Going to Queens, on its own, would have been like a new adventure, but the three of us, Ma, Clyde, and I, had a destination. And it was huge—the 1964 World’s Fair. There were pavilions for miles in all different styles of architecture that represented other countries. There were food booths and restaurants with things I had never seen people eat. There were hundreds of exhibits that blew the three of us away. We walked by massive dinosaur sculptures in Dinoland and the big Unisphere ball that represented the globe; the “It’s a Small World” ride was there; and a skyway tram took us from one end of the fair to the other so we could look down on the thousands of folks below.
The Bell Telephone Company pavilion had prototypes of the Picturephone (think big-screen FaceTime, but forty-six years before it was available to the public). You could dial up and talk to somebody in a completely different area and see their face. It was like magic. As an up-and-coming sci-fi fan, I also loved Futurama II. It was supposed to represent life in the US in the year 2064, with space folks zooming around wearing jet packs. I guess my great-grandkids will get to see how that all turns out.
It’s a good thing we can’t see into the future. Even as a kid, I had no idea how drastically my future and my whole personal world would change in the next couple of years.
One afternoon I came home from elementary school and found my mother standing in the hallway, looking in the coat closet. Her hair was completely disheveled, sticking out all over her head. Without even seeing her face, I knew something was really wrong. She would have never let her hair look like that. She was barefoot and wearing a black trench coat open over a white slip. She was muttering incoherently to herself and didn’t even seem to notice I was home. Then she turned around and looked toward the bedrooms. I didn’t know what to do. Clyde wasn’t home, and I knew I couldn’t leave her like this. I watched as she went over to the oven, turned it on, opened the door, and put her head in there.
I was old enough to know this was really bad news. I ran over and grabbed her around the waist and pulled her out.
“Ma! Mommy, what are you doing?”
She stayed there, kneeling on the floor, mumbling something. I reached up and turned the oven off.
“Mommy, are you okay?”
Then, she said clearly, “Go get Miss Viola.”
Miss Viola was a neighbor my mother liked who lived one floor below us.
I ran down the stairwell and knocked on her door. She seemed annoyed to have her day interrupted. I was having a hard time formulating words to ask her for help. I didn’t know how to explain what was happening. I stood at her door, motioning for her to come with me.
“What’s the matter? What’s going on?” She asked me about three times.
Finally, I got out the words, “Something’s wrong with Mommy.”
Miss Viola followed me up the stairwell and into our apartment. I stood by the hall closet and watched as she bent over my mother. Ma mumbled something incoherent. I watched as Miss Viola spoke to Ma and then helped her get up and sit in a chair. She went to the wall phone and made a call.
The paramedics arrived with a gurney. They were moving my mother from her chair when Clyde got home from school. He became frantic.
“What’s going on? What’s happening to Ma?”
I told him, “I don’t know. I found her like this. Don’t get mad at me.”
Then Clyde started freaking out and got puffed up with the paramedics, trying to get them away from our mom.
“Don’t touch her. Wait! Leave her be.”
They weren’t about to listen to a kid, though, and Ma didn’t seem to notice Clyde either.
When they wheeled her onto the elevator, I got on it, too. Other people were already on the elevator, and I felt protective and pissed off. I was thinking, Don’t look at my mother. Mind your own business.
But that wasn’t going to happen in our building. By the time they wheeled her out the front door and loaded her in the ambulance, all the neighbors were looking down from windows on every floor.
I tried to climb into the ambulance next to my mom, but the driver stopped me.
“I want to go with her. Let me go with her.”
Miss Viola pulled me back. “You can’t go. Kids can’t go in hospitals.”
By this time, Clyde had come down the stairs and was standing on the sidewalk next to me as the ambulance turned on the siren and drove off with our mother inside.
I didn’t know what to do next. Do we go back upstairs? What is going to happen?
Clyde took my shoulder and steered me to the front door. “Come on. Let’s go.”
We rode the elevator back up to our floor and went inside. I stood in the middle of the room, not grasping what was happening.
“Clyde, what are we supposed to do now?”
I remember Clyde made some phone calls to our father and our grandfather, Ma’s dad.
“It’ll be all right. It will be fine,” Clyde told me. I could tell by his voice that he didn’t really believe it.
