When I wake up at 3 a.m. these days because of chronic pain in my knee or neck or hands, I think about my late mother. She died in 1999 after a long illness and she hasn’t left. I see her everywhere, but especially when I can’t sleep, and she is framed by a kitchen doorway, utterly still, a painting in my mind. A Degas, perhaps, one of his lonely women.
Auburn hair well-brushed, shoulders slightly hunched, she sits quietly in our L-shaped Washington Heights kitchen with her back to the window as if she is not ready to engage with something as simple as the view of another six-story, cream-colored brick apartment house built in the thirties. Or the small bowl of cottage cheese that waits for her spoon.
Eventually this picture will break up as she reads the New York Times that my father has brought to her before he went to work. She has a cup or two of instant Nescafé, takes aspirin for the arthritis that has twisted her hands, and smokes her first Pall Mall of the day while she puts herself together.
The Yiddish words she uses to explain it — “Ich muss mich zusammenstellen” — literally mean, “I have to assemble myself,” and the phrase seems both weighty to me, and a little comical. In her red-and-white robe she might be a human stop sign.
STOP. Construction Zone Ahead.
But I have never thought of her as anything other than, “together.” Brisk, highly-educated, fiendishly well-read and speaking French, German, Russian, Polish, English, and Yiddish, she is quick in her judgments and firm in her opinions. In the Nixon era, she dismisses him as a fascist and says that a speech by his vice president Spiro Agnew is, “like Stalin on a bad day.”
She is in her sixties when her fingers become gnarled and painful because of arthritis and she gazes at them in regret mixed with surprise. “Getting old is miserable,” she mutters.
In my sixties, and after various surgeries, I feel far less put together than I was ten years ago, and I can’t help but agree with her. I don’t smoke, but I have many pills at breakfast and can’t even get to them or food before a few cups of coffee to clear my head. And I often have cottage cheese for breakfast, though mine is organic.
My fingers aren’t twisted, but arthritis has wrecked both my thumbs and one knee. Taking stairs hurts, using certain tools hurts, opening jars and boxes hurts, and sometimes just rolling over in bed at night hurts. And where she had headaches, I have migraines that can send me to bed, unable to bear light or noise.
Yet thinking of my mother at 3 a.m., hearing her husky smoker’s voice in my head, I feel oddly soothed. It’s taken me years to realize that I am so much like her: though I don’t smoke, I have more opinions than one person needs, I can’t get my day going until I read the New York Times and have my coffee, and I speak several languages.
Pain is now another thing that we share. I have stepped into her frame.
