On the day my mother forgot I existed, I sat across from her in a small cafe in the Berkshires, watching her sip her cappuccino and delicately tear off a piece of the croissant we were sharing. As she looked up and met my eyes agreeably and impersonally, I worked to get my bearings in this new world. Ten minutes earlier, when we were driving here, she had told me she couldn’t remember how we’d met.
This was two years after my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The disease’s progress had been slow at first, but one day I’d come into her apartment to find both the oven and a burner on; her partner, Conrad, and I convinced her to move up to Massachusetts to live with him full time.
She missed New York horribly She’d call to tell me about an imaginary job she’d been offered in the city, how she was going to move back in with her parents, who had been dead for many years — filling in the gaps of her memory with shadows of old truths. It hurt to hear the longing in her voice.
She always remembered me, though.
Sometimes she’d get confused when she’d leave messages. “It’s me,” she’d say into the machine. “It’s Katie.”
It seems too obvious to say that our mothers are our mirrors, but it’s not just that we see ourselves in them; we also see ourselves in how they see us. That double reflection can refract in unpredictable angles.
My mother was an actress, which added another refraction: I grew up watching her pretend to be other people. My great excitement at seeing her on stage was always tinged with a vague sense of being in limbo that would persist until I saw her again in her street clothes.
And, although we were fiercely close in many ways, she was physically absent a lot, too — her career was her priority and her marriage to my father unhappy. She did plays out of town often, and she wouldn’t come back on her days off, as, I’ve learned since, most actor-parents try to do.
How does a daughter cope with a mother who disappears so often and returns so suddenly? My solution was to try to fashion myself in her image, to be a perfect reflection of her. Whether that was to keep her with me when she was gone, or to prove myself worthy of her so that she would stay, I don’t know.
I do know that I wasn’t good at it.
She had delicate features and fair skin and straight dark brown hair cut in a neat page boy; I was rougher looking, tangle-haired and darker skinned. She wore expensive French clothes that flattered her small, slim body. I was short, too, but rounder, and usually dressed in too-small hand-me-downs. We shared a sense of humor and a million private jokes, but our personalities differed. She was disciplined; I was a procrastinator. She was charming yet reserved; I was more like my extravagantly emotional alcoholic father, whom I feared I took after in too many ways. I became an actress, true, but I was much less successful than she. The relationships I found myself in were not as romantic as I knew hers had been from the stories she’d told me, and lacked her occasional movie star.
Still I soldiered on, disappointing myself over and over.
When I was in my late 20s, though, it occurred to me that this arrangement I’d chosen might be connected to my struggles with depression, and that the image I was trying for was a bad fit. My idealization of her twisted into unbounded resentment: she’d gone off to work and had affairs and left me to the mercies of my father’s rages; she’d bought herself fur coats and Sonia Rykiel pantsuits while I looked like a waif, etc., etc.
I left acting. I married a lovely, sane man and had a child, a beautiful, bright-eyed son, whom I stayed home to take care of, turning down acting work the few times it was offered because bedtimes with him were too precious to give up. The opposite of her, I thought. But that thought, I knew, meant that I was still seeing myself in terms of her.
Then the diagnosis came. As I watched bits of my mother flake off and fly away, her larger loss made my own seem mundane and petty. This was her tragedy, not mine.
But now, sitting across from her and seeing myself reflected nowhere in her still-clear eyes, all I was losing took my breath away. And, in that moment, I realized that her Alzheimer’s, in laying wreck to so much, had rendered unavoidably visible the problem I’d always had: that when I’d looked to her to see myself, I hadn’t, and that, like the vampire I felt myself to be, I had no reflection of my own.
Just then, my mother smiled at me from the other side of the table, her beauty undimmed, at least to me; her smile warming me, as it always has, no matter what.
“You are so wonderful,” she said. “I love you so much.”
How could she love me if she didn’t know who I was?
I felt it, though. And it was unattached to anything I had done or not done, been or not been.
“I love you too, Mom.” I reached out and held her hand — too tightly, I’m sure.
She was leaving for real, and for good, and there was nothing I could do to stop her. There would be no mirror, anymore, to search for myself in. Nowhere outside myself to locate who I should be.
It’s been eight years since my mother forgot me, and she’s almost gone now. Since that day, and as I lose her more and more, as she has moved farther into the awful oblivion she can’t escape, the voice in my head that compares myself to her has quieted. I’m lonely without it, it turns out, but I’m also finding, finally, my own way to live.
The price of my freedom is way too high.
Kate Neuman, a New York-based writer and actor, is working on a memoir about losing her mother to Alzheimer’s.