Mothers with Alzheimer’s

Born within a year of each other (1948–49), and each their mother’s only birth child, Caterina Edwards, an Albertan Canadian, and Mary Gordon, an American raised in New York, have much else in common. Both are writers first, but also academics; both were raised in Catholic homes and are, or have been, practising Catholics; both have some claim to European ethnicity in that Gordon’s mother’s family was steeped in Irishness (her father was Italian and Jewish), while Edward’s mother was Italian (her father was English). It would take a specialist to deconstruct the influence of that ethnicity on the subject of Gordon’s Circling My Mother: A Memoir, other than to say that Gordon appears to have done everything in her power to shake off those influences, while, in Finding Rosa: A Mother with Alzheimer’s, A Daughter in Search of the Past, Edwards acknowledging them somewhat ruefully but seems still to respect and live with them.

But most important to this review, both women’s mothers succumbed to that creeping death that is Alzheimer’s disease, with all its gruesome and pathetic indignities, and it fell to these honourable and generous-hearted daughters to see to their mothers’ care until their deaths—and then, years later, still trying to come to terms, to write books about that experience.

I say “see to” because Mary Gordon, when it became clear that the mother with whom she had shared an intense and loving relationship could no longer care for herself, found her a nursing home where she stayed until her death—15 or so years—as she fell deeper and deeper down the mental black hole of Alzheimer’s. Edwards, however, when it became too much to stop two and three times a day at her mother’s apartment, while at the same time managing home, family, writing and sometimes a job, took her mother into her own home.

Edwards’s Sicilian-Canadian husband and two teenage daughters were enlisted in the four-year marathon of managing this impossibly difficult and, it would appear, unfailingly unkind—at least to her daughter—woman. They went so far as to build an addition onto their house, bright, sunny and spacious, more, one would think, than a woman whose mind had gone could need, never mind appreciate. Edwards then devoted herself to the woman’s care, over the years working herself into and out of a serious depression and near breakdown from over-work and worry, struggling and hoping, it would seem, day after day for the parental blessing we all wish to hear: I love you unconditionally. Words that for Edwards do not come (at least, never in an unequivocal form), as they never came when her mother was well.

Certainly, simple duty alone requires the non-abandonment in her hour of need of the one who gave birth to and raised you. It does not take a degree in psychiatry to infer that the relationship of each woman to her mother during childhood and adolescence and on into adulthood would help to determine the degree of devotion to the mother no longer able to care for herself. What is perhaps odd in these two stories is that the mother who gave—pretty much—that unconditional love is the one who appears to get the lesser degree of devotion, while the mother who left the daughter uncertain that she was ever loved gets the extraordinary degree of selfless care.

Thus, the long story of these women’s struggles with their mothers’ Alzheimer’s becomes the story of motherhood and daughterhood and the way in which women cannot escape being the persons their mothers made them. All the moments when the mother’s unrecognized and uncritical worshipfulness f the brilliant daughter or the mother’s unexamined but appalling rage at the daughter’s happiness, all those moments that the mother perhaps did not even notice were happening and probably could not have explained had she noticed, stack up against the rules about proper conduct and womanly skills that she believes it is a mother’s duty to impart. All her deliberate and careful teaching fails to produce the desired result—the “perfect” girl/woman— and instead instils only shame, leading to defiance and rebellion: the daughter wanting to grasp life, the mother terrified for her daughter and perhaps more, not wanting the daughter to have the joys she could not have herself; the daughter also intent on besting the mother, intent on overthrowing her.

It is the other lessons, the ones the mother had no idea she was imparting, that have the power to create the daughter as a person: in Gordon’s case, her certainty in the power of her intellect and the inevitability and rightness of her success and, further, of her right to go out and do as she pleases in life; in Edwards’s case (having had a mother who repeated day after day and year after year that she was worthless and a slut) uncertainty, genuine humility and a lifelong struggle to feel herself worthy—this most worthy daughter, wife, mother and gifted writer. (Edwards is at pains to point out that she now believes that her mother did this not out of sheer brutality, but out of fear of the evil eye, and to keep her humble as befits a woman.)

Inevitably, the books take different forms. Mary Gordon explores carefully the emotional relationships of her mother with her mother’s sisters and her place in the family epic, “circling” her mother to come closer to who her mother really was, who she was outside of motherhood, while Edwards goes as deeply as possible into the tragic history of her mother’s people and thus of her family, trying with every fibre of her considerable scholarship and her being to locate somewhere in history the sweet, good woman she needs to believe her mother really was, trying to understand why her mother could not ever express that sweetness to her obedient, loving and sometimes desperate daughter.

Edwards’s voice is somewhat tentative, while Gordon’s sense of herself in this memoir is whole and strong, and she recounts details of her youthful recklessness with a certain wryness, as if guilt has never been a burden to her. It is hard to imagine the Edwards of Finding Rosa flying into a rage and doing or saying outrageous things—or ever forgiving herself afterward. But these are literary personas , and despite the fact that memoirists contort themselves in order to never reveal their “real” ones, in the end they always reveal inadvertently, to the thoughtful reader, more than they meant to. The real story of these books is the minute examination (or failure to examine), the primal mother-daughter relationship and the way this relationship worked itself out in the two writers’ lives.

