Are You My Son?

In one of my favorite photographs, my mother is standing in front of a 1960s-model Kelvinator, wearing a black evening dress, a large corsage pinned to her collar. "Dressed to the nines" is how she would describe herself. Strangely, she is balancing a plate of butter and three eggs in her right hand. I have no idea what she intends to do with them, but there is something beautifully incongruous about the image. I'm fairly certain she and my father were about to leave the house to attend a Beta Sigma Phi Sweetheart Ball, probably the year she was nominated as her chapter's sweetheart.

I'd like to think those eggs were for my two brothers and me, that she was helping us prepare supper. My mother taught me many valuable lessons when I was growing up—how to scramble eggs, for instance. My brothers and I were latchkey kids. Because my mother worked full time for as long as I can remember, she ensured that we could take care of ourselves.

She also taught me how to play cards. Not content with Go Fish or Old Maid, she started me with Crazy Eights and then moved on to Hearts, Spades, Gin Rummy, and Canasta. She wanted to make it worth her time, after all, and she wasn't about to go easy on me. Once after complaining about losing several hands in a row, I asked why she never let me win. "What good would that do you?" she responded.

She won for a simple reason: she memorized every card as it was played. My mom is as smart as a whip (one of her favorite phrases), and even as she approaches the age of eighty (sorry for divulging that detail, Mom), her long-term memory is remarkable. Last month while I sat beside her hospital bed (as she was recovering from knee surgery), a clip from the 1958 film Auntie Mame flitted across the TV screen in the corner of the room. "That's Rosalind Russell," my mom noted. I pulled up the Internet Movie Database on my phone to verify her claim. She was right, of course.

It's not that I would normally doubt my mother's veracity—she used to remind me that she was always right—but these days she would be the first to admit otherwise. For the past few years my mother has suffered from Alzheimer's disease, and it has progressed most noticeably in the last six months.

Millions of people struggle with the disease, and even more friends and family members struggle with the effects. I have watched others deal with dementia, but there is something poignant and sobering about witnessing your own mother slipping away. During a recent physical therapy session, someone introduced me to her doctor as her youngest son. My mother, who was sitting in a wheelchair in front of me, turned around and asked, "Are you my son?" After reassuring her that I was indeed her son, she reached up to hug and kiss me.

For a long time my mom has confused me with her grandsons, and she has not remembered my birthday for the past two years, so it didn't surprise me to hear her ask who I was. Yet this incident continues to stick with me … and not just in a negative way. There is something sweet about the way my mother continually lives in the present. In some ways she is much more aware of the details around her than the rest of us. When she was in the hospital, for instance, she picked up on snippets of conversation outside her room and tried to connect what she heard with where she thought she was, her own home. And when she goes on a car ride, she is mesmerized by the clouds sliding past the window. "Aren't they beautiful?" she asks, as if seeing the sky for the first time. It doesn't matter that she will marvel again at the clouds five minutes later or that she will rediscover her youngest son every time I come to visit. Her emotional response is always keen, always fresh.

I wonder how she processes memories. Do those snippets of knowledge—names of film stars, rules for playing bridge—commingle with details of life experiences? Does she remember being the young mother self-consciously posing in front of a clothesline? Could she recall where she was living at the time or who gave her the wristwatch she is wearing? I think I know the answers to these questions, but I'm still curious to understand her thought processes.

I still see vivid glimpses of my mom the way I've always known her—a sly, mischievous, and playful gal (another of her favorite words). What's different now is that those qualities appear in sudden but fleeting bursts—in a facial expression, a non sequitur, or the sound of her laughter. And her expressions are often exaggerated. She sometimes imitates people, almost mockingly, mirroring what she sees because original expression doesn't come as easily as it once did. Such moments are filled with raw, unfiltered emotion.

