A History of Scars

* * *

When I am thirty-three and my sister forty-three, we have a long phone conversation, nearly six hours long, in which we discuss our complicated family history. Our mother has just died. I’ve just been diagnosed with a serious mental illness, one with roots in both genetics and environment.

My oldest sister admits to me, about having been expected, implicitly, by my parents, to pass on lessons they’d passed on to her, to have a hand in taking care of me and my middle sister, “I resented it.”

I’ve always sensed this resentment from her, regardless, don’t need her to admit it to me. It comes across in the little things—the way she’s kept her social circles hidden from view, the way other transplanted siblings living in the city share apartments or live in the same building, where she has always made clear she wants her geographical distance from us, that she values her independence above all.

Her resentment of this expectation is tied to my sadness over how little of a relationship we had, for most of my formative years. I, too, have my resentments—mainly about the times when I needed her help, and she wasn’t there to provide it.

My family, never the happiest, self-destructed in my oldest sister’s absence, as my mother grew sick, as my father departed for South Korea, as my middle sister descended into her own undiagnosed condition.

“I’m sorry for the times I was mean,” my oldest sister tells me, and then, as an afterthought, “and that I didn’t listen.”

But it’s this, the failure to listen, that has bothered me more than the unkind comments accrued over the years, whose sting I still recall.

Honest conversations about uncomfortable topics have never gone well with my sister. She similarly didn’t believe me about my father’s violence when I was growing up, until, in my midtwenties, I had emotional backup in the form of my then partner, who stood with me in the yellowing linoleum of the kitchen of my childhood home, as the three of us stood together there, all of us visiting to take care of my mother. She hadn’t believed me about my middle sister’s abusive behavior, until she witnessed me confronting my middle sister about it after I’d moved to the city for college, when my middle sister didn’t deny anything, but instead apologized.

The denial that always stung the most, though, was in relation to my mother. It caused me to doubt my own reality. It had consequences in terms of responsibility; how could responsibility be divvied up for problems unacknowledged?

About my mother’s illness, my oldest sister tells me, “I didn’t want to believe that was true about someone I loved.”

By the time she told me this, after my mother’s death, I’d already deduced this logic on my own—that all the times my sister had refused to listen to me had originated from this reflex, both self-protective and protective of my mother.

* * *

In the years prior to my mother’s diagnosis, my wisdom teeth were impacted. They needed to be broken into tiny pieces and vacuumed out.

You’re going to need someone to drive you home. Someone responsible, said the surgeon. This, due to the general anesthesia I would undergo.

The consent form language of allergic shock, stroke, heart attack, and other risks didn’t worry me. This mention of a responsible adult did.

Can I take a cab home? I asked.

But he was quite firm.

And so the day of the appointment, I drove to the doctor’s office with my mother in tow. She was tasked with taking me home.

I had returned to Colorado only for dental work. My mother had wanted me to stay, to take care of her, rather than attending NYU. I wanted nothing more than to leave my childhood home. Everyone else had left, after all—my father, my older sisters. It was my turn to go.

I lay reclined on the chair, dentists and nurses and other personnel clustered around me. One held a mask to my face and counted backward from ten. Probably my last thought, while drifting away, was, Colorado is so white.

* * *

I woke, groggy and confused, and saw the door of my mother’s tan minivan moving closer to my face. I didn’t know how I’d gotten there. Then I realized I was sitting in a wheelchair, and one of those white faces—a dental assistant, perhaps—was pushing me through the parking lot.

The last thing I heard, before I was left alone with my mother, was the assistant’s instructions: Don’t talk. Keep your mouth closed. Clamp down on the gauze pads so your gums don’t bleed excessively. Otherwise you might knock blood clots loose, and you’ll end up with dry sockets. Take painkillers.

Once we were alone in the car, my mother turned to me in the passenger seat and asked, Where are we going?

Through thick layers of gauze, I warbled, not… suppose to talk! Hrme! Then my mother drove off, and I passed out. Still fuzzy from the procedure, I fell back and forth between drugged sleep and wakefulness. Each time I woke, I caught a glimpse of the passing streets and trees and buildings. I wondered why we weren’t closer to home, but then I faded out again.

Until those persistent and familiar notes—fear, panic, and despair—in my mother’s voice awakened me.

Where are we? Laura, where are we?

It’s like a punch line of a joke, isn’t it? The Alzheimer’s jokes people still insist on telling me, even after they know my mother is dying.

But it isn’t funny when you’ve just had surgery. When your mother hasn’t yet been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s (and still won’t be, for quite some time). When all you want to do is lie in bed with some codeine, feeling itchy but pleasantly drowsy, and your mother, tasked with returning you home, has absolutely no idea where you are.