Unburying My Mother’s Secret

In the last years of her life, a sudden revelation upended my entire image of my mom. It took a decade after her death—and another major life change—for me to see that both versions of her were real.

Illustration by Naomi Ann Clarke | Story edited by Brendan Spiegel

Last week, we kicked off our new series, The Personals, with an excellent piece from J Martin about love and loss and everything between. This week, we’re bringing you another Personals story that we’re super excited about, this one from essayist Cathy Alter. And wouldn’t you know it, love and loss are also key themes. 🙂 Without further ado…enjoy!

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I stood in front of the hole over which my mother’s coffin hovered, a raw pine box with a Jewish star hammered to the top. The rabbi led us in the kaddish, the prayer for the dead. My father and brother joined, and I mouthed along, unable to properly say goodbye. I remember wondering how my father and brother knew all the words by heart. I remember my 3-year-old son, Leo, observing, “Box going down,” when my mother was lowered into the pit. And I remember the sound of the rocks knocking on the lid as we each took turns shrouding the coffin in a dirt blanket. But mostly I remember feeling sucker-punched. Not by her death, but by an unearthed secret that had rendered my mother into the stranger we were now burying.

As I stood there pretending to know the words, I considered that my mother was never at a loss for them. Her pronouncements — especially to me — sounded right out of a Bette Davis movie. “Put on your lipstick,” she’d say. “You never know who’s around the corner.” Or, “Kill ’em with kindness and then crush him with the heels of your stilettos” when a male boss suggested I might have better luck at presentations if I wore my shortest skirt.

As owner of our town’s hippest women’s boutique, my mother regarded herself as fashion’s final say, the Anna Wintour of the Connecticut suburbs. Her shop offered racks of French denim, string bikinis and Native American concho belts. She hired her coolest friends as salespeople and had “bagels and Bloody Mary” sales that started at 7 a.m.

Even synagogue provided an opportunity to show off the goods. At 6 feet tall, my mother would work the center aisle like a runway, heads turning to see what she was wearing.

I grew up as a High Holiday Jew, those members of the tribe who only attend services at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the biggies on the Jewish calendar. At some point near the end of every service it was time for the kaddish. “Mourners, please rise,” our rabbi would command. Without fail, I would hear a racket of seats snapping shut as their occupants stood up to pray.

Cloaked in white, Rabbi Silver would deliver the kaddish like a ship’s captain shouting in gale-force winds. His clear baritone reminded me of Jim Morrison, the brooding lead singer of The Doors. Even though I knew the words to every Doors song ever recorded, I hadn’t even attempted to learn the kaddish. I avoided looking at anyone standing. Theirs was a fresh sorrow, deserving privacy. It was not for public consumption. Leave them alone, I wanted to tell those congregants craning their necks, the type, I imagined, who read the obits every morning.

Even when I was eventually the one standing, first for my grandparents, then for my favorite aunt, I kept quiet, except for that opening line, which must have entered me through osmosis.

Yitgadal v’yitkadash.

Recited in ancient Aramaic, the words of the prayer are rhythmic and hypnotic; they sounded to me like a mystical incantation capable of penetrating the spirit world.

But what did I know, really? I was a Hebrew school dropout, forgoing my bat mitzvah at 13 and joining the track team instead. If my parents were upset with me, they never let on. My mother joked that she’d use the money they would have spent on catering to get her eyes done.

When I left for college, I became a No Holiday Jew, and, after a while, met the man I would soon marry. Karl was co-owner of a fashion boutique in Georgetown, and he and my mother bonded over their shared love of Mongolian cashmere. My mother had seen me through so many heartbreaks and poor decisions (Just put on your lipstick!), she told me that Karl was my bashert, my destiny.

Karl and I were still in our honeymoon year of marriage when we made a trip to Connecticut to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family. We arrived home while my parents were out to dinner, and I set a bottle of wine on the kitchen counter. After my parents returned and my mother went upstairs to take a bath, my father led me into the kitchen, pointed at my bottle of wine, and said, “There is no more alcohol in this house.”

Why? I wondered. I pressed him for an answer. After an uneasy silence, he looked at me and said, “Your mother has been keeping a secret.”

I quickly ran through a list of contenders. An affair? A gambling habit? What did those possibilities have to do with Merlot? I’d never seen my mother drink more than a single vodka on the rocks before a special occasion.

“About alcohol?” I asked. My face felt numb, and my teeth were buzzing. “For how long?”

“I’m still trying to figure that out.”

My father told me that my mother’s memory was deteriorating. She couldn’t remember how to sign her name on the bottom of payroll checks or how to use the telephone to call her sister. She had recently taken him on a tour of their house, showing him where she hid all the vodka, including the pint she had stashed in her winter boots. He took her to see a neurologist. Images of her brain showed a frontal cortex that looked moth-eaten.

When I thought about the pint bottle in those boots, ones I had coveted for their genuine sheepskin lining and perfectly distressed leather, I began shaking so hard, I had to hold on to the counter beside me.

I played back a movie montage of my life up to that point. My mother, always the life of the party, sparkling and bewitching like a Capote swan. My mother, so confident in where life had landed her, the envy of my friends. My mother, who told me I was beautiful and kind and “just you wait,” even when no one asked me to prom.

And yet, the image my mother presented to the world was vastly different than the one she kept hidden inside. Now I understood the real story behind the electrical tape holding together the driver’s side mirror on her car. The reason she fainted one morning while standing up from the breakfast table. And why, when I poured myself a vodka on the rocks one Thanksgiving, there was a lipstick ring around the neck of the bottle: her trademark color, Revlon’s Love That Red.

