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Friday July 30,2010

The End of My Mother: A Rational Suicide

by Judith Sachs

On a Tuesday morning, about a month before my mother's eighty-first birthday, I got a call from a supervisor at New York University-Cornell Medical Center. My mother had been hit from behind by a toddler on a tricycle and had fallen to the pavement, breaking both her arms. She was all right, but she had just been taken up to surgery; they were going to put metal pins in her arms to stabilize the bones.

With my heart pounding a terrible tattoo, I sat through an interminable hour on the train wondering what to do. Would I have to take her home with me? Would she agree to come? I couldn't see my fiercely independent mother, who had lived on her own in Manhattan since her divorce in 1962, agreeing to a suburban existence. And what about me, my husband, and my preteen daughter? Could we bear this responsibility?

My mother had just come down from recovery when I arrived. She was semiconscious, looking tiny and frail in the bed, her gray hair with touches of an old red rinse splayed out on the pillow. Her face was a riot of color, as though she had just gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. Her arms lay stiffly on the sheets, the metal pins protruding from casts.

"Honey," I whispered. "Naomi?"

She opened her eyes, glanced at me and said, "I want to die."

From that blistering June afternoon in 1994 to the day she ended her life in November of 1997, she never wavered from her path.

But I didn't believe her. Through the next three months in a rehab hospital near my home, she railed and ranted. Her arms healed, but her soul never did. She told me that she had "terminal cancer of the spirit." She couldn't feed herself, wipe herself, dress herself, put in her hearing aids by herself, or do any of the normal things we take for granted every day. I protested that she was just depressed and angry, just reacting to the violation of her person and her life. I told her, as people do, that time would take care of everything. Her response? "Bullshit."

My wild and wacky mother, who had decided, at 50, that she needed a divorce so that she could go back to school unencumbered with husband, child, and apartment. She wanted her freedom, wanted to be part of the big, wide world. My brilliant mother, who at 70, had decided that she needed pictures and a resume so that she could get into movies and TV. If that "Where's-the-beef?" lady, Clara Peller, could make money, so could she. She founded a theatrical improvisation group in her apartment complex, she went to every audition that asked for senior citizens and eventually became a regular extra on the soap opera, "The Guiding Light."

My strange and off-putting mother, who at 77 decided that politeness was for the young and innocent. In those days before no-smoking laws went into effect, she would frequent nice restaurants and delight in telling those around her who were lighting up that they would soon die of lung cancer, but that she was going to protect herself. She would whip out a battery-powered fan from her pocketbook and start blowing the smoke back at the offenders.