It wasn’t fine. It was the last time I saw my mother for two whole years.
No one explained to me what had happened. I only knew that she was in the hospital and kids weren’t allowed to go.
I didn’t understand until later that my mother had been sent to Bellevue Hospital for having a nervous breakdown.
She had been acting differently for a couple of months, like she wanted to be alone and not have me and Clyde to think about. One night, I woke up to see my mother standing over me, staring at me without saying anything. I asked her what was going on. She didn’t answer. She only walked out of the room. Years later, Clyde told me he had found her with a pair of scissors, acting strangely. He had taken the scissors from her.
I had also been noticing that her head would shake from side to side when she talked to me. I had asked her, “Why does your head keep shaking?”
She’d dismiss me and say, “It’s not shaking.”
I left it alone.
She never talked about her feelings. She kept it all contained with a self-sufficient attitude. If any adults saw my mom’s nervous breakdown coming, I never knew it. She’d never say if she was lonely or hurt. She didn’t show if she was worried. That was how it was for her generation. Folks didn’t talk about their feelings. The word stress didn’t even exist in everyday language. It was part of life, everyone trying to get by. I guess they thought vulnerable types of feelings should be private stuff . . . even between family members.
Ma solved her problems on her own because she had to. She didn’t have any help, and she was never comfortable asking anyone for a favor. The one time she asked for a little assistance from my dad’s mother, my grandmother, she was treated unkindly. There were no child support laws in the 1960s. Women couldn’t get a bank loan without a husband to cosign or even a credit card with just her name on it.
Having my mom taken away and hospitalized was like having a Band-Aid ripped off and facing the real world all of a sudden. I have very few memories of those two years without my mother being there, and maybe that was because no one would talk to me about it or tell me what was going on. I kind of remember my mom’s cousin Arlene staying with us, some other cousins coming and going for a while, and our father being there off and on. But I couldn’t get from them what I’d always had with my mom. I had a key, and I’d let myself in after school and wait for Clyde to come home. I have no idea how the rent got paid, what we ate for meals, how I had clean clothes to wear, or any other everyday living thing. It all happened somehow, but I don’t know how or when. None of the holidays without my mom are in my memory. I don’t recall being at school and going on to the next grade, but I know I did. No one asked me about it. Nobody told me it would be okay or that I’d see my mom again. I only had the same thought, every single day: Don’t ask anyone for anything. Be good. Don’t cause any trouble. Stay to yourself. As long as your brother is here, you’ll be okay.
I felt that I’d have to be self-sufficient and that being kept from my mom by the adults was bullshit. I held back from telling any of them anything. It’s not like I was going to discuss how my day was at school with my dad, who never seemed to care anyway. I knew Clyde and I would be better off without any of them there. But I didn’t have a choice. It’s probably classic trauma stuff for kids who don’t feel safe, but I learned by necessity that I had to count on myself and hoped that nothing would happen to my brother. I knew he’d never let anything happen to me, and I’d never let anything happen to him if I could stop it.
A couple of times during those two years, I’d ask Clyde, “Do you think Ma is ever going to come back?”
He’d say, “Yeah, sure. Why wouldn’t she? We’re her kids.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re right. We’re her kids. She’s going to come back.”
I tried to go with it, to believe Clyde had the answer. He may have known more of what was happening with our mother, but I doubt it. He never told me if he did.
I spent some of my after-school hours and Saturday mornings watching cartoons. My mom used to love to watch them all, too, as they’d show the older classics featuring characters like Felix the Cat, Koko the Clown, and Betty Boop with Minnie the Moocher. I’d watch Rocky and Bullwinkle, Huckleberry Hound, Mighty Mouse, Popeye, the Flintstones, all the Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons.
I’d collect comic books and get new ones if given a little change, reading about Archie and Jughead, Nancy and Sluggo, Richie Rich, Tom and Jerry, Wendy the Good Little Witch, or Casper the Friendly Ghost.
Then, one day, when we got home from school, our father and grandfather met us at the door. And our grandfather said, “Look, your mom is back home.”
Clyde and I ran in to see her, shouting, “Ma! Ma!”
She hugged us both, but she looked like she wasn’t sure what was going on.