At once, the perception of my mother had been upended. A narrative about a glamorous extrovert was now revised to include a troubled soul that could not be soothed. By the time we took her for another evaluation at Yale Geriatrics, she was too far gone. I was just a week into my first trimester, petrified that I would miscarry from the trauma of sitting next to my mother as she fielded a battery of standard questions, failing to remember the day of the week and the first name of her husband.

When she was aware that she was slipping, she made my father promise to “never tell the kids.” So I had to pretend that everything was fine. In the waiting room at Yale where she unleashed a torrent of four-letter words at the old lady sitting next to her. In a restaurant where she tore apart her grilled chicken with her hands. In our own kitchen where she held a fork to my father’s throat, because she insisted he was trying to kill her. Through it all, I acted like this was perfectly normal. Honoring her edict was another unbearable secret.

As she rapidly declined, my father made the agonizing decision to put her in a care facility. Decades younger than her floormates, she sat strapped in a wheelchair, her hands clenched in rage, screaming bloody murder at whoever crossed her path, including me. Before dementia robbed her of her speech entirely, the last clear words my mother ever said to me were, “Shut up.”

Hugely pregnant during the worst of it, I’d come home for monthly visits, each more horrendous than the last. Welcoming a new life as another was ending was a brutal symmetry. Her final years were a thousand-pound blur, a heaviness I wore around like a BabyBjörn. She died on Leo’s first day of Pre-K 3. My father and brother called from her bedside as I pushed a stroller from 400 miles away.

Ten years after her death, I was still wrestling with the truth about my mother, unable to come to terms with the person she was and the person I thought I knew. It was a sorrow I felt in my body.

It was when Leo began preparing for his bar mitzvah, a day that marked one rite of passage, that I saw an opportunity to work toward another. If death is a letting go, my mother and I were still in limbo. And so, as I quizzed Leo on his vowels and listened to his tropes, I began to learn the kaddish for my mother.

Our rabbi was pint-sized and all action. When she asked if Karl or I wanted a part in the service, I told her I wanted to take ownership of the kaddish. For my mother, I emphasized.

“Let’s hear what you got,” she said.

I sang her a bit of the Shema, the ritual prayer I knew by heart. When I finished, she said, “Good thing we have some time.”

I thought back to my early days in temple, listening to Rabbi Silver’s version of the kaddish and imagining it was really Jim Morrison reciting the prayer. My mother was appalled by my Morrison obsession. When we took a family trip to Paris, she put her foot down when I demanded to visit his grave at Père-Lachaise. “I’m not wasting half a day to see where some drunk is buried,” she said. “End of discussion.”

As I thought back to that trip, it finally made sense. There was something in Morrison that my mother saw and despised in herself. She, too, had demons. A dark loneliness she filled with booze.

It didn’t take long before I was saying the kaddish everywhere. Walking to meet a friend for coffee, from the middle seat on a flight to San Francisco, waiting in line at the post office. Even when I wasn’t reciting it out loud, I was singing it in my head. Like MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,” the kaddish was an irresistible earworm.

Yitgadal v’yitkadash.

What a beautiful way to begin a prayer for the dead.

When Leo practiced his portion of the Torah, I practiced my kaddish. Karl was my primary audience. When he tired of listening (“Again?” he’d ask), I sang it to my best friend, a religion major in college. “You’re like one of those itinerant Russian Orthodox monks who constantly repeat a single prayer,” he said. “The repetition is intended to change them bit by bit over many years.”

Heartache and joy are next-door neighbors. With each recitation, I stopped noticing only my mother’s profound absence; I instead felt her outsized presence. It became easier to contain both truths. Little by little, the stranger reintroduced herself. I remembered the time she taught me to do the box step so I could slow dance with a boy. The time we played hooky and took a train to New York City to see Ain’t Misbehavin’. And all the times she told me how proud she was of me, how she sometimes wished that she could be more thoughtful and sensitive like me. These memories made a difference in my body.

For so long, I dealt with my grief and sense of betrayal — did I ever really know my mother? — privately. The same isolated space that I allowed those mourners back in temple.

As I learned how to recite the kaddish, I learned more about the kaddish. There is actually not a single mention of death or dying in the prayer. Instead, the kaddish touts the awesomeness of God. By reciting it, mourners show that even as their faith is being tested (and their heart is being broken), they still acknowledge the greatness of God.

More important, the kaddish must be recited in a public setting, as a community.

After Leo became a man and after Karl made us all cry with his heartfelt speech, it was time for the kaddish. No longer the saddest prayer of all time, it was instead an act of love and reunion taking the spotlight.

“I miss my mother,” I began. “For those of you who are missing someone today, please rise.” My cousin Danny stood up for his sister Carol, my beloved first cousin. My friend Laura stood up for her father. My father and brother, sitting right up front, joined me word for word in prayer. I looked at all of them. And they saw me, too.

In that perfect balance of time, I was simultaneously a bereft child and a dutiful mother. Yitgadal v’yitkadash.

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Cathy Alter’s articles and essays have appeared in The Cut, Oldster, Wired and The Washington Post, among others. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Karl, their son, Leo, and Benny the cat.

Brendan Spiegel is Narratively’s co-founder and editorial director.

Naomi Ann Clarke is an illustrator working with art directors in editorial, publishing, brands and charities. Her drawings are influenced by our connection to nature, adventure, well-being and heritage. They’re created digitally in vector but inspired by her painting, printmaking and collage work.

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