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Sarah Stankorb | Longreads | May 9, 2024 | 2,874 words
My mother hadn’t made sense on the phone, muttering about a blinking light and a duck. She’d entered respite care while my father healed from a broken hip. Plucked from the routines of home, truth revealed itself in confusing behaviors and eventually a CT scan: both my parents had dementia.
He kept calling me from his room, which neighbored my mom’s. He rang, 10, 12, 14 times a day he rang, screaming that something was wrong with her mind—unaware in his own urgency that he’d already called. He’d scream. Forget. Most everyone else he knew had blocked his number due to the hammering rate of angry calls.
“She just sat in the dark all day,” he pleaded. They wanted to go home.
“The house isn’t safe, Dad. We’ve talked about this a thousand times,” I told him. He had to remember. I was only starting to understand he couldn’t.
For many, many years by then, my mother had lived mostly as a shut-in, able to walk but very unsteadily; my father used their home’s three front porch steps to keep her indoors. (The flight of steps she climbed inside had no contraindication.)
“We were so happy there,” he told me miserably. “When are you coming?”
“As soon as this lockdown is over,” I promised.
“When the hell will that be?” It was 2021, deep enough into the pandemic that we were vaccinated but still in the thick of outbreaks. I knew if I estimated a date for my arrival, and it changed, that would be the single thing his brain held onto: the fact that I’d let him down.
I knew if I estimated a date for my arrival, and it changed, that would be the single thing his brain held onto: the fact that I’d let him down.
But the lockdown did end, and I drove the hours cross-state, stopping to eat at a Chipotle. Weary already, that’s where I got the news of professional success. A publisher wanted to make an offer on my first book. I couldn’t wait to tell my mother in person.
I’d been working toward this for years, since girlhood really, when my mom bought me a word processor in middle school and taught me how to touch-type, making thought permanent. She taught me to type for the same reason she taught me to sew: she wanted me to have job skills.
But I was a kid with too much imagination and too many words I couldn’t say aloud. I went along with her each Saturday to our empty Presbyterian church, where she cleaned bathrooms and swept floors while I skipped around playing make-believe. The job was a kindness. The preacher knew how little we had; he snuck Christmas gifts into our house in black garbage bags so my mother could wrap them. My favorite part was when she cleaned the sanctuary. As she plucked hard-candy wrappers from the nooks of the choir chancel and dusted the rows and rows of pews, I got to dance around the deep plush carpet in my socks. It was such a rebellion: Socks! In the sanctuary! When I wore myself out, I’d tuck under a pew and daydream, watching for her legs as she moved through the vast room. When she got to where I’d hidden, she’d smile down at me as if I were a genuine surprise. Sweat dampened the temples of her hair, which would add extra spring as it dried. I’d roll on my back and stare at the underside of the pew, picturing worlds in the knots of wood.
My writing habit started in third grade, when I wrote a story about a teenager who stole a diamond ring to pay off gambling debts. The teacher gently asked if I had copied the story from somewhere—why should a kid my age know about bookies? We’d lost our house the summer prior, after my father lost his job. He had been a bus driver and crashed the bus, drunk. He went away for a while—jail or rehab, I don’t know. In turn, I carried our cat around in a laundry basket and called him Dad. He was a quiet, fuzzy replacement. My easy transference to a feline father-figure distressed my mother though, and when my dad came home sober for a short time, she chose to believe it would last, even when it didn’t.
By high school, I penned supernatural short stories and poetry about pain and anger. I jotted down words while locked in my room. The clatter of fingers on keys became a funnel for the noise in my mind and our home, a place to pin ideas while my father screamed.
When I arrived at the nursing facility, my mother complimented me on my boots. She grinned and called me Sandy. That’s my aunt’s name, my dad’s sister.
I dropped my mask momentarily. “It’s me, Sarah,” I told her.
She studied me, shook her head. “Oh, it is.” I wasn’t convinced anything had clicked.
I hugged her quickly, needing to make myself real to her but also worried I might transmit some COVID germ picked up at a rest stop. My hand reached for her hair. It looked foreign.
Her hair had always been a stubborn mass of curls. A stylist once bothered to count fourteen cowlicks on her head, a bob that normally points every which way: up, left, front, back, under, through. Ever practical, for years she kept it in short corkscrews. Except after cancer, the decade prior, when she didn’t lose her hair with chemo, she celebrated by letting it grow long and wild. To my children, she looked like a friendly witch. To me, the cloud of silver made her appear rapidly aged. Maybe the cancer did it. Maybe all the rest caught up with her.
Now, at the nursing home, it was in odd, straight stalks. An aide must have tried to tame it, which looked like a failed revolution up there. Her hair, like her memory, had gone flat.