I thought maybe she didn’t like being hugged on much because she had been in the hospital for so long. But she didn’t respond to hugs at all, even weeks later. She would look at me like she was trying to figure out what I wanted and what she was supposed to do for me and Clyde.
The best way to describe the difference in her is like in the 1956 sci-fi horror movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the young woman says something like, “He looks and sounds like Uncle Ira, but it’s not him.” This woman in our living room looked like my mom and sounded like my mom. But it wasn’t her.
I had no one to tell that to. I tried to say it to Clyde. I could see it bothered him, too.
He answered me, “Well, you know, it’s Ma. Leave it alone.”
Then I said, “She’s different.”
He said, “Well, she’s been in the hospital.”
She never left the apartment on her own. She would stay home until Clyde and I got back from school.
Every few days Clyde would ask her, “When are we going shopping? Should we go soon?”
The things our mother would always do on her own became a group effort, but that was okay with me. I loved going to supermarkets and looking at everything. The market nearest us was Daitch Shopwell, and it had all these amazing older women working there, wearing hairnets and running the registers with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. They could ring up anything without looking at the price sticker because they had them memorized from working there for so long.
They would wave and smile at Ma, and she would wave back, but she didn’t seem to know who they were or why they were waving hello.
We’d make our way up and down the aisles, getting what we needed and sometimes stuff we didn’t need. Clyde and I would side-eye each other and grin because Ma was now okay with us getting snacks she had never agreed to before. We loved Cheez Doodles and Yodels (a chocolate-covered roll-up cake). She wanted them, too.
Mom would get vegetables and steam them for dinner. We didn’t eat much meat, but sometimes we’d walk her over to the fish market on Ninth Avenue, which my friend Kathleen DiMartino’s family owned, and get fish for dinner.
Little by little, she knit back together the routine stuff that was part of her life before hospitalization. After going somewhere a few times with me and Clyde, she would remember that she could go to Dan Bell’s on the corner, and they would give credit if she needed it. She figured out where to go to buy her cigarettes.
As much as I couldn’t wait for her to be back home with us, things were different. She didn’t return to work at the French Hospital. It took a long time for her to be confident enough to go out on her own, and no adult explained why to me or Clyde. They all acted like things were back to the way they used to be. They also never made me or Clyde think that our mom had a nervous breakdown because of the two of us. So Clyde and I didn’t have to go through any guilt about what had happened to her.
We didn’t know, at that time, why she was so different, but we chalked it up to thinking that people must get kind of standoffish if they’ve been hospitalized for a long time. Maybe they get tired of folks being up in their face. It made me question if I even really remembered who she used to be. Maybe she had never been a huggy type before, and I only thought she had been.
When I was a little kid, I understood that you had to be a certain size and age to lay up on somebody. But after that age, like around seven, you didn’t do the physical stuff. Adults would expect you to be more self-contained and not need to touch and hug that much. I liked hugging as a kid and still wanted to hug my mother even as an older kid.
But after her hospitalization, her drama was such that I would say, “Can I hug you?”
And she’d say, “No. Not right now.”
I’d say, “Okay,” but then when I went to walk away, she’d call my name. So I’d stop.
Then she’d say, “Come here.” And she would hug me. She’d say, “Okay, that’s it. Okay?” And she let me go.
Those hugs were just for me. She never went back to being a hugger.
About forty years later, I finally found out what was really going on for her.
One afternoon, my mother, brother, and I were talking at my house in Berkeley, California.
I don’t know what led up to me saying this, but I told her, “You know, Ma, when you went away for those two years, I think it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I know it was unhappy for you, but it changed everything for me.”
She said, “Really?”
“Oh, yeah. It made me see things differently. It really drove home to me that I had to do stuff on my own. I had to figure things out.”
“Like what?”
“I had to figure out who I was going to be.”
She said, “Can I tell you something?”
I was like, “Sure. Of course.”
Mom looked at Clyde and then at me. “I didn’t know who you were. When I got home from the hospital.”
My brother and I both said the same thing: “What? What do you mean? Of course you knew who we were.”
Then she went on to tell this story that stunned my brother and me. Afterward, it all seemed to make perfect sense to us in a way that we hadn’t contemplated before.
