The Day the Music Stopped

I’m the kind of girl who goes around saying sorry all the time when there’s nothing to apologize for.  I find that those who NEVER apologize – whether they’re at fault or not – get the farthest ahead.  

“Balls,” people call them.  I never had those.  As time passes and I experience more in this unpredictable thing called life, I find that at the very least, I do have a very strong vagina.  Or pelvic floor, if the former bothers you.  I’d like to think I inherited this trait from my mother.

My mom had a lot of late night jam parties in our Brooklyn apartment. All her friends were musicians. There was a clarinetist, a violinist, a saxophonist, and my mother at the baby grand.  Jazz and klezmer tinged with classical blasted out our windows. When called for, my mom would also do the singing – unless her cantor friend was there, in which case there’d be a mini opera shaking the walls.  She was a single parent in her mid twenties, after all, and neither she nor any of her friends had much money – so there was little choice in the matter of self-entertainment.  

I recall getting out of bed one night at around midnight in the long Russian-looking white cotton flower-embroidered nightgown I hated, rubbing my eyes at the light coming out of the living room, peering in to see if they were wrapping up. Of course, not even close, so I’d tip-toe to my mom’s side and ask her when she’ll be done.

“Another 20 minutes, I promise!” she’d say.

I wished she’d play the Chopin piece I loved so much. I couldn’t stand the noise. Neither could our neighbors; those who lived directly underneath us took a hammer to our door once and made a dent in the metal.  They had also called the cops. When they showed up, she played My Funny Valentine and did an encore, and the police made us promise to call them if the neighbors ever bother us again – and maybe play a little something for them, too.

Lucky for us she was a hard worker.  She’d graduated from the Lithuanian Conservatory of Music. When we first got to the states, she went on to work for Julliard and the New York City Ballet as an accompanist during rehearsals.  She would juggle two, sometimes three jobs at once.  When I was around four she got a call from Mikhail Baryshnikov who had his own dance company, and he wanted my mother to tour with them.  She traveled with them and played for long stretches of time.  At the ripe old age of 23, she developed severe arthritis and could no longer play the piano to make a living.  So she went to secretarial school, learned to type as gracefully as she played the piano when the arthritis wasn’t acting up, and got a job in two medical offices as an administrative assistant.

Besides being a professional musician, she happened to be a good businesswoman to boot, helping turn her boss’s modest medical practice into a busy, well-known one.  Mom would always be herself – a large presence with a sing-song voice and big blue eyes.  It wasn’t long before she was promoted from secretary to office manager.  Nights, she was a voice coach. I’d easily do my homework to the sound of live opera.  It was what seemed to me at the time a normal upbringing.  Weren’t all homes filled with this beautiful chaos? 

As time went, I of course I realized that no, they weren’t. None of my friends had music in their homes as I did.  No one had to practice the piano as I did. So it was no wonder that I quit as soon as I discovered boys at 12 – and my mom let me.  She let me! Given my extreme love of the piano, and music in general, this turned out to be a huge regret in my life.

But it was not all laughter all the time.  I was an even split between my mother and father in terms of personality and looks.  I had my mother’s explosive nature and my father’s diffidence and repression.  Essentially, I was a time bomb.  Music and love of beauty brought my mother and me together; it was that same passion that heated our arguments.  Our similarities caused us to butt heads, and for whatever reasons my parents didn’t get along that resulted in divorce, was the same reason our butting heads turned into raging battles.  Both of us were impatient, impassioned drama queens.  Under the same roof. With no mediator. 

My mother had a couple of boyfriends – a serious one from when I was about eight until I was 11, and then no one for many years after that.  When I was a teenager my mother battled serious depression.  I would come home from school and find her in bed, crying, with several bottles of medication on her bed stand – heart palpitation meds, anti-anxiety pills, valerian root and anti-depressants. She was in her mid thirties, lonely and worried she’d be left alone.  My going off to college soon wouldn’t help matters.  

