When I was born, my parents planted a tree for me—a corkscrew willow—alongside a stream that cut through the yard of our home in Ithaca, New York. That tree, once a sapling, grew to 30 feet tall. I remember climbing up the trunk at 8 years old and then sliding down its gangly limbs, trying to avoid a plunge into the rocky stream. Later, in my 30s, I witnessed a slow war of attrition between the tree and the brook as the streambed ate away at the bank where the corkscrew willow had set down its roots.
Memory is fickle. It defines who we are and who we think we are. It helps us create coherent narratives of our incoherent lives. And then our memories fade. I retain other, painful memories of my childhood and of my mother. But as she got old and I got older, I realized that some memories need to be squeezed, like oranges, until only the love remains.
Last summer, I drove from my home in Vermont to visit my parents at their retirement community in Ithaca. They had both lived there for years, but had recently moved to separate rooms. Both of them suffered from dementia; I didn’t know if they ever spoke to each other anymore. I hadn’t seen them in a year, and I wasn’t entirely looking forward to it.
My mom, then 92, had progressively lost most of her memory over the previous half decade. At the beginning, there was an upside to her dementia. She became less anxious, expressing less dismay about my taking a plane, for example. As time outpaced her memory, she no longer recalled the 2015 death of her oldest son. Eventually, she grew into a part-time fantasist, innocently inventing a past—such as her graduation from Cornell University—that had never occurred.
When I caught up with her that late-summer afternoon in the memory-care unit’s cafeteria, she was dining by herself. At that stage, she slept more than 20 hours a day, so I was fortunate to find her awake. Unexpectedly, her brown hair was rising straight up, resembling that of a cartoon character who had stuck her finger in an electrical socket. Her expression looked pinched, almost contorted. In earlier years at the retirement home, she had pitied the memory-care residents.
As I sat down, my mom asked me where I’d come from and, hearing of the six-hour drive from Vermont, marveled at how far I had traveled.
“Which neighborhood do you live in here?” she asked. “Owasco, Cayuga, or Seneca?”
It dawned on me that she thought I was someone else. My mother was making conversation with me as if I, 60 and still working as a professor, were a fellow retiree.
Like a boxer, I started adjusting my approach to the discussion. Our shared past wasn’t going to make it to the table. She was having a rough day, and so was I.
In a simultaneous tug-of-war with the dining staff, my mom called out numerous times for her dessert, a bowl of vanilla ice cream. A caregiver tried to coax her into eating more of her omelet. My mother became insistent about dessert. After several rounds, they agreed that she would have one more mouthful of egg. When the server turned away, she spat the food back onto her plate. Shouts of “Ice cream!” again filled the cafeteria.
Suddenly, my mom turned to me and blurted out, “Where are your parents?”
I had no reply. It was a question one might ask of a child—a lost child, one whose parents are missing.
My mom possessed a curdling scream that reverberated throughout our childhood home. The very memory of it still chills me. And her threat—“Just wait until your father gets home!”—led to thrashings my dad didn’t even know the rationale for. Whipping us with a belt or another object was just one of his fatherly duties.
One day in the fall of 1962, my mom took me and my oldest brother down to Stewart Park, on the southern end of Cayuga Lake. He was 8 years and I was 7 months old. Comfortably tucked inside my stroller, I was fast asleep as early-autumn leaves fell. My mother told my brother that she was going on a quick errand—code for a trip to the ladies’ room—and instructed him to keep an eye on me.
Once she was out of sight, he wandered away and climbed a weeping-willow tree. When my mom returned, the carriage and I were missing.
After scrambling frantically for a dime, she called the police from a nearby payphone. Nobody blamed my brother, because he was only 8. No one faulted my mom for absent parenting. Abductions are pretty rare in Ithaca, and it was a different time.
Several hours later, the police spied an elderly woman pushing my stroller. Apparently, the police told my parents, she had no children of her own and held no greater ambitions for me than a stroll in the park. Charges were not filed.
I was too young to recall this incident myself, but “the caper of Stewart Park” was told and retold by my family over the years, at the dining-room table or when one of us wandered too far from my mom at the grocery store. Gradually, the story attained the stickiness of memory.
I now possess vivid, seemingly firsthand impressions of that fall day. As a joke, my older brothers embellished the story, claiming that the lady had swapped me with another baby. This twist worked for me because I already felt like the family’s odd one out.
I visited my father on that same trip last year. He recalled my name, but our exchange circled around one question—“Where do you live?”—raised and answered many times. It was kind of him to ask. I didn’t know if he understood that his wife of 68 years was moving into the final stage of her life.
It took time to forget a lifetime.
Once her bowl of ice cream arrived, my mom, ignoring me, picked it up and walked back to her room across the hall, quickly shutting the door behind her. Uncertain of what to do, I followed her into the room, where the seven Christmas stockings she had made by hand when we were kids hung from the walls.
She ate only a few spoonfuls of the ice cream, placed the dish on her side table, and then climbed into bed, fully dressed. She looked at me with some consternation and announced that she was going to sleep. I approached to kiss her goodbye, but as I put my hand on her arm, she looked wary of the stranger in her bedroom. Not wanting to unnerve either of us any longer, I backed away and left.
I’m becoming forgetful too. Time is not on my side. Stories slink away before I have the chance to share them. Family and friends recall my work-related trips or even my past relationships better than I do. I write things down: “buy milk”; “make appt w/ neurologist for cognitive eval.” I have outlived my corkscrew willow. In its 40s, the tree collapsed as the ground underneath surrendered to the flowing stream. I am my mother’s son.
A couple of months after my trip to Ithaca, my mom had a stroke. She was taken by helicopter to the hospital, where she was operated on to relieve a blood clot in her brain.
During my visit there, my mom, tucked into a mottled gray-green hospital gown, couldn’t be awakened. But her monitoring machines were quiet—no beeping—and the atmosphere was peaceful. I sat and silently read Don Quixote—“There is no memory that time does not erase.”
Soon it became clear that my mom would not recover. She had trouble speaking and swallowing. A permanent feeding tube would have to be installed. Physical therapy would be challenging at her age. She had signed a “do not resuscitate” order, and with her quality of life so compromised, my brothers and I decided to pursue hospice care. She returned to the assisted-living facility. From then on, she consumed only ice chips.
My mom slept most of this time but had moments of clarity while awake. One morning, she popped out of sleep and was especially alert. She was unable to speak, but the look in her eyes suggested that she recognized both me and the brother I was with. We removed our masks so she could see us more easily. Underneath, I wore a COVID-style salt-and-pepper beard, the newness of which lit up her face.
“I forgot how to shave,” I told her.
My mom laughed. Like a comedian connecting with his audience, I felt a rush that she understood—that there was still a mother-son relationship. Among the snarl of tubes and wires, I found her hand.
A few days later, one of my brothers showed her a 1970s studio portrait of the family—the five boys and our dad in corduroy suits, she in her finest dress with a corsage—which she grabbed and pressed to her chest, saying, “That’s all of them!”
She had answered her own query, “Where are your parents?” There she was. There I was.
As my mom’s health declined, her pain relieved by medication, she became unresponsive. As she lay dying, my brother played her Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, featuring Luciano Pavarotti, her favorite singer. We drafted her obituary.
While my mom was still in hospice, I went on a long-anticipated vacation to visit close friends in Italy. After hiking in the Alps, we returned to Milan. As we were gathered around their dining table, my brother texted, “Just got the call. Mom died around 2:30 p.m.”
I cried. My Italian friends, whom I’ve known for 41 years, were stuck between their desire to comfort me and their inability to comprehend why I was with them instead of with her. For the family-centric Italians, I had violated a taboo. We stared in silence at the osso buco.
For whom should I have acted differently? For my mother? For me? For you?
Until my own past escapes me, here is what I’ll remember. I lost and found my mom. From her laughter, and our laughter together, I knew that my mom loved me, I knew that she knew that I loved her, and, perhaps most important, I knew that I knew that I loved her.