Ever since I was a little kid, it seemed my mother’s life was being threatened by unseen hands.
My earliest memories of her are of life lived dangerously. Surgery begot surgery. I shuttled back and forth between loving aunts during her frequent trips to the hospital. Living with my mom was like living under the Sword of Damocles; at any moment the thread could be cut and our lives changed forever.
It became almost a macabre ritual of horror. I can remember when I was 7 or 8, she had barely returned home from kidney surgery when our dog jumped up to greet her and apparently pawed her breast. She found a lump, screamed in fright and was sent right back to the hospital to have a tumor removed. It was not cancerous.
I had just gotten engaged when it was discovered that she had a rare fungus on her liver. The surgeon had asked my stunned father if Mom had ever visited Latin America. He could just as well have asked if she had ever visited another planet. Diagnosis: six months to live.
Needless to say, Mom "survived" the diagnosis; I expect that she has even survived most of the doctors who treated her, and my bodybuilding father too. Dad was so sure that she would pass first that he’d warned me that the next time I saw him afterward, he’d have a blonde on each arm and that I shouldn’t take offense. I told him that I wouldn’t; he had earned two blondes. But Dad has been dead for 21 years now.
As if all of the physical ailments weren’t enough of a cross to bear, Mom became afflicted with bipolar disorder when she was in her early 40s. Her life became one of extremes. Half of the time she was on a mental high, like Mary Poppins on speed. She would talk non-stop until her voice became a hoarse screech.
Her thoughts raced around in her head at breakneck speed, like some mental version of the Indianapolis 500. Sleep became almost impossible. In the middle of the night, she would decide to walk to the 7-Eleven. She imagined all kinds of conspiracies against her.
The other half of the time was even worse. For six or seven weeks, she would sink into a deep depression. During that time she would not speak to anyone. She lived in total darkness, rising from the couch only to go to the bathroom and back. I was her only contact with the outside world.
No matter how brightly the sun shone outside her apartment, not a ray of light entered her world during this time. I brought her the meals my wife prepared and paid her bills. She would not answer the phone. Friends and family would wonder what had happened to her, until the depression would end as suddenly as it had appeared and she’d be back racing around South Broad Street. She was living the life of a modern-day Jekyll and Hyde.
Four-and-a-half years ago, yet another surgery combined with her bouts of depression to finally force her into a nursing home. All of us thought her quality of life was pretty much at an end, but the Comeback Kid refused to be counted out. Under the supervised medical care, she began to take her medication regularly — something she had refused to do when she lived on her own.
Miraculously, the bipolar disorder leveled off. The peaks and valleys of her mental state were no longer intolerable extremes. Jekyll and Hyde was replaced by the lovely and witty little lady I had known as a youth.
She was back to reading the newspaper cover to cover. Her mind as sharp as it ever had been, she loved the give-and-take at the nursing home current-events sessions. She is a Democrat (my dad was a Republican) and George W. Bush felt the full weight of her scorn. Mom could rip you with the best of them. She often saves her best zingers for the nursing home food. ("Who the hell ever told them that you serve carrots and peas with spaghetti?")
But bad luck continues to dog the Comeback Kid. If Mom didn’t have bad luck, as the saying goes, she’d have no luck at all.
About two years ago, she was discovered to have Parkinson’s Disease. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the side effects of her old surgeries had come back to haunt her.
In recent months, the brightness has gone from her eyes. When you speak to her, it is as if you have to reach into her mind and pull her back from an alien planet. There is medical speculation that, at 85, there will be no more comebacks, no more miracles.
I know at my age I’m lucky to still have her, and no, I don’t want her to suffer any more, and yes, I should be realistic enough to accept it. But I can’t. Her newspapers are going unread, but I refuse to cancel the subscription.
She’s the Comeback Kid, so I keep waiting and hoping. Maybe the Kid has one final joke up her sleeve.
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Tom Cardella’s mother passed away three days after he wrote this column.
