Mom quit smoking on a Tuesday in March of 1996. Nobody knew it at the time. It was about two a.m., and all we knew for sure was that she’d quit breathing.
The doctors didn’t expect her to live through the night, and my family and I said our goodbyes. But I don’t think that Mom was ever good at quitting anything. By the next morning she was breathing again.
“They call it ‘sudden cardiac death syndrome’. Can you believe it?” she said to me. I knew this already. She wasn’t so much conveying information as expressing how she felt about the name. “Why do they call it a syndrome when it just means that my heart stopped beating?” We had this conversation ten years after the night she quit smoking. I was visiting from Indiana, where I had moved to go to graduate school. “Syndrome just doesn’t seem like the right word,” she said. I had to agree. “Syndrome” involves a group of symptoms, not just one event—it’s a pattern, something that takes its time to effect change or cause damage. What happened to her was sudden and abrupt: part of her heart died.
The lack of blood flow to her brain was the real problem, though. Her brain was severely damaged. She has lost memory and manual dexterity, she gets anxious more, and her personality has altered. The night we discussed terminology she seemed more like herself than she had in ten years. I was surprised, as was everyone else, by the improvement in the recent months. I’d been home at Christmas, just four months prior, and she hadn’t been this coherent.
§
When it happened, I was eighteen—a monumental age in many lives, but for me it was in some ways the equivalent of being thirteen. I had read that the books a boy reads at thirteen are the books that shape his whole life. But looking back now, for me it was the books I read during that year, my first year in college, that defined much of who I have become. I discovered Harlan Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O’Connor, and Homer’s Odyssey. It was also the age at which I decided to try my hand at writing. I had been toying with the prospect for a few months, and when I returned to school from spring break I began writing in earnest. It was a decision long in coming.
On that Tuesday when it happened, during spring break, I had been out with some high school friends. I got to my parents’ house late that night, and as I was changing for bed I heard a desperate and horrific gasp. Dad called for help, and my sister and I ran into their bedroom. Mom wasn’t breathing. Her body was rigid, unnaturally so. Her eyes were open, but when I looked into them I couldn’t see her. It was like she was already dead. Still, she wasn’t a good quitter, and so she gasped for air and for life. Soon paramedics came and took her to the hospital.
In the coming days, as she improved, my family and I struggled with how to proceed. She had survived, but her brain had suffocated for too long. She was never going to be the same, and neither were we. My dad didn’t leave the hospital much, but he made my sister and me continue on with our lives. I went back to school when spring break ended, only to come home the following weekend. That was when the full force of the changes in her hit me. With five days of perspective, I could see them clearly. That was the weekend of my nineteenth birthday. My family wanted to have a little celebration, which I would have rather avoided, but we all needed something to celebrate. So with aunts, uncles, and cousins, we sat in the hospital room and ate cake.
When I arrived for the party, Mom didn’t understand. How could I be nineteen, she asked, when she was in the hospital to give birth to me?
I had signed up to spend the summer studying in China, but felt the need to cancel the trip. I was a kid from a small town in southeastern Michigan who had only been on a plane for the first time a few months before. When I had gone to college, I had done so with the belief that I wasn’t ever going to move back in with my parents, not really. But the pattern of my life had been disrupted. I was trying to found my independence, and whatever foundation I had been constructing had crumbled. Mom was still in the hospital when the semester ended, and I just wanted to stay at home and help take care of things. But Dad wouldn’t hear of that. He insisted that I go to China, and when the time came he drove me the first leg of the trip.
Before I left, I visited Mom at the rehabilitation center. I hadn’t been able to come for a couple of weeks, and she was shocked to see me. I could see her note pad in front of her, which had details of my life written on it—where I went to school, how old I was, my upcoming trip. She had known I was coming, but she was confused. “Aren’t you going away?” she said. “To China or something.”
“Yeah, ma. Study abroad.”
“Oh, I thought you were working for the government. Aren’t you a spy? Or something? Isn’t that why you’re going?”
Going on that trip was, of course, the best thing for me. I really couldn’t have done much at home, but I felt like I was taking the easy way out of dealing with the situation. I tried to spend the trip alone, reading and writing in my dorm room. However, the nature of the trip and the people on it wouldn’t let me brood forever. It’s impossible to be distracted by thoughts of home while walking along the Great Wall or staring at the huge portrait of Mao in Tiananmen Square. By the time I returned home I could find the pattern of my life again, all because Dad hadn’t let me quit.
Mom was out of the hospital by the time I got back, but she still needed therapy for both her mind and her body. On many days I drove her there, in her car, and on the way we’d talk. Mostly she asked questions about me, the same questions day after day, and I tried my best to answer them. She no longer thought I was a spy, but she couldn’t remember much, past or present. I tried to discuss things beyond myself, find out how she was doing, but she wasn’t really capable of discussing anything. I began to notice that her nerves were shot. She became terribly frightened by the traffic: Any time a car passed she would suck in her breath and brace herself against the door. The drive to the rehabilitation center took an hour away.
