Mother's Day by Mark Salzman

I assume that the full scope of my mother’s influence on me lies beyond my understanding. I figure it must be like an iceberg: only the tip of it shows. The tens of thousands of hours she spent looking after me, feeding me, clothing me, socializing me, teaching me, consoling me, encouraging me, disciplining me, listening to me, driving me to cello and kung fu lessons—I can remember only a tiny fraction of it all. And then there is all that I learned from her by example: watching her practice the piano every day for hours and hours without ever feeling satisfied with the results, watching how she worried every month when it came time to pay the bills, watching how kindly and patiently she treated others, but how unkindly and impatiently she treated herself.

My mother graduated with honors from the Eastman School of Music, having double-majored in piano and oboe. She gave solo recitals all over the country and abroad; she taught hundreds of students; she raised three children without the help of a housekeeper or nanny; she helped found an orchestra in Connecticut and an early concert series in Arizona, both of which are still thriving; and she never spent what little money she had unwisely. She led, in other words, a productive, accomplished life—but not quite as productive or accomplished as that of Pablo Casals or J. S. Bach. And those were the sorts of people to whom my mother compared herself.

One year, I sat next to her during a lecture by the writer David McCullough. He was discussing the life of John Adams, and regardless of anything else you may think about John Adams, you cannot accuse him of being an underachiever. The man was staggeringly productive. At the end of the lecture, I turned to my mother and saw that the front of her blouse was soaked with tears. She could barely move, her whole body was so tense. Eventually, after the applause had died down and people were getting up to leave, she shook her head and said, “My whole life has been a waste.”

Here’s the happy ending to this story, even if it is bittersweet.  When my mother was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer at age sixty-seven (she’d smoked for fifty years; tobacco was her antidepressant medication of choice) and was told she had between three and eighteen months to live, her reaction took all of us by surprise. She seemed to go through the first four Kübler-Ross “stages of grief”—denial, anger, bargaining, and depression—over the course of the first weekend. By Monday morning, she’d reached stage five (acceptance) and pretty much stayed there until she died nine months later. She stopped practicing and started reading for pleasure. She started describing every meal she ate as the best meal she’d ever eaten. We traveled as a family to Italy and watched her marvel at everything she beheld, from the statues to the soundless dishwasher in our rented house.

When, at the very end, her symptoms required care that we weren’t able to provide at home, we moved her to a room in a hospice facility. The first thing she did when she got there was point out a trim pattern that had been hand-painted on the walls just below the ceiling—tiny purple flowers growing in clusters—and marvel at how beautifully they’d been rendered.  

Whoever came up with the idea of hospice care ought to get the Nobel prize. During her stay there, no one poked her with needles or woke her for tests, no machines beeped, no alarms went off, and the staff’s highest priority was to make her as comfortable as possible. She was lucid and cheerful until the morphine carried her off into the land of dreams, and then she slipped away.

She let go of something when she learned she was going to die, and it seems to me that it relieved her of an elaborate and unnecessary burden. Better late than never, as they say. She did the “surrender thing” well, and that’s what I remember most vividly about my mother now. That’s the tip of the iceberg for me, and far from trying to steer away from it, it’s become a landmark that I navigate by every day. Not a bad parting gift—just wish I could thank her for it.

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Mark Salzman is an award-winning novelist and nonfiction author who has written on a wide range of subjects, from a graceful novel about a Carmelite nun’s crisis of faith to a memoir about growing up a misfit in a Connecticut suburb.

As a boy, Salzman studied kung fu and the cello. His cello proficiency led to his acceptance at Yale University at age sixteen. He soon immersed himself in Chinese language and philosophy; he then spent two years in mainland China, teaching English and studying martial arts. His experiences in China resulted in his first book, the Pulitzer Prize–nominated Iron & Silk. 

Salzman went on to write The Laughing Sutra, Lost in Place, The Soloist, and Lying Awake. He has also played the cello on the soundtrack to several films, including the Academy Award–winning documentary Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien. His latest work is the memoir The Man in the Empty Boat, published by Open Road Integrated Media.