I learned to cook during those years.  Pasta wasn’t exactly hard to make.  I’d make my own sandwiches for school lunch, mostly peanut butter and jelly on thick, brown Ukrainian bread.  There weren’t many rules to follow, no specific curfew.  As long as I’d call home once, assuming she was home herself, she was okay.  But I didn’t go out much.  She, on the other hand, did.  “Why haven’t you called” was thrown around a lot – by me where she was concerned.  Needless to say, there was a lot of role reversal.  Sex talks were more for fun conversation rather than to inform.  She was 19 when she had me. When she was 35, I was 16, and we were girlfriends.  We’d go shopping together.  I’d beg her for a younger sibling and vowed I’d take care of him/her. I was sick of being by myself.

Valerian root was a staple in our household.  My first memories of it was when I had just started experiencing what I now know as panic attacks.  Back then we referred to my episodes as “being nervous.”  My mom would ask, “Are you nervous today? Here’s half a pill.  You’ll be fine, it runs in our family.  You’re just a very nervous, sensitive person.”  It tasted like I’d been eating mown grass with some dirt mixed in, and if I took it before bed I’d have that aftertaste in my mouth until morning.  I know it didn’t do much to calm me; my head was still my head, and no herbal crap was going to cut it.  Everything scared me – my teachers, the irrational fear of not doing well in school, and just the fear of the unknown future.  

My life is divided into part 1 and part 2, separated by May 11, 2003, the day my mother had a massive stroke. 

My elder son David was six weeks old and I'd just had my six-week post labor checkup two days prior. I was 24, and it was my first Mother's Day as a mommy.  I woke up that morning feeling better than I've felt in weeks, like my ass was special because I did it – I pushed that kid out, I was no longer bloated, my breasts no longer hurt, and I was an expert at changing a diaper and burping my – whoa – kid. 

My mom called several times the day before to make sure we were home because she had gifts for me and David (any excuse to give him something).  Since my son was born, she morphed from a young, what-do-I-know-about-babies, it's-all-about-me crybaby, to a full-fledged grandma. She’d come over to my house in the snow by bus several times a week to feed the baby and cook and clean up, just so I could rest.  I was planning on a trip to the city - this time instead of just the two of us, we'd take the baby.

A trip that would never happen.

I awoke on Mother’s Day and quickly descended the stairs. The smile on my face disappeared when it was countered by my husband’s silent frown.  My dad, who was visiting us from Israel, looked as though he was about to vomit.  I was NOT appreciating the gloom and doom moods on this, my first mama’s day.  It was supposed to be all about moi.  Hello.  And then Dad blurted very quietly that Mom's sick.  Very sick. In the hospital sick.  Slipped into a coma.  15% chance of coming out of it alive.

We piled into the car.  Instinctively I turned on a soundtrack my mom gave me the day before called Notre Dame de Paris.  There had to be a theme song to the movie I now found myself in – because it wasn’t real, 44 year olds don’t have strokes – and I was glad it was in French.  I neither understood the situation I found myself walking into, nor the words in the downer of a song that was now blasting in the car.

It was a shitty city hospital – the closest one to where she was at the time of the stroke. I thought, it must be some sort of mistake. It’s probably just a broken arm or a fractured toe.  I walked into the ICU where she was laying in critical condition, unresponsive, surrounded by machinery.  The 12-year-old they decided to make a doctor did nothing.  It was Mother’s Day after all – why have a full staff at a hospital on a holiday.

A week later we had her transferred to a top rehab facility.  I spent several days in bed with massive cramps from the stress.  I hardly saw my son, spending the rest of my disability leave at the hospital.  Once my mom was able to sit up and hold my hand, I bought a nail file and filed down her nails.  It was difficult uncurling her stroke-impacted fingers, but we managed. There were times she’d punch me in the stomach out of frustration due to her impaired speech, her inability to express herself.  It shocked me and frankly, it pissed me off. It just did.

