Last week, my eighty-three-year-old mother and I road tripped to Pennsylvania to take care of some last-minute details for the sale of her house (she recently moved to my town in Connecticut). Early on, I made her listen to an episode of Smartless (a podcast hosted by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett). Stephen Colbert was the guest, and I found myself smiling and chuckling as the hour-long show went on. My mother didn’t laugh once, clearly missing half the references. I didn’t bother explaining (and not just because her early dementia meant she’d likely forget it all by next week). She just waited it out, patient as always.
Then, about halfway through the eight-hour drive, I asked her a question I’d never asked her before. Who are you? Not as my mother or as the woman who raised me. Just her and what she cared about outside of family. What she’d fight for, if it came to that.
She blinked at me, thinking for less than ten seconds before stating, “Nothing.” She wasn’t being facetious or dismissive or even hiding something, nor did the question upset her. She simply and genuinely didn’t have any other answer, and she wasn’t bothered by that in the slightest.
I have talked to my mother every single day of my life. We’ve covered every mundane detail possible, from who’s coming for Thanksgiving to what her sister said and whether she’d eaten any protein that day. But we had never once gone somewhere like this, and it turns out there wasn’t much there to find. I don’t think she’s shallow; she’s just never felt the need to look for a higher purpose.
My mother grew up poor, worked hard enough to earn a full scholarship, and then got married right out of college. She worked for 10 months before I was born, and after that, she spent the rest of her life caring for people. Her kids, my father’s grandparents, her own aging parents, and then a second husband she loved dearly and lost to cancer. She has had a full life, and by almost every account a happy one, during which she never asked herself what it was all for. She never dwelled on what went wrong or what she might’ve done better. She just kept on going.
I, on the other hand, cannot stop asking that question about my own life if my own life depended on it. I am constantly taking inventory. What I’ve done wrong. Whether I can fix it. What I should be doing instead of whatever I’m currently doing. Until recently, I prided myself on this introspection and near constant drive to evolve and become more enlightened (or at least more productive). My mother thinks I’d be happier if I thought less. Some days I think she might be right, but I have no idea how to test that theory, because I don’t know how to turn the thinking off.
While I was busy comparing my way of moving through life to hers, my mother started pointing out the scenery as if she’d never seen it before. That day, everything from the barns to the hills dotted with dairy cows and the roadside service centers looked new to her despite having driven that road to my house more than one hundred times since 1999. This time, the bucolic Pennsylvania farm country and mountains looked so beautiful to her (and she’s always preferred Vegas to nature). I found myself suddenly seeing as she did, like a child awed by the wonder of everything.
I know part of her new way of seeing it is due to her illness. It’s not a comfortable thing to consider, this idea that losing cognition might be handing her a kind of contented wonder my fully intact mind appreciates only fleetingly. But I questioned whether that spirit of wonder versus analysis is part of the trick to being less like me and more like her. After all, she has been happier in life than I, more at peace with what she couldn’t control, and with anything that went wrong. At my age, that would be nice (and thinking my way there isn’t working out so well).
I still don’t know which one of us has it right. For now, I’m just happy I got those quiet, unplugged hours with her.
Have you ever asked someone you love a question you’d never thought to ask before, and been surprised by the answer?