My mom dying before my father was not supposed to be part of the Deal. In fact, if the Deal I made with my parents four years before she died had spelled out its particular chronological order of death and life events, I may never have signed on its metaphorical dotted line.
The Deal. The Deal was a bargain I struck with my mom and dad when I was 34 years old and after I had lived independently away from the family home since age 17. The centerpiece of the Deal was that I and my elderly parents would move in together and live under the same roof, with me paying on a roughly 4:1 dollar basis the majority of the rent on the house we shared as well as all other routine living expenses. For her part of the Deal, my mom assumed responsibility for requisitioning and cooking the household food, washing and ironing our collective laundry, and maintaining the environmental order of our family home. To the day that she died my mom completed her end of our Deal with the same maternal grace and love she had exemplified her whole life.
For me, this living and budgetary arrangement between me and my parents was a Deal, but to my mother it was her Dream. From the time my two brothers and I were born my mom had cherished the hope that one or two or all three of us would grow up to be adult sons with whom she would live under the same roof for the full length of her old age. The diametric opposite of the historically American cultural ethic wherein adult children are supposed to permanently leave the family “nest” at age 18 and never look back, Mom’s dream was rooted in the history of our immigrant family and culture. In the Peru of the 1930s and ‘40s, where she had been born and raised, multigenerational households were nearly universal. Nothing was more alien to my mother’s rural Peruvian mindset than families that scattered to the four winds as their respective children, having grown to young adulthood, made their separate ways into disparate homes located in distant cities.
My mom maintained this defining cultural ethos her entire life. Even after having lived in the United States for over 35 years, Mom’s dream remained the same: familia unido por siempre, united family always. Mom’s ideal remained the same despite the inevitable accommodations and adaptations that her own six younger adult brothers and sisters made as they navigated the acculturation challenges that comprised the modern American backdrop against which they lived their respective lives away from their own parents, my grandparents Nona and Papasito.
In her own life my mom was not immune to the winds of change. She allowed the presence of my father in our multigenerational family household to contribute to the decision my maternal grandparents eventually made to move away from the old Lake Avenue house when I was 13 and after my mom had turned 51. Despite this, the fact that my mom and her parents lived together until my mom surpassed the half century mark of her life was the most natural thing imaginable to her mind. The only thing disconcerting to her about this fact was that her parents ever felt compelled to live away from her in the first place. Sixteen years later, after my grandfather died and my grandmother Nona was widowed, my mom’s first and truest instinct was for Nona to come live with her. This proved to not be possible at the time but it was an unfortunate convergence of fact and circumstance that my mother told me years later she always regretted.
I was 11 when the existence of my mother’s Dream first hit me. I remember her and I riding alone together in our family’s old beat up 1972 Toyota station wagon on an otherwise unremarkable sunny weekday afternoon when my mother turned to me from the driver’s seat and said forcefully that in the distant future I was to “never, ever, never” place her in an “old people’s home.” Failure to preempt her placement in a nursing home, she said emphatically in Spanish, would result in her personally wringing my neck. I remember nodding my head at her, as if I really understood what she was talking about but the whole notion of my mother ever growing old and the question of how I would care for her when that time came was more than my sixth grader’s mind could grasp. My prepubescent mind was still locked in on things like G.I. Joe cartoons, Three Stooges reruns, and the wide world adventures of Tintin and his dog Snowy. However, since my memory of this moment survived the three interceding decades, I can safely say that she succeeded in establishing just how neck bone creakingly important this issue was to her.
All of six years after our mother-son conversation in the station wagon, as I prepared to graduate from high school my main goal in life had become to leave the family home and never live there again. For reasons directly related to my stressed relationship with my father, I had decided I would not live at home with my parents one second longer than I had to. To facilitate this goal I became the only graduating senior from my entire high school class who, having been accepted at a four year college for a fall semester entrance the following September, enlisted in the military reserves for six years. Several classmates asked me at the time why I enlisted. I never told any one who actually placed the question to me that the single decisive factor for me was to avoid having to spend even one last summer at home with my father, from whom I felt an estrangement too profound to capture in words.
In the years that lapsed between 1990 and 2006 my mother respected my decision to move away even as she clearly regretted that I had done so. Several times she let her frustration show at my dogged determination to live on my own as she asked me outright why I didn’t “want” to live with “her.” I never mobilized the honesty to tell her that to live with her meant my dad would be included in the deal and that the prospect of living with my father was practically radioactive to me. So, in those intervening years I visited my parents as often as I could, sent Mom spending money when the need arose, and otherwise contented myself with living an independent bachelor lifestyle.
Contentment remained true until May 2006, when my father was diagnosed with liver cirhossis. Dad’s cirhossis came on so suddenly that my parents were caught completely off guard and at first mistakenly believed he had terminal liver cancer. By 2006 Mom and Dad had both worked at the same lamp assembly factory for twenty years, very happily reporting there every work day to perform precision based manual labor, despite being seventysomethings. That is until, as the saying goes, the day the music stopped. My father’s newly diagnosed liver condition meant he had to take immediate medical retirement. My mother, as his primary caregiver, also had to retire, since my father would be requiring daily care and supervision from her.
Their unexpected medical retirement meant a significant reduction in household income, as the Social Security checks they were eligible to draw could not come close to equaling what they had earned at the lamp factory. Mom had the budget nailed down to a cent and she knew there was no realistic way they could live long term in the detached single family three bedroom house they rented with only their Social Security retirement income. I knew this too, and since my roommate was coincidentally getting married during this same time frame and I would be needing to transition in to a new place of my own, the germ of the Deal was born.
“Six months”, I told my mother, on the day I moved my belongings into the family home. “I will help you for six months and then I will find a new place closer to my job and move there.” My mom remained silent in response, as she watched me in happy disbelief while I marched taped up box after taped up box in to my new bedroom in her house, me doing my best to assert the end term of the Deal and her preferring to play out the string that would signify the resurrection of a maternal dream deferred.
Six months lapsed into four years because dreams are more compelling than deals, especially when those dreams involve your beloved mother. But through all this, one permanently unspoken assumption was the driving force behind the Deal: that my physically robust, mentally razor sharp, energetically whirling 72 year old Energizer bunny of a mom would not merely survive but decisively outlive by an incalculable lot my physically frail, easily disoriented, perpetually doddering, cirrhotic liver equipped 76 year old father. The catastrophic worst case scenario that would be the reverse chronological sequence——my mother dying well before my father—was never uttered by her and I, never contemplated by me personally, and not so much as imagined by a soul in our family.
Catastrophe and reality collided on the morning of March 9, 2010. On that beautiful early spring Tuesday, my mom experienced a piercing head ache that caused her to stand up from the kitchen table where she had been having breakfast with my father. She walked into the family living room, sat down on the sofa to try to compose herself, and within minutes suffered a powerful cerebral aneurysm that in turn precipitated a massive stroke. She died the next day.
My mother’s Dream was completed, as she had lived at home with one of her adult sons in to the full length of her old age, just as she always wanted. But for me the Deal was not even close to over and had in fact become completely inverted, because she left me and my father stranded alone together in what suddenly felt like the emptiest house in the entire world, lost at sea in our shock and grief without the anchor of our lives.
With my mother gone forever, it was emphatically now my turn to care for my traumatized 79 year old father and somehow, some way, survive a footnote to the Deal that I had never even considered when I first agreed to it: that Mr. Death had held the real playing cards all along and nothing I planned for, thought about, or believed in could trump the ace of irony it had now flung in my face.
