A Hope for Emily

“This is the last thing you need.” I can’t bear it, that my mother is thinking of me at a time like this, when her life has just been unbearably limited. “Parkinson’s,” I say, trying to remember what I know about it. “But you don’t have tremors…?” I look at her hand as if I expect it to shake.

“I do sometimes, and that’s only one symptom. The others…” She sighs and shrugs. Lack of balance, slowed movement. I didn’t even realize it at first. I just wondered why everything was taking such a long time.” She gives me a wry smile. “But then my writing was affected, and my speech.”

“Your speech…” Why have I not noticed?

“It takes more concentration,” my mother says. “I’ve been trying to hide it from you, Rachel, so don’t beat yourself up for not seeing the signs.”

“How long have you known?”

“I started having tests back in April. The diagnosis came a few weeks ago.”

I scan her face, flinching inwardly at the sorrow in her eyes. Is it my imagination, or does she look older now than she did even a few minutes ago? Her hair seems whiter, the wrinkles on her face carved deeper. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear any of it.

“What does it mean?” I ask, even though I don’t want to. “People can… they can live with Parkinson’s for a long time.”

“Yes, they can. With the right medication, symptoms can be lessened or delayed. People have lived with Parkinson’s for decades.” Something in me relaxes a little at that, even though I still feel scared. It’s not going to be like it has been with Emily. “But it is a degenerative condition,” my mother informs me gently. “It only gets worse.” Which is like Emily. I can’t stand the thought of the two most important people in my life both inexorably declining.

“Still,” I say. “You could be okay for years.”

“Yes.” There is a note in my mom’s voice that I recognise; she is shielding me. She’s done it often, especially since Emily got sick.

“What is it?” I ask. “What are you not telling me, Mom?”

She shakes her head as she takes a sip of tea. “It’s just, already I don’t feel like myself. I’ve lost something. That’s why I went to the doctor in the first place.”

“But…” How could I have missed this? How could I have been so blind? “You’ve seemed like yourself to me.” And yet, even as I say the words, I think… has she? The rumpled hair a few weeks ago… it seemed like nothing at the time, yet other memories float through my mind, snatches of conversations, moments in time.

When I stopped by and my mother had forgotten that I was coming. The shopping list she’d left on the counter, with the writing looking more like a child’s than my mother’s usual copperplate script. The teapot she’d asked me to carry, when she was the one who always brought it to the table.

And I’m dismissed it all, I hadn’t even let it register, because I was hiding too. I was protecting myself, knowing I couldn’t cope with the information, the possibility that something else was wrong. Yet here we are, and there is no going back. There never is.

“So what happens now?” I make myself ask. “You go on medication that helps…”. If not for Emily, then for this. For my mother.

“Yes, there are some things,” my mother agrees. “Still no cure, though.”

No. No cure. I am silent, as realization filters through me. My mother is going to go through the same experience Emily already has, albeit in a different way. She is going to lose her faculties. Maybe not for years, decades even, but eventually she is going to become entirely dependent on other people, on me. She is going to decline and die.

“I’ve been prescribed something,” my mother says after a moment. “Levodopa. It helps with some of the physical symptoms—the tremors, the slowness, at least at the beginning.”

“So you’re still in the early stages.” That, at least, is some tiny glimmer of hope in all this suffocating darkness.

“Possibly. It’s hard for them to know.”

“But you’re…” I gesture to her, her hands resting on the tabletop, without a tremor. “You’re fine.…”

“It isn’t like that, Rachel.” My mother’s voice is quiet, a gentle reprimand. I need to stop denying what she’s told me, finding ways out when there aren’t anyway.

A sudden rage swells in me, like a tsunami building force and power. This is so unfair. First Emily, now my mother. I don’t have anyone else to lose. Not anymore. But I can’t say any of that to my mom; I can’t make this about me.

“I know,” I tell her heavily. “I know.”

She reaches over and places her hand on mine, and that’s when I feel a tremor, as faint as one of Emily’s squeezes. “Rachel,” she says, almost sounding severe, “I don’t want you to worry.”

“Of course I’m going to worry—”

“No.” She speaks firmly. “I won’t let you take on my care as well as Emily’s.” Something I hadn’t even thought about it yet; I haven’t even begun to think about what this all means, how the landscape of my life along with my mother’s has changed irrevocably, become even more cratered and desolate. “Look, this might not happen for years and years, and I hope that is the case, but I’ve arranged to go into a nursing home when… when it’s time.”

I blanch. “Let’s not think about that yet, please, Mom…”