Gordon is the more accomplished and successful writer of these two, but Edwards has produced a competent, engaging, even a (historically speaking) groundbreaking work. To the extent that the Edwards book is flawed, it is because, in the mode of the good daughter, she seems unable to express except occasionally and obliquely what must have been the most profoundly conflicted feelings for her mother: her longing for expressed love, praise, some sense that she and her mother were one and the same, and, above all, the terrible, but buried, rage she must have felt at so difficult a mother. There is no direct examination of this conflict, the very thing the memoir is best adapted to do, and its absence is, for this reviewer, the book’s single failing.

Perhaps it goes farther than that. The struggle to find the mother, to locate her, as it were, takes Edwards very far afield both in geography and in time. This becomes the source of her search, her mother’s peoples’ physical dislocation and its place in history, as if this is where she might hope to find the origin of her mother’s hysteria, as if she cannot bear to search inside the psyche of the woman who raised her with such fury, as if she cannot bring herself to face the terrible possibility that her mother was only what she seemed to be—unloving, unsympathetic and perverse in her mothering. Over and over again the question of ethnicity, of the cultural mores of the world that created her mother rise and hang, a threatening shadow—addressed mostly obliquely—over the world Edwards reveals to us as the one from which she herself took her imperatives as to her daughterly duties.

Gordon and her mother were intensely close. A single parent for most of Mary’s older childhood, supporting them both by her career as what would today be called an executive assistant, her mother was forced by situation and by family circumstances to raise her daughter while living in the homes of family members. She and the family seem to have recognized Mary’s intellectual brilliance early on and mostly to have given her credit for it. Gordon never had to think herself unloved, and especially not by her admirable mother. Oddly, or perhaps it is not so odd, although she saw that her mother was well provided for and visited when it was convenient, and sometimes when it was not, Gordon mostly left her mother’s care to the nursing home staff, who, she reports, thought with some justice that she was negligent.

This self-implication has a cursory air about it; at some level, I think, Gordon knew that her mother would not stop loving her if she failed to visit; she recognized that her mother, lost in her condition, did not mourn her absence as she did not know her when she was present, and although this must have been painful to Gordon, having learned to emulate her mother in her capabilities and pragmatism, she went about her life without undue anguish.

Edwards, though, felt she did not even know who her mother was, knew none of the details of her mother’s life in Italy. Her mother had refused to answer her few questions and by the time Edwards needed to know, senior family members who might have the answers were dead. She sensed in the mystery some great tragedy, suspecting, in a general way, the ravages of war of having shaped her mother’s personality. After her mother’s Alzheimer’s struck, she set out to try to pin down that history.

This involved visiting family members in Canada, England, Italy, Croatia and the United States and following, year after year, clue after clue, to the next country or the next relative. Did or did not her mother’s family spend three years in a refugee camp in Sicily? Were they or were they not part of an Italian diaspora when their much-contested area of Italy, on the Adriatic Sea east of Venice and south of Trieste, came under Slav control (now Croatia)? Was there an Italian diaspora at all and, if so, how many people were involved? Twenty-five hundred or fifty thousand? Who, centuries ago, were there first, the Slavs or the Italians? And finally, what atrocities—forgotten because historical records were deliberately destroyed and all voices silenced—did her mother’s family, perhaps her mother herself, witness or suffer?

Speaking both Italian and her mother’s Istrian language, Edwards set out to answer these questions in some firm and final way. As with the hopeless search into her mother’s psyche for understanding of who the woman truly was, she has to face that there can only be inference, suspicions and intuitions about what really happened to her mother’s people. In the end, she is left with the mother she experienced and the compassion her good heart allows her. It is Edwards’s compassion that is the triumph of this book.

What is perhaps most courageous in Mary Gordon’s book is the 40-page ending in which she examines closely all the questions we dare not ask, but that lie at the root of mother-daughter relationships. She addresses them directly, in a manner closer to poetry than to a memoir (indeed the American memoirist and theorist Patricia Hampl insists on the similarity between memoir and lyric poetry). It is a section that might well lose many readers for its intensity and paucity of narrative, which also leaves Gordon vulnerable to the accusation that all memoirists find themselves defending against: navel gazing.

Addressing the mother’s body is both the greatest taboo to a daughter and the thing toward which she is most drawn in existential dread, loathing and desire. Gordon does not shy away, but forces herself there. Page after page she worries the question of dishonour, of writing so intimately of her mother. She questions the artist’s task, calling up the painter Vuillard, who painted and photographed his mother over and over again in intimate and unlovely postures and situations. She admits to using her mother for her writerly purposes and declares this dishonourable, but she does it anyway. The deeper she spirals down the well of self-analysis, the clearer it becomes that truth will not be found in this direction, although, in the end, where it might be found cannot be discovered: it is the depth of honest inquiry that counts. That is the task of the memoirist writing in the early 21st century, and it is a task that Edwards does not fail either, although she deflects it, heading into a gnarled and equally unsolvable history instead.

Women in particular (men, of course, never stop dealing with their fathers) never forget their mothers, never leave them behind, never finish with them. To have that deathbed moment when all is explained, when the last, most meaningful I love you is said, stolen away irretrievably and forever by the demon that is Alzheimer’s can only leave behind a wound that will never heal, a sorrow that cannot be assuaged. Thus, the memoir also acts as therapy for the daughter who writes it, but the mother, lost in her disease and then to the grave, can never participate.