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The title of Lynne Tillman's account of the final 11 years of her mother's life welds mother and care into a new word, heavier than the sum of its parts, suggesting the effort and anguish a parent's dying can bring to a child. Mothercare: The burden falls differently on those of us whose relationships with our mothers were complicated by abuse, betrayal, disappointment, or, in the case of Tillman, an early antipathy.
“From the age of six,” Tillman reflects, “I had disliked my mother,” a woman her adult self would fault for an “unflappable narcissism” (p. 70) that left her “incapable of anything but self-love” (p. 83). So it is that at the end of her mother's life, when her physical frailty demanded an equally physical, sometimes visceral, intimacy the author had avoided for decades, Tillman determined that her mother's care would have to be provided by someone other than herself.
“I wanted Mother to be handled by others, chores and things to be done by others” (p. 43). Others. The word lands as the necessary antiphon to Mother, the formal term Tillman always chooses over one of endearment. After the death of Tillman's father, her mother moved from Florida, where she had never wanted to live, back to Manhattan, where she enjoyed “seven and a half years as an independent character” (p. 8), before suffering symptoms initially misidentified as those of Alzheimer's. But her peculiar behavior, frequent urination, and sudden memory loss were in fact the result of NPH—or normal pressure hydrocephalus. Suddenly, Tillman and her two sisters, one of whom lived in another state, had a crisis to manage.
What the reader experiences of the author's mother's physical decline is, of course, mediated through Tillman, who guides us through the grisly plumbing required to relieve the pressure on
her mother's brain: a shunt and catheter that drained excess cerebrospinal fluid into her esophagus. This worked temporarily but backed up twice and ultimately needed to be rerouted into her aor