I wheeled her to my father’s room. He took a half-second to recognize me in my face mask but quickly started demanding help moving them home.
My mother studied her lap, then finally interjected, “This is my husband.”
Dad guffawed. “She knows that, Lois! This is Sarah! Sarah! It’s Sarah.” He looked at me helplessly. “We have to get out of this place.”
I couldn’t argue.
I felt like I had no idea what I was doing coordinating their care from afar and was dogged by a sense that if all this had happened on a more natural timeline, I would manage better.
My mother had me at nearly 40. Is that your grandma? people asked me when I was a kid. It embarrassed us both, like she’d achieved a Biblical-level miracle having me at that age.
Now I was just past 40 myself. She had eclipsed 80, and my own kids were school-aged. A generation felt missing somewhere—the one who was supposed to teach me how to mother while helping my own parents as they faded.
Time twisted around inside me. I still didn’t know how to rescue my mother, I didn’t know how to rescue either of them.
Families often follow patterns, and although it was too soon, it was my turn to start enacting my mother’s roles. When her own mom had gotten too frail to live on her own, my mom had taken her in, giving her my childhood bedroom. I couldn’t do the same with my parents—I would not subject my children to formative years with my father in their space, his voice whipping lasting pathways into their minds.
But I also knew the current arrangement wasn’t working. I’d begun to buckle under the strain of my father’s deterioration and my mom’s mental drift. I didn’t know how to shield my children from what I was feeling.
I didn’t know how to look beyond each brutal moment.
My mother could. It might have been the key to her survival.
I didn’t know how to look beyond each brutal moment.My mother could. It might have been the key to her survival.
I remember a time when she was in the kitchen popping popcorn and forgot to put the top on the popper. I heard her shriek and laugh, and I ran to the door to see kernels launching like missiles in all directions. Popcorn was all over the floor, the counters, shooting toward the living room, filling the air with a seemingly endless bounty. It caught in our hair, bounded off her shoulders, and she pealed with giggles.
My father exploded, Lois, you could break a wet dream! (one of his favorite insults), but that time, Mom and I doubled over laughing at the sheer anarchy of corn pelting him too as he yelled over the mess.
I started trying to get my mom to move out back when I was in first or second grade. Sometimes she would threaten to leave, but he countered that he would track us down and set fire to wherever we went, with us inside. I was small, skittish, but fear motivated escape in me, while it rooted her in place.
When she wouldn’t leave, I decided to run away, but I was unsure of how to pack my cat into my suitcase. I couldn’t leave without her, the cat. Or my mother.
Each evening until I moved off for college, my father drunkenly slurred and screamed, chasing me around the house until I caged myself in my room and he pounded outside. I’d stayed there safe, until his attention refocused on my mother, then I’d run out and draw his anger toward me again. I was faster, could outrun him.
He had the longer-term benefit of blacking out, forgetting it all in the morning. When I was 21, with no one mentioning the irony, he got sober. He’d “blown up like a balloon,” Mom said. An early user of Dr. Google, she diagnosed him with kidney or liver failure and told him he had two choices: dry up or he would die. She detoxed him at home.
A couple of weeks into sobriety that would span the rest of his life, she called me at college and told me I could come home. He was “better.”
Walking into the house, it was the usual old fog, dark memories laced within dense cigarette smoke. He sat in the same, filthy-brown recliner, feet kicked up, sipping Pepsi in a glass with ice. The TV blared as it always had. I stepped timidly into the living room, feeling as though the floor could drop away any moment, spilling me into all the other times he sat perched in that chair, weighing what might throw him into a rage. Look at you two eating. Pig, he’d said to me, a hungry child. You’re trying to starve me to death, he constantly accused my mother, though she cooked for him daily. He just wouldn’t eat; his stomach had been saturated with booze.
That was before. The distant past, or at least two weeks prior to him quitting the drink. He smiled at me the first day I saw him sober, his dark eyes lighting up with the visit, then he turned back to the TV. Eventually, he drained his glass, and kicked down the footrest. That metallic clang, the slap of him bolting from the chair, clenched my stomach, my chest. I was habituated to run from the sound. He merely rushed off for more soda. I felt myself locked in fight or flight on the edge of the couch. Freeze, instead. Old terror doesn’t look like anything much. No one noticed.
Later, I’d check the fridge and see beer cans left over. I counted them with every visit, but they sat untouched. Eventually, he gave them to neighbors.
He broke every rule of AA, and fair enough, it had never helped him before. This time, he was always around temptation and ascribed to no higher power (unless you count my mother). He kept up his daily appearance at the bar and even sat on the same barstool, sipping ginger ale. She maintained her routine of working only to scrape by with whatever he didn’t spend gambling or on cigarettes, until she got him to quit smoking in their 60s.
We never talked about what a terror he’d been. I assumed it all washed away as ginger ale replaced beer and whiskey.
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We lived that sober reality for two decades, though the smallest perceived infraction could still make him snap.
But as he screamed at me in his scared, elderly state that I needed to help them both, I remembered all the years at once. His raised voice collapsed the distance between my girl’s body and my middle-aged one, bracing inside while my legs prepared to bolt.
I was starting to wonder what my mom had retained—and what was being lost, floating off like curls of smoke.
In my father’s nursing home room, his walker next to the bed and my mom gazing vaguely in her wheelchair, I panicked. I said something I would forget moments later.
It’s difficult to explain, but there’s a willful blank space in my memory. I must have suggested they should live closer to me. I must have said the words, but there’s a gap in conversation, a moment that vanished immediately in my stress and overwhelm. And then my dad was nodding, yes, my parents needed to move to a nice place near me, where I could help take care of them. A few incautious words evaporated all the years I’d distanced myself from my childhood.
We never talked about what a terror he’d been. I assumed it all washed away as ginger ale replaced beer and whiskey.
I wheeled my mom back into her room, and soon she was in bed. She pointed at the window and told me about the pond outside.
There was no pond; just darkness. She told me about the ducks that lived out there, and I wanted to cry but couldn’t because then she’d know something was wrong. It was my job to protect her. She smiled sweetly and told me how the man across the hall kept one of those ducks in his room, would you believe it?
“Right under that tree.” I looked through her open door to the Christmas tree in the room across the hall.
“I don’t see a duck. Are you sure?” I asked, hoping my doubt would cut through whatever gripped her.
“No, it’s right there.” She poked a finger out from under her blanket. Her eyes locked on something I couldn’t see.
“Hmmm.” I shrugged. She studied me—looking but not yet seeing her duck. “I love those boots, Sandy.”
Daggers in my heart.
It took weeks longer than my father wanted for me to find a suitable facility, get their Medicaid provider changed for the move to a new county. The minutiae of bureaucracy was beyond him. He only retained that I hadn’t served his needs quite yet.
My book wound up going to auction. The result wasn’t lavish, but a livable wage for a difficult book that investigated stories of abuse in evangelical church environments. It would be about brave women who spoke out against and fought the abuse.
I had meant to mostly write from the outside, as an observer, but over time, snippets of personal narrative spilled in. I tried to be antiseptic and analyze how my own childhood abuse differed from those who endured spiritual abuse; they believed their suffering had been God’s will after all. That stung in a unique way, I realized. Some people lived with pain that couldn’t be explained; others were given false reasons and told to accept it.
Tapping my own story into the draft pulled old memories out of me, put them elsewhere, on a page. They lived alongside my sources’ brutal recollections, footnoted to interviews, testimony, police and court records. There were far too many horrors I couldn’t write. Those just lived in me, reawakening whenever I heard his voice.
There were far too many horrors I couldn’t write. Those just lived in me, reawakening whenever I heard his voice.
Finally, the weekend came to pack my parents’ belongings into my SUV and my parents into my husband’s little electric car. We found them dressed and ready in wheelchairs.
“Are you excited?” I asked my mom.
“Sure,” she said. She did seem genuinely happy, ready for an adventure, or maybe just glad to be leaving the room. I had picked that place during an emergency—surely the next round would go better. My husband was puttering around shoving a few last items into the cars. I absently grabbed a tiny, neon green comb from the sink and started running it through my mother’s silver hair. It was clean. Whatever one aide had used to flatten her hair, another had cleared to return it to its original state.
My hands moved absently, experienced. We were at a stage where I spent plenty of time dissecting my own daughter’s tangles. If I didn’t rake through it myself about once a week, she’d clump a knot that quickly turned into a dreadlock that I’d have to pull apart hair by hair. I knew I could just cut the knots out, make her learn a hard lesson about self-care. But she loved her long hair; I loved how it turned back into rippling silk.
I ran the wide-toothed end of the plastic comb through my mom’s curls one at a time, lightly, giving each a gentle run. My own waves would never tolerate this, would rapidly turn to frizz. Hers snapped back to coils just as they always had.
Sarah Stankorb is the author of the national best-seller Disobedient Women (Worthy Books/Hachette). The award-winning, Ohio-based writer is a fan of heart-felt truth telling. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, O Magazine, Marie Claire, Vogue, Longreads, Glamour, Slate, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Newsweek, and Salon.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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