On some days, however, her demeanor was more like the mother I had known. Not exactly like her, but closer. A decade later, it is difficult for me to describe the mother I had known as a child and an adolescent. I’ve grown up. Though I have often heard that offspring are always children to their parents, to the offspring the relationship can change dramatically. Though parents may never quit fulfilling the needs of their children (“I’m just being a mom,” is a phrase I often hear when she’s concerned or worried about me), the needs in question are not the same for a grown child. She recognized this long before I did, of course. She had always been intelligent, but it went beyond that. My sister commented once that she was incapable of small talk. She only dealt in things that mattered to people. I was only just beginning to understand this at eighteen. She desired only deep and complex communication and relationships. She wouldn’t let people leave thoughts unfinished or tasks undone. So I can’t help but see some irony in her career as a substance abuse counselor. She helped people quit for a living.
But there was more to her. She read voraciously, and to this I attribute much of my own love of words. When she did so, she often tuned out the world, looking for the same complexity in books that she saw in the rest of the world. However, she looked for it in people most frequently. My sister and I had long ago noticed that our friends thought we had a normal mother, by which we decided they meant that she seemed interested in their lives beyond the concern of a parent to know with whom her children are spending time. She was interested in everything.
Unfortunately, in the years after she gave up smoking, she didn’t read at all. She couldn’t drive or cook or work, either, but not being able to read was the harshest consequence of sudden cardiac death syndrome—at least in my eyes. As the years went by, she tried to recover this part of her life, with some success. When I come home, I can always gauge how well she’s doing by whether or not she’s reading. This year, I believe she’s made it through more books than I have.
She still has her good days and her bad days; but the bad days aren’t as bad as they used to be, and they come less frequently. We’ve had long and involved discussions, especially about religion, literature, and Native America, subjects she was always interested in. She’s not the same as she was once, nor will she ever be, but she’s getting better.
§
Kurt Vonnegut pointed out that it’s often the job of boys to live out the unfulfilled dreams of their mothers. I decided I wanted to be a writer during the winter of my freshman year of college—in January of 1996. I was eighteen, without a major, and under no pressure whatsoever to find a direction for my life. Writing was, at the time, the one thing in my life I had never quit doing. Even before I learned how, I had begun incorporating a curious narrative quality to playing with my toys: I described their actions as I had heard descriptions in books, going so far as to include dialogue attribution (Mom still laughs when she talks about this). Later, I wrote stories about these toys. When teachers made me keep journals, I’d try to write short stories in them instead of more traditional entries. But somehow, until that year, it had never occurred to me to write for a living. I had wanted to play baseball, which gave way to wanting to be a scientist, then an engineer, then a philosopher; but writing was never on the list. I went home for winter break and told my parents that I was considering writing as a career. They seemed pleased, especially Mom.
She’d gotten her bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University in Detroit, in English literature. We talked about writing, about the great writers, and about why in the world anybody would want to take it up as a career. She had wanted to, she told me, when she was younger. I could remember her typing away at her electric typewriter. As a child, I had thought it too loud, and I’m sure I complained. I reminded her that she had other obligations. Before long, our family needed another income, and she wrote much less. But she hadn’t forgotten about it. When I was eighteen, she told me that she had always wished someone would give her enough money to live on for one year so she could see if she had what it took to be a writer. A few years prior, someone had done just that. But the offer came when she was a bit older, and she turned it down. “What I realized,” she told me, “was that I really wasn’t a writer. I was a reader.” I could tell, even then, that the realization might have prompted her to turn down the offer, but it hadn’t killed the dream in her. She had accepted her limitation and moved on. She’d come to know herself more fully, which included knowing that she wasn’t a writer.
Did she quit trying to be a writer? I don’t think so. I am still convinced that the only thing she ever quit—at least during my lifetime—was smoking. And that wasn’t even her decision. She’d tried a few times when I was young, but it never worked. Smoking was a major factor in her syndrome, though there’s a history in her family of heart troubles. Her syndrome had been a long time coming, and in truth it was only the final manifestation that had been abrupt and shocking: the pattern finally become visible. So Dad, taking care of her in a whole new way, made the decision for her. To continue living, she would cease smoking. Still, she hasn’t always been good at it. I have heard her, in a moment of human weakness, confess that she wanted a cigarette. To my knowledge, though, not one has touched her lips since 1996. That sounds like quitting to me.
But the end of her writing career wasn’t the end of her writing. She had written as a way to express her love of books and her interest in the world. None of that ended, and so neither did the writing itself. Many of my childhood memories are of narrating stories as I played in my room, with the sound of her electric typewriter coming from the kitchen. I can still hear it hum sometimes.
§
Daniel Peretti is a folklorist living with his wife in Bloomington, Indiana.
