When her 86-year-old mother falls and breaks her hip, Sandra Tyler is 42, with a nursing infant and precocious toddler. Tyler, the acclaimed author of BLUE GLASS, a NEW YORK TIMES Notable Book of The Year, mines what it means to be divided between the role of mother and daughter, with empathy and affectionate comedy.
After this fall, Tylerâs mother insists on hiring her own caregiversâa motley patchwork of lost souls, including the too-friendly who think Scrabble is a good idea. But when she has a near-fatal fall, it is the author who hires a live-in aide, Chandice, who moves into her motherâs house as if it were her own, with her KitchenAid mixer, bake pans, and apple-and-kale concoctions. Where should Tylerâs allegiance lie when her mother threatens to fire Chandice? At what cost to their relationship should she no longer defer to her motherâs staunch guidance?
Meanwhile, Tyler's ten year old winds up in the hospital, leaving her to feel inadequate as a mother herself. THE NIGHT GARDEN candidly explores what it means for a daughter to have her focus fractured by conflicting responsibilities while still seeking, above all else, her motherâs approval, protection and love.
When her 86-year-old mother falls and breaks her hip, Sandra Tyler is 42, with a nursing infant and precocious toddler. Tyler, the acclaimed author of BLUE GLASS, a NEW YORK TIMES Notable Book of The Year, mines what it means to be divided between the role of mother and daughter, with empathy and affectionate comedy.
After this fall, Tylerâs mother insists on hiring her own caregiversâa motley patchwork of lost souls, including the too-friendly who think Scrabble is a good idea. But when she has a near-fatal fall, it is the author who hires a live-in aide, Chandice, who moves into her motherâs house as if it were her own, with her KitchenAid mixer, bake pans, and apple-and-kale concoctions. Where should Tylerâs allegiance lie when her mother threatens to fire Chandice? At what cost to their relationship should she no longer defer to her motherâs staunch guidance?
Meanwhile, Tyler's ten year old winds up in the hospital, leaving her to feel inadequate as a mother herself. THE NIGHT GARDEN candidly explores what it means for a daughter to have her focus fractured by conflicting responsibilities while still seeking, above all else, her motherâs approval, protection and love.
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I remember it this way: my whole self sprawled across her, my motherâs body.
Because no. I wouldnât let them take her â those funereal men, looking absurd in starched suits standing there in my motherâs weedy gravel driveway, nervously pulling on their cuffs because the crazed daughter wouldnât let them take her mother. I donât remember their faces, only their vehicles, the black van that would take away my mother, the other, a pristine white escort car; for show. For me. Their audience.
I peered at them through my motherâs dusty Venetian blinds.
No.
I let the slat drop.
I pulled out loose strands of her white hair. I thought about getting up for a pair of scissors, to clip some, to keep once my motherâs body was reduced to ash. But that would mean getting up, leaving this moment. Leaving my mother.
I splayed her fingers, studied the plastic fake-gem ring my son had bought for her at the school fair. The one I would insist she be cremated wearing, Iâm not sure why. Maybe because when Iâd prepaid for the cremation, I was baffled by the funeral director assuring me the cremains âwould be all bone, no teddy bears.ââ¨Â         Â
Her circulation having ceased, my motherâs fingers seemed bloodless, translucent. Beautiful in their translucency. Stunning in their stillness â only yesterday, theyâd been flitting about, feeling for the edge of her fleece throw, reaching up to explore her own face as if an object she did not recognize. Since her stroke, sheâd lost so much body mass, her hands were transformed. From the tough knobbiness of the arthritic to the fragile. Literally breakable; when she was rotated regularly to avoid bedsores, one hand might get caught beneath her hip, and her aide was quick to free it: âWe canât have that happen.â
No.
We canât have that happen.
Because now her hands were as delicately boned as a birdâs. As the sparrowâs, the one flitting about our porch back home, where I sat most nights, with a bottle of wine. Flitting about like my motherâs hands, searchingly, failing to find a place to settle, and Iâd long to cup the panicked bird. The sparrow would fly off, into our bushes, into the dark, leaving a wake of trembling leaves, and Iâd down a Diazepam with the last of the wine; my doctor, noting my distress, had raised the dose from 5 to 10 mg, but in that last year, on nights after my mother was back in emergency, after her stroke, and when she no longer could place me in time, sometimes I slipped another pill.
Now as my mother lay dead, I was both moved and horrified by the fact that I actually found beauty in her hands. Horrified because it wrenched me to see my once strong mother, even in death, reduced to the easily snapped of delicate bones. But moved by the secrets of her hands: the intricacy of veins branching out into that translucency, the strident blue of an early evening sky, into those last traces of light.
My motherâs aide came in. The men in starched suits were threatening to leave. Without the body.
I clung to my mother as I hadnât been able to do when she was alive. When the slightest touch caused her pain.
 Nooooooo!