In the same way a woman couldn’t get a bank loan or a credit card on her own in the 1960s, she also couldn’t decide on her own health care. Because she was still married to my father, he and my grandfather got to decide what happened to her after she was taken by the ambulance. These two men, who were barely ever around my mom, approved of her having experimental electroshock therapy.
As she talked, I sat there feeling awful for her that she had been sent to a mental hospital and had to stay for two years. After all, it might have all been prevented if they had helped her out along the way. All she wanted to do was get some help. And nobody would help her. Nobody.
Then, after God knows how many electroshock therapy treatments and who the fuck knows what else they tried out on her, they decided she was no longer crazy. One day the doctor came to her bed and said, “Okay. It’s over. You’re getting out. You’re going home.”
She had no idea what that meant following so many brain-altering treatments. But she wasn’t going to say, “What do you mean? I’m going home? Where is that?”
They expected she would know she had two children and where she lived. But the truth was she had no memory of her previous life. All she wanted was for them to get away from her so they couldn’t see that she was unsure and then change their minds.
Her father and husband, who were like two strangers, took her to our apartment in Chelsea, and in came these two kids she didn’t recognize.
Sitting at my kitchen table, she told Clyde and me that she remembered thinking, I have no idea who any of these people are, but I am never going back to that hospital again. No matter what. So whatever they say to me is what I’ll accept.
Clyde and I both sat there listening, speechless about what our mother was telling us all these decades later. But it all made sense.
Little by little, my mother had to solve the mystery of who she used to be and what her life had been like before Bellevue. And she had to do it without anyone knowing she didn’t remember much at all. Some of her memory came back on its own after time, and some things were a complete start-over for her. But as soon as she was free, she made a choice that lasted her whole life. She would never work in a hospital, be taken to a hospital, see a doctor, or even a dentist ever again. She was never going to allow anyone to make a decision regarding her future care. She didn’t want to give anybody the chance to decide she was crazy or sick. It had been taken out of her hands once, and she was never going to put herself in a position where that could possibly happen again.
Later in her life, Clyde and I would suggest that she should see a health professional for various reasons. She refused to go. Even when she was losing some of her teeth, she wouldn’t let me get her a dentist appointment.
She’d say, “I’m okay with losing a couple teeth. I’m not going.”
After she died, the doctor told us that the aneurysm wasn’t her first brain issue, that she had probably had a number of small strokes before the fatal one.
That made sense too. I had been doing a FaceTime call with her a couple weeks before, and her face on one side looked swollen or stiff. I asked her about it. She said she had a bad tooth. I suggested the dentist, and once again, she refused.
In retrospect, I’m sure it was a stroke. But I didn’t get it then.
Clyde suffered terrible guilt after the doctor told us about the multiple strokes. He said he should have noticed.
I told him, “Clyde, you wouldn’t have noticed. If Ma didn’t want to be seen, she wouldn’t let you see her. She had her TV, books, a phone, and cigarettes in her room, and she wouldn’t come out when she didn’t want to deal with anyone.”
If she had told Clyde and me that she was having strokes, we probably would have fucked it up and forced her into a hospital or something she never wanted to do. She knew it, too. So she kept it to herself.
Clyde still felt bad, like he could have done something to prevent her from dying. But the truth is she brought us up to make our own choices. She made hers.
About ten years before she died, the three of us were talking about all the crazy shit that was going on in nursing homes when CBS started tracking abuse cases happening there.
My mother said, “Don’t ever do that to me.”
“Do what, Ma?”
“Put me in a nursing home.”
“Why would I ever do that?” I asked her.
She said, “You might not be able to take care of me here.”
Later, I asked Clyde why Ma was feeling worried about it.
He told me, “She’s been watching and reading about all these terrible things happening to older folks in the nursing homes.”
“But I would never send her there,” I said.
“Listen, Caryn. There is no guarantee that we are going to have the money or that you will always be who you currently are in your career,” Clyde said.
I thought about it. It made sense. She had been sent away before, against her will. She wanted us to know she never wanted that to happen again.
For that reason, it’s a good thing she went quickly. I thought to myself, Thank you, God, that I don’t ever have to consider who would take care of her and where. I never had to make that kind of decision. Lots of people do have to make those choices for their parents or a sibling. Clyde died very fast, like that, in the same way. I wasn’t ready for him to go, but I was still grateful I didn’t have to make any choices for him either.