“Write about a time when you chose to push against despair and bleakness. How did love, humor, and hope persist despite dire circumstances?”

—writing prompt from Arundhati Roy

During the years my mother was dying and we were generally exhausted, stressed, and gaining weight, but some things seemed funny.

The third night in a row driving home from the ER in the dark and a bull elk jumped in front of the car. We didn’t hit it.

Spending every anniversary, five years in a row in the ER and Mom was only dehydrated. A lot of visits to the ER.

The ER doc telling a friend that he had to drive two hours to work in Seaside because no other ER in the state would hire him.

My favorite was a (visiting/resident?) doc with rings and tattoos all over her face who asked me, “Have you ever seen an Xray of your mother’s spine?” I hadn’t. She put it up, showed how insanely out-of-line and titled her vertebra were. “It’s amazing she can sit up.” Not funny, but revelatory.

The final joke was after Mom died and we were clearing her rooms. No one wanted her electric wheelchair, an expensive machine which Medicare paid for. We tried giving it to hospitals, clinics, charities. We tried returning it to the company that provided it. No one wanted the “liability” of a used wheelchair. Finally, Gary drove over the assisted living facility and left it in the entrance. There were often chairs parked in the entrance.

Every time we drove past, Gary would say: Wheelchair! This made it possible for me to pass the place where she died every workday for the next twelve years without crying. I thought, Wheelchair!

My mother was a dear, sweet, controlling, and marginally mentally ill person. She was the daughter of a single mother, on whatever prescription antidepressant was going when I was an adolescent in the 60s, was in group therapy, had a hysterectomy, and daddy issues. She had mad organizational skills and was highly valued everywhere she worked. She was a feminist who seriously expected her daughter to marry a man who would take care of her, but whose daughter would also “have a skill to fall back on.” It was only after she died that it dawned on me how insulting it was the the skill she thought I would need to fall back on was typing. Typing. No offense to secretaries everywhere, but office work was never going to suit me, and I was smart enough in school and a strong math student. Accounting might have been a better choice should my imaginary marriage to my mother’s imaginary attorney end in divorce. She told me what to do almost always—what colors to wear, “put on some lipstick,” how to arrange my hair, furniture and appliances I should or should not buy. (If I didn’t purchase items she thought I should have, she’d buy it for me and then send a check of an equal amount to my brother.) I did not always do as I was told, but I was not paranoid about her “advice.” I was at least forty before I understood that not all mothers were still dictating behavior to their adult children. I have struggled not to repeat her mistakes.

Her grandchildren adored her, but even they were scared to be in the car with her. I tried talking to the DMV about revoking her driver’s license. The woman at the window said: “I would never do that to my mother.” But since someone’s 80-year-old mother had driven straight into the side of my car while my little boys were in the backseat, I was more concerned about what my mother might do to someone else. Our solution? Gary kept borrowing her car. Eventually, she became annoyed and insisted on having her car back. But by then I realized a sad but wonderful thing: my mother was no longer strong enough to depress the clutch. She might manage to get down the three steps and to her car unaided and into the car and start the engine, but she would stall it before she could leave the driveway. Gary and I laughed in relief when I told him. Good news for the safety of children everywhere!

Mom had her faults beyond what I have written here. All people have their faults and most do the best they are capable of doing. She was, on balance, a good mother and a great grandmother. She loved her family. Mom and I were close, as they say. We talked most every day, except when long distance calls were expensive on land lines and we lived in different states. Even during those years we talked for an hour at least once a week. We traveled together and saw movies, shared books. We were close.

I love my mother and miss her still. I think of her when something funny happens that would have made her laugh. Gary and I suspect she probably would have laughed about that wheelchair. She didn’t pay for it.