Dia de las Madres
Dia de las Madres
The old moon has not yet completely given up its ghost. Two days shy of new. Today, according to kabbalistic tradition, is the day of the lovingkindness aspect of sovereignty. It is also the day of The Mothers, those incubatory agencies hovering in the shadow just beyond the threshold of perception. My actual mother rendered her flesh to the fires of cremation nearly eight years ago. I remember the occasion of it with hallucinatory clarity. A strange affair. Fire was her wish and fire was her undoing. The 18th century mystic, Baal HaTanya, tells us that the addict returns to her body immediately upon its demise and clings to it, unable to discern that its life has evaporated. Two years before her death, I found my mother lying speechless in the ashtray that was her apartment in Leisure World. For my mother, leisure was license to descend into a maelstrom of her own device. It was a lonely perch several stories off the ground, lost in the endless concrete complex of condominia into which she had deposited herself.
My mother had survived a second go-round with lung cancer, a different cell type than the first, a different array of medieval tortures to exorcise it. Her attachment to the demon weed remained unabated. I see the smoky tendrils of Nicotiana tabacum swirling their way up my mother’s nostrils and into her prefrontal cortex. There the combined effects of hypertensive vascular disease and accelerated atherosclerosis released whatever loose grip my mother still had over her inordinate desires. Uncountable. The number of stubbed out cigarettes that lay strewn about the length and breadth of her two room apartment. Her wordless stare from her soiled bed sheets was the clue that she had at long last been released. No more struggles.
It turned out that her left middle cerebral artery had leaped its banks and flooded the surrounding landscape, including the parcel called Wernicke’s Area. Dr. Wernicke was a Prussian psychiatrist from the era before Sigmund Freud encouraged his disciples to sever the field’s connection to physiology. It was my mother’s physiology that was damaged beyond recognition. Beyond recognition, beyond names, grammar and identity. But that, after everything was unsaid and undone, was the plan. My mother’s physiology had assaulted her for three score years and change. It proffered her an armada of sympathomimetic storms and ghoulish magic lantern shows, a flood of unwanted reminiscences of the nightmare inflicted upon her as a child at the hands of her mother’s father. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Called ‘Soldier’s Heart’ in Wernicke’s day. From a battle into which no soldier would ever choose to be sent.
I remember Pop Nathan only as a wraith, fleetingly visible in the shadows atop a flight of stairs. It was that wraith that took up residence in my mother’s psychophysiology. Try as she might, she could neither unseat him from his shady purchase nor cease to pay him fealty. His grip was iron. He had molested her daily from age seven to eleven. She told no one until the flashbacks returned with the death of her second husband. It was during her first marriage, to my father, that she hatched her crazy plan, her backdoor scheme to dethrone the tyrant that trashed her nights and days. Though she never would have admitted it, even to herself, with all due deliberation she chose her co-conspirator—Nicotiana tabacum, a most powerful ally. When I was eight years old the Surgeon General issued a health warning that my mother could read on every pack of cigarettes she purchased in the ensuing years. But Nicotiana’s grip was the only one that rivaled Pop Nathan’s. So it was that my mother stalked herself into that dark country, the burning torch at hand for all the remaining years of sentience she had.
After the stroke my mother smoked no more. Nicotiana had done her job—overtaken my mother’s will and then obliterated all trace of reminiscences. Pop Nathan’s alias, stored deep within my mother’s hard drive, had engineered its own erasure, albeit most crudely. Instead of a simple deletion of the corrupted code, my mother precipitated a headcrash. Horror, a grandfather so malign that his molested granddaughter could not help but seek him unbidden, in the fabric of her dreams and daytime imaginings, until the witness in her psyche went dark as she took him down with the rest of her cognitive apparatus in tow. Maybe that was the only way. I don’t know. I’ve heard that exorcism is a risky business, not for the faint of heart, sometimes fatal. In my mother’s case, peace came in the form of a kindly wizened old soul, happy to see any other soul that crossed the threshold of her visual field. Not a trace of the old fear left to bear witness to the horror of her childhood. Hardly a jot of coherent speech passed between her lips. Yet in the newly liberated sovereign realm of her heart, she’d fix her gaze upon her visitor and smile for all she was worth.
Michael Diamond is a writer in the DC area where he practices psychiatry and medical qigong. Diamond has published a handful of verse, creative nonfiction, fiction and translation in Cybercorpse, Shirim (courtesy of Dryad Press), Akashic Books and JAMA. He lives in the burbs with his wife, who is an illuminator of Hebrew manuscripts, his dog, two cats, a cockatiel named Peaches and a tankful of hyperactive fish.
Photo Credit: Logan Tozzi, New Mexico Review Staff