ER Showdown

Can telling the truth kill people?

In the emergency room, the day before she died, my mother was alienating doctors, nurses, and orderlies. Even my sister had been driven away by angry diatribes that overrode compassion for an 88-year-old woman with a broken hip. Mom was lying on the gurney trying to get off, swinging her one half-decent leg off the edge and insisting I help her stand up. It was a little comical. She was spitting mad. I knew she was scared.

Then she said it again. “I should have left you two in the gutter.”

She’d said this repeatedly since we were young children, and I always wondered, why the gutter? There was a 5&10 store downstairs. Also, a bus stop, and a Catholic church across the street. Our Upper East Side neighborhood had curbs and sidewalks. She would have had to travel to find a gutter wide enough for children. This was Madison Avenue after all.

Were we always sad?

As an adult, I asked myself, who said it to her? Who had made her feel so worthless that she had to inflict the deep harm on her own children.

I was there at her side in the hospital, but in her eyes, I had clearly let her down.

I said, "Look, I won’t leave you, but you cannot say mean things to people. Don't say things like that, it's not right."

I don't know why it took me 56 years to find my voice, but the effect was kind of amazing. She clammed up and was pleasant and docile after that. I think maybe she knew I was right or that she also had to trust me because I was her flesh and blood. Or maybe she had a premonition she was going to die.

She did indeed die the next morning during hip replacement surgery when a blood clot found the half of her heart that still worked and that was that. Soon after, I saw my therapist. He’d been working with me on managing my relationship with my mom after 50 years of taking her shit.

"Well," I said, "I finally stood up to my mom when she said something mean to me."

"Wow," he said. "How’d she take it?"

"Oh, she died," I said.