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The winter I was 5 years old, my parents packed up our wood-paneled station wagon and drove north from our hometown of Mobile, Alabama, to Wilmington, Delaware. We arrived at my aunt’s house with only the suitcases that fit in the car; we didn’t have winter coats or the money to buy them.
My mother immediately took to bed in a nylon peignoir set. It wasn’t her bed; it was a twin in my cousin Shari’s bedroom. I’m sure my mother must have left the room for meals, but in my child’s memory, she didn’t emerge again for several months. She was in mourning for her life, to use Anton Chekhov’s phrase. Meanwhile, my aunt and uncle folded my older sister and me into their brood as my father looked for work.
My parents eventually got back on their feet, landing in sunny South Florida, and my mother resumed the minimal duties of a suburban housewife of the 1970s, driving me to dance lessons and doctor’s appointments. Any more challenging tasks, like protecting me from my father’s unpredictable temper, fell to my sister, Lisa. That was just as well, since the more time I spent with my mother, the more we fought. I was always doing something criminal in her eyes, such as refusing to brush my long hair.
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Later on, when the money for my college education evaporated into one of my dad’s many schemes — silver mines, soft-core porn, who can remember? — as angry as I was with him, I was even more disappointed in her. How could she let her husband leave her child so vulnerable?
There were years of estrangement after that, but grandchildren have a way of bringing a family together, even though my mother seemed to consider grandparenting a spectator sport. She couldn’t manage tasks such as changing my son Ezra’s diapers, but she loved to watch him while he napped. By that time I knew not to expect more from her. We had reached a sort of détente.
That particular house of cards came crashing down in 2014, with the discovery that my parents — then both 78 — had zero savings, a clutch of maxed-out credit cards and a slew of unattended medical issues. Lisa sprang into action and came up with a strategy to allow them to live with their basic needs covered. She’d long shouldered the majority of the parental wrangling, but the tasks ahead were overwhelming even for her, and she enlisted me to sell their home and help see to their well-being.
My parents had given me every reason to opt out, yet I stepped in because of the debt I owed my sister for fulfilling the maternal role in my life. Perhaps there was also a bit of self-interest at work.
I’m fairly certain my son has been documenting my many missteps, and I thought that if I modeled selfless filial behavior for him, just maybe he’d behave the same way toward me one day.
On the tour of the assisted living facility that would become my parents’ home for the last years of their lives, something shifted. So great was their anxiety in their new surroundings that even my father, at 6 foot 4, appeared shrunken. His typical swagger seemed suddenly tentative.
We were enjoying a Cobb salad in a brightly lit dining hall when a woman, perhaps a decade my parents’ junior, rushed into the room.
