I should have known it would. That’s what a meatloaf is meant to do: make you believe the world is so forgiving a place that even an array of bits and pieces, all smashed up, can still find meaning as an eloquent whole. The duplicity is integral to the dish, if you make it well. And when I made my mother’s meatloaf, it was perfect.In 2005, as my mother began the torturous process of disappearing in plain sight, I retreated to my kitchen, trying to reclaim her at the stove. Picking up a pot was not the instant panacea for illness and isolation and despair that I wanted it to be. But it helped. When I turned to my mother’s recipes, I felt grounded in her rules, and they worked every time. I could overcook or undercook the meatloaf, and it still tasted the same. I could eat it hot and eat it cold, and I ended up doing both, because my stepsons, Nat and Simon, and my husband, Frank, like meatloaf fine, but they don’t love it. The writer Peg Bracken summed it up perfectly in “The I Hate to Cook Book”: men prefer steaks and chops to casseroles and meatloaf, she wrote, because they “like a tune they can whistle.” But it was those inexact elements, murky and mystical, that drew me to my mother’s meatloaf again and again. It was my remnant of home and I conjured it, reaching back, always back. Each time I made it, it was absolutely perfect. And each time I made it, I felt more and more afraid. (...)
As Thanksgiving neared, Mom grew calmer. I did not. I spoke with Roberta Epstein, the social worker, filling her in on Mom, how she was there, but not there.
“It’s called ambiguous loss,” she said. “Gone, but not gone. She is your mother, but not the mother you knew. If she had died, it would be easier to grieve the loss. It’s hard to do that when she’s sitting in front of you.”
Would I prefer to have lost my mother completely, without warning? I used to think the answer was no. Still, as hard as that would have been on me, maybe it would have been better for her. To die as herself. Because the worst part was watching her know that she wasn’t in there anymore — watching her face as she heard herself speak and saw how other people reacted. No awards for bravery for keeping going while realizing how diminished you are, watching flashes of yourself crackle then disappear, like lightning.
So at that point, who was my mother? A 77-year-old woman who could no longer remember how many years she had been married or any of her children’s birthdays. She did not recognize her grandchildren. She stood in my apartment, where she had visited me for 19 years, and asked me who lived there. But the fierce, loving, prickly person she had always been was still in there, fleetingly for sure, and I didn’t want to let her go. I wanted to track her down and keep her there.
But she didn’t want to be tracked down. She didn’t want to be kept, anywhere. “Is someone here for me?” she had gone down to the lobby in her nightgown to ask the doorman one morning. “Am I moving?” she asked my aunt. She was sensing it was time to go. Even halfway out of her mind, she seemed to recognize the truth of that. When I still couldn’t.
I never wanted her to think I’d abandoned her. I wanted her to know I was fighting for her. I kept asking what I could do to help her, what I could do to make her happier. She looked at me pityingly every time. “There’s nothing you can do, because it’s not up to you,” she would say. “You’re here with me now. That’s enough.”
by Alex Witchel, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Alex Witchel
