LOVE IS LOVE AT THE NARRATIVE ARC | WRITING COMPETITION

My Mother Was Fighting a Battle I Couldn’t Understand

How “Here, There, and Everywhere” became a different kind of love song

The three of us sat in the corner booth at the Greek diner down the block from our house. In an effort to cheer her up, I pushed a milkshake and plate of fries toward my mom. She just smiled at my dad and me with tears in her eyes.

My mother had barely eaten in days. Her lovely porcelain face now looked gray and pale.

At 12, I was old enough to recognize that my mother was suffering. But I had no idea about the depths of pain she was feeling inside.

At that age I was just starting to figure out how to love myself. I wasn’t quite ready to understand how painful it can be to love someone else fiercely and not be able to stop their suffering.

Earlier that day, you see, my mother had been the one to drop her beloved father off at the dementia ward of a nursing home. He had cried and begged her not to leave him there, like a toddler crying for his mom at day care drop-off.

My mother had to turn her back on her father and leave him in the hands of strangers. He’d looked so small, she told us over that plate of fries at the diner.

Her handsome dad, the one who stood tall and proud in the back of all of her childhood photos like a 1940s movie star, had been pushed away from her wailing in a wheel chair.

My grandfather’s decline had begun long before that day. His own wife had selflessly cared for him for years, far before letting on to my mother and her siblings how bad things had become for them.

My fearless grandmother had silently endured two hips that became so arthritic you could hear her bones crunch against themselves as she walked.

She hadn’t wanted to worry us about it, trying not to upset the delicate balance of care in her household. But when the orthopedist saw how deteriorated her hip joints had become, he was amazed she was still able to stand upright.

So with my grandmother recovering from two hip replacements and the rest of her siblings spread across the country, my mother was tasked with dropping her father off at the nursing home. She was the eldest daughter, the one who had stayed close to home. She was the only one of her siblings who survived her teenage years without a rebellious phase or a late-night call for her dad to bail her out of jail.

She was the crowd favorite, the clear choice for enduring the pain of watching a grown man you revere become a child before your eyes.

But the day she dropped him off was only the beginning. During the two years between the day we went to the diner and the day my grandfather died, 81 pounds and a shell of his former self, my mother barely skipped a day of showing up for her dad.

Our family’s days during that time became so routine that I hardly recognized my mother’s sacrifice.

She’d drop me off at school, work a full day as a high school teacher, drop me at home, drive to the nursing home, and then return in time to cook dinner for my father and me. She’d stay up late at the kitchen table grading papers long after I went to bed.

I caught glimpses of what those hours in the nursing home looked like, visiting my grandfather on holidays or weekends. But my mother mostly shielded me from the gruesome bits.

I only learned years later what those hours she spent there each day looked like for my mother.

Though my grandfather’s care was top-notch, no nursing home can provide the kind of 1:1 support that a loving daughter can. My mother spoon-fed her father at dinner, read out loud to him, and changed his diapers when the nurses were busy with other patients. When his disease progressed so much that he stopped eating, she sat next to him and held his hand.

Not every moment during those two years was painful. There were lighter moments, ones we still chuckle about as a family.

At the beginning, my grandfather would raise his hand each dinner and call the server over like a waitress in a bar.

“I’ll have a vodka tonic with lemon,” he’d say each evening, sometimes even trying to tip them.

During another tender and more lucid moment, my mother wheeled him over to the window to see a fresh snowfall.

“Look at the snow, Dad!” My mother exclaimed, in the same voice she’d used with me as a child.

“You think I haven’t seen snow before? I’m 78 years old!” he replied playfully.

But those lighter moments didn’t hide the fact that those two years were excruciating for my mother.

And I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t make life any easier for her either. During most of that time, I showed my mother far less love than she deserved.

I was suffering my way through middle school, eating my lunch in the bathroom each day to avoid choosing where to sit in the cafeteria. My best friend was pulling away from me. Other girls were kissing boys in the parking lot after school, but I was more interested in decorating my wall with pictures of the humpback whale I’d “adopted” through a nature conservation group.

I wanted space and independence, and I pulled away from my mother.

We often barely spoke on those drives between our home and school. I surely didn’t acknowledge her enough for spreading herself so thin that she was barely eating or sleeping.

I could barely comprehend the idea that she was spoon-feeding her own father and then rushing home to make me lasagna.

Except there is one moment I will always remember when it all finally hit me.

We were driving early one winter morning to school, toward the end of my grandfather’s two-year decline in the nursing home. We were waiting in silence at a stoplight at the train tracks that cross through my town.

The Beatles’ Here, There, and Everywhere came on the radio.

I’d discovered the Beatles earlier that year, and I adored the tenderness of this song. But it had always seemed to be a romantic love song to me, the words of a man expressing his undying love to a woman he couldn’t bear to be apart from.

And yet that cold morning, stopped in our car at the train tracks, I heard it differently.

Here Making each day of the year Changing my life with a wave of her hand Nobody can deny that there’s something there

For the first time, I heard my grandfather’s voice in this sweet song. I heard his declaration of love for his eldest daughter, a daughter who never left his side.

I heard him expressing how much he needed her, even though he barely recognized who she was.

I want her everywhere And if she’s beside me I know I need never care But to love her is to need her

Everywhere Knowing that love is to share Each one believing that love never dies Watching her eyes, and hoping I’m always there

I remember sitting in that car and fighting back tears for my mother. They were tears of built-up guilt for how coldly I’d treated her, and tears of admiration for her strength. They were tears of grief for the grandfather I’d lost.

It was a moment when I started to comprehend the real dimensions of love.

Love was slowly becoming far more complicated than the love stories I’d seen in movies, or the teenage relationships I’d started to fantasize about with boys my age.

Love was pain, and love was sacrifice. Love was walking away as your father cried out your name. Love was caring for a spouse during his decline while your hip bones raged with pain. Love was being needed by a proud dad who had cared for you so tenderly for most of your life.

Love was doing it again and again, even after exhaustion had long taken over.

For the past 26 years, Here, There, and Everywhere has been a different kind of love song to me.

Every time I hear it, I think of my mother’s devotional love for her father, and her sadness in that corner booth at the diner.

I know that my time to show a love of devotion to my own parents is fast approaching too. And I can only hope to express it in as pure a form as my mother modeled for me with her own father.

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This story was in response to the Valentine Love Is Love Writing Competition from The Narrative Arc. Here are some other sweet submissions I enjoyed from Suzanne B. and to Allie G: