Trying to understand my parents' lives, part 1

Things happen when we're children that we don't understand until many years later and as grownups we know more and can put things into context. I seem to spend a lot of time trying to make sense of events from my childhood.

When I was four years old my mother spent a week in Lenox Hill Hospital undergoing a series of tests. I don't remember that at all, but after my father died, one of of the things I found was the hospital report. It described her symptoms and listed the tests and concluded with a diagnosis of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. ALS. Lou Gehrig's Disease. Basically, a death sentence. I can't know how much of this was explained to my parents. To the doctors they were a poor, uneducated immigrant couple and maybe weren't told everything this diagnosis entailed. Or maybe they were. As a child I was never told my mother was dying. I knew she was "sick". That she couldn't get around like other people. For the last nine years of her life she was completely housebound. But I kept hoping they would find a cure for whatever it was. As I got older, she became feebler. For a while she could get around with a walker. Then eventually she could only stand and maybe take a step or two while leaning on the walker. Then she couldn't manage that much. But the prospect of her imminent death was not something that was a serious possibility. Yes, she was getting weaker, but there was no reason she wouldn't live a normal lifetime. Things in our home were always tense. My mother was invariably miserable and my father overwhelmed with the care she required.

And in the midst of her chronic condition, my mother had to undergo an emergency hysterectomy. I was ten years old at that time and had no idea what a uterus was. I was told she had a tumor in her stomach, but they did use the word "hysterectomy". It wasn't till a few years later that I learned what it was all about. It may not have been until after she had died. She was rushed to the hospital because of bleeding from what turned out to be a benign fibroid tumor and it was several weeks before she came home. I was sent to stay with relatives. My mother never fully recovered her strength and her decline progressed much more rapidly. I had naively hoped that when she was in the hospital they would figure out what was wrong with her and maybe cure her.

After a few more years it got to the point where my father couldn't handle caring for her. Just lifting her out of bed several time a day was quite a strain as she was as tall as he was and outweighed him. We had to place her in a nursing home. A few weeks later she was hospitalized after having a stroke and pneumonia. While she was there the doctors said she probably didn't have ALS because she would have died sooner. They still had no idea what was wrong and mentioned the possibility her condition was psychosomatic. If they thought that, they made no efforts to try to treat her. She recovered enough to be sent back to the nursing home, where she finally died a few weeks later.

To lose your mother when you are fifteen is an overpowering blow. I spent years absorbing the loss, trying to cope with it and understand it. Then after dwelling on her illness and death for so long I started trying to understand her life. And I feel cheated that I never had the chance to talk with her as a grownup and ask her things. Like how she really came to marry my father and leave her family and her country and come to the US to be the wife of a man she had known when they were children. Did she regret it? I always understood that she loved him more than he loved her. If he did love her. He was not one to show affection to wife or daughter and that made me angry with him. Again, it was only many years later that considering his life caused me to give him a break. When he was three years old, his mother died. Not having the benefit of a mother's love and having a stern, critical father probably kept him from learning to love and be loved. His father took him back to Europe, where he remarried and started a new family. When my father was sixteen he was encouraged to go back to America. Was this a rejection by his father? Maybe not, but he might have perceived it as such. Maybe my grandfather thought his son would have a better life back in America.Maybe his new wife didn't like her stepson. In any case, my father came back to the US in 1929, just in time for the depression.