As the mother I've known all these years slips away from me, I've been thinking a lot about person she was long before I came into her life. I can almost step into another of my favorite photos. She is walking down Polk Street in downtown Amarillo, holding the hand of her grandfather (her beloved Dapta). She squints in the bright winter sun.  She is wearing a Betty Boop jacket with a leopard print collar, and a matching felt beret rests jauntily on her head. There she is, a little girl in white boots, clutching a tiny zippered bag. She is out on a stroll between two world wars—her entire life ahead of her—without a care in the world.

Adjusting the View

This is how I remember my father—he is standing next to a 1950s-model car with my mother, who, in turn, is holding my oldest brother.  The image is blurry, but I can tell that they're all squinting in the bright sunlight.  They appear to be heading out on or returning from a summer picnic.  My parents were nineteen years old at the time, and their faces beam with joy and optimism, neither of which held up, given that the marriage unraveled within ten years. 

Of course, I don't really remember my father this way at all.  Since my parents separated before I turned three, I have no memories of living with him, but this image is fixed in my mind because of the snapshot, a relic I discovered as an adult while rummaging through my mother's cedar chest, looking for new details about the family history.  Until I was in my thirties, my mom revealed very little about the years she lived with my dad, not wanting to taint my relationship with him or to sugarcoat things either.  Theirs was an unhappy marriage, and over the years I have gotten only glimpses of what it must have been like.

So the blurry image is especially appropriate.  Growing up, my two older brothers and I would occasionally spend weekends with my dad, going on camping or fishing trips or hanging out at his modern split-level house with his second wife (who was always sweet and welcoming).  But even as a child, I never really got to know him.  I liked him.  He struck me as a guy who was really, really cool—in all respects.  He was hip, good looking, and smart, and he was emotionally detached.  He was also a charmer, a quality that stood out in some of the old photos from my mother's cedar chest.  One picture, in particular, always amused me.  It was taken at a costume party.  A leggy young woman (not my mother) is sitting on my dad's lap, and she's wearing mismatched knee socks.  He's smiling bigger than I've ever seen him smile, and his glasses reflect the camera's flash so you can't see his eyes.

That detail about the glasses is revealing.  In all the years I visited my dad, he invariably wore sunglasses, even indoors.  I once asked my oldest brother why that was, to which he replied, "Because he has no eyes."  We both laughed but we knew it was true—not literally, of course—but our father never made eye contact, never connected with us.  He rarely expressed any emotions, good or bad.  He was simply there.  Admittedly, it was an awkward arrangement for all of us.  He was our part-time dad, but we were his part-time kids, and he probably never knew how best to relate to us.

I last saw my father twenty-eight years ago when I was in my mid-twenties.  I had just gotten married and had taken my wife to meet him.  After that visit I decided to let my dad call if he wanted to talk or get together.  He never did.

So here I am, sorting through a box full of old photographs.  Two pictures stand out because they were taken by my dad.  The first was snapped a year or two after my parents got married.

What's striking is how young and pretty my mother looks, and she must have looked equally beautiful to my dad.  There's also something disorienting about the image.  My mother has never been what you would call a lover of the great outdoors, but there she is standing at the base of a mountain in Colorado or New Mexico, doing her best to enjoy the kind of experience my dad most certainly loved, a fishing trip.  She's even wearing waders, perhaps for the first and last time.

The other photo my dad snapped was taken at Christmas, the last one we all shared under the same roof.  My cousin, my brothers, and I are sitting on the floor after the presents have been opened.  My oldest brother is wearing a shiny new pair of cowboy boots and has a transistor radio pressed to his ear. That's me pressing my bare feet against my other brother's new boots.

What stands out most is the hi-fi set behind us.  That stereo was my dad's pride and joy (he was quite the audiophile, especially when it came to his jazz records), and when he moved into his new house not long after this photo was taken, he devoted a room to his stereo.  Don't ask me how I know he is the one who snapped the photo.  I suppose it could have been my mother, but there's something about the blank looks on our faces that tells me our father was on the other side of that Polaroid camera, one knee on the floor, left eye shut, right eye pressed against the viewfinder.