I remember that, my wailing. Hearing it from a distance, the way we could hear the ocean from her deck, when we used to sit out there in the summer. That thunderous breaking of the waves on a still night.
It didnât make sense to take my mother from her own house. âThis is her house!â I cried out, into my motherâs room. Into the April morning, its cruel brightness slicing though those blinds, across me and my dead mother in the hospital bedâŚ
The hospital bed. A glacial presence in the midst of the familiar â of the fragile antique rocking chair cracked from too many nurses sitting on it to fill out their charts; lining her bookshelf, the brittle starfish and broken shells my mother had collected along the beach; my motherâs desk, the letter slots packed with all my old sentimental birthday, Valentine, and Motherâs Day cards; yellowed cat notepads; loose photos of me, a toddler pulling up dandelions; of her, helping me to dress my Barbie in a red skirt she crocheted; then the black-and-white of when she was my age now, in her fifties: sheâs sitting in a chair, turning all her attention to me, to my showing her some lopsided dish Iâd made, reaching for it. The way sheâd always turned her attention to me. The way weâd always been, resurrected months later, when more things of our lives together resurfaced: more loose photographs Iâd come across cleaning out her bureau drawers, tucked in with her necklaces kept carefully untangled in their separate boxes. I would find them mixed in with old board games in the living-room chest, falling out from old cookbooks. My mother was an artist, and Iâd find her sketchbooks filled with drawings of all the places weâd travelled to together, side streets in Florence, the old adobe churches in New Mexico. Then drawings going back to our beginning, of me in my high chair, on a rocking horse, playing with the cord phone. Iâd find my own drawings, preserved in wood frames sheâd painted herself, or pressed between cardboard so that only their edges had yellowed.
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My motherâs aide, the one who persevered through so many others who were fired, quit, or left for the more lucrative of managerial office jobs, was standing over me. Over us. Quietly pleading, trying to keep her voice even so as not to annoy the crazy-grief-stricken-fifty-two-year-old child clinging to her motherâs frail bones. Bones sheathed in loose bruised dehydrated skin.
The child, in the end, relented â she allowed the starched men into her motherâs house. Who promised to treat her mother with âthe utmost dignity and respect.â
âFuck you!â The child screamed. Spat the words.
They stood there stunned. Or maybe just politely allowing the awful moment to pass, before slipping the stretcher into my motherâs room and shutting the door. It would be weeks later when I would chastise myself for not thinking to dress her, had not thought how they would remove the fleece throw to reveal her in only a Depends and a stained white T-shirt.
In my motherâs foyer with her potted plants, I slumped to the floor. Pressed my hands into her cold cracked tiles.
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After theyâd slipped her mother into the back of the shiny black van, after sheâd watched them drive away from her motherâs home of 30 years, up the street, the sun now cresting the tops of the budding trees, the child climbed back into the hospital bed. Onto the air mattress that inflated and deflated. And cresting each wave, she cried out for her mother, into the still room:
Mommy!
Mommmmyyy!!
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That was the last time I ever cried for my mother. I mean, cried. The heaving of real tears that shook the hospital bed, left me spent. Otherwise, I only managed a moaning, a grief laboring to erupt after years of my wishing her gone, but wishing she would never leave me â I could not imagine that, my life without her, even though our relationship had morphed into something so distorted, I hardly recognized us as the mother and daughter we had always been. And so, entirely unmoored, and to mask the unimaginable that now had become real, nightly after putting our boys to bed I sat on our porch, staring out at stark trees, trying to make sense of it all, with a bottle of wine capped off with the Diazepam; the reason after she died, my primary care physician would send me to psychiatric emergency, where eventually I was admitted and had taken away from me not only my phone, but my sweatshirt because I could have hung myself with the drawstrings. Where I would be woken up daily with two questions: had I had a bowel movement in the last 24 hours and was I feeling suicidal? The real reason I was admitted was not because I had gone crazy, nor even because I was looking to end my life. But because even after she died, I could not transition back into a normality that long since had stopped seeming normal.
In those final years leading up to my motherâs death, there was only the this. The immediacy, often real urgency, of the moment, when Iâd become a mother myself. A period in both our lives, me now the daughter of a quite elderly mother, I would come to describe as the new normality. A normality defined less by routine than by the disruption of it, when the phone would ring and Iâd have to drop what I was doing, leaving a pot of half-cooked spaghetti to go undrained and swell for hours, or wet laundry to sour in the washing machine, to drive an hour to meet the ambulance at the hospital.
Most often, these emergency-room scenarios were from her falls, and I would be more angry than afraid â why canât you use your cane? Why the walls, so you ÂÂÂgo and fall into your own windows? But I would remember better the extraordinary times: over a lunch of onion soup, when she lost all feeling in her right arm and we thought she was having a stroke from an arterial inclusion. Then shortly before she died, when she actually was having a stroke and could not form coherent words on the phone. Those times, a terror seized me, one rooted in me from when once I lost sight of my mother, at age five, up