I had to deliver the news to her that she needed heart surgery.  I sat next to her on her adjustable hospital bed as the doctor gave her the particulars of the surgery. I wasn’t sure how much of this information she’d understood, just how much of her brain was impacted by this mess.  When the doctor left the room I asked her if she was okay, and if she understood what was supposed to happen next.  She shook her head yes (no was a nod; everything was in reverse for her).  Then she cried, and I asked her if she was scared – another shake of the head, a yes.  I told her it's a "simple" procedure and she'll be fine.  And then in my head I cursed my aunt, her sister, and my stepfather for leaving this for me to deal with alone.

It was the worst day of my life, worse than when I received news of my own cancer.  I lost 15 pounds that month.  I never learned how to enjoy my son and his milestones.  I vaguely remember the first year of his little life. The parallels between him and my mother were uncanny.  He was on formula; she was being fed Ensure through a tube in her stomach.  He started solids; so did she. He started sitting up properly without assistance; so did she. He began to walk, and so did she.  I’d change him and feed him in the morning, only to go to the hospital to help change and feed her.  Eventually, my little man grew up.  Yet my mother never regained use of her arm or walk without assistance.

The day my mom had her stroke was the day I began to mourn her.  To me, the mother I knew pre-stroke was gone.  The feeling of loss I felt was how I imagined I would feel had she never recovered and died.  I was ashamed to feel this way.  I saw her once a week once she was home, but I didn’t want to see her.  She would come over my house and remind me that she was still here, alive, but in my mind, it wasn’t the same person I knew – only a shadow of a memory I called mom.  Either way, she was taken away from me.  I tried to convince myself that it was still the same woman, that it was terrible of me to think of her as anything less. There were moments I’d wish she were taken; it would have justified my mourning, my depression, my loss.  Alive, she was a constant reminder of the cruelty of life – how someone so full of soul and talent got robbed of use of her hand and could no longer play the piano, drive a car, speak normally, or work, ever again; how one of the most independent people I knew became dependent on someone else to go to the bathroom, to be spoken for, to be fed, and at such a young age.  I was robbed of my best friend, of my daughter, in a sense, since I was always keeping tabs on her, of David’s grandma who was folding his little clothes and feeding him so I could rest.  She was taken, no matter how many times a day she calls, or tries to talk to me in her broken speech, or comes over to my home.  She disappeared.  I would no longer hear her play my favorite Chopin piece on the piano.  She would no longer call the shots or grab the mike at parties to sing her Yiddish songs.  All became silent.

Is that how my children will react if and when my disease overtakes me and I begin to look and behave less than my self? When I become a shadow of the person I once was, will they too divorce the old version of mom in their minds?  How will they remember me? Will they too begin to mourn me before I am gone? Somewhere in a pocket of my subconscious is a note that reads “an eye for an eye.” The thought haunts me. What’s worse is that I’m not entirely certain that I don’t wish it on myself, that I deserve to be alone in my illness because in essence, I’d left her.

Almost nine years have passed since her stroke.  My mom walks with a pronounced limp and her speech is still impaired. She hasn’t been able to play the piano since.

HOWEVER. Music is still an enormous part of her life. She goes to jazz bars and concerts. She walks up to three hours a day. She’s lost over 70 pounds through sheer determination and willpower. She celebrates her birthday in restaurants and invites all of her family and friends – every year. She seems to cut through any bitterness and resentment about her disease with a love for life and a strong desire to overcome her obstacles.

This is a mother I have only recently come to know.  I’m proud to be her daughter.  I have stopped mourning the pre-stroke her.  Instead, I have come to realize what an extraordinary woman she is.

Not too long ago, I had to have part of my liver removed as a result of metastatic breast cancer.  I was recovering in the hospital when my father came to visit me.  Nurses were running in and out of my room, changing my medication and drawing my blood.  My dad took a long look at me and asked, “Where does your strength come from?  It can’t possibly be from me. It must be from your mom. Yeah, definitely from your mom.” 

I’d like to think so. And I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my incredible mother for my very strong vagina.


Dedicated to my mom - of course.

Copyright 2011  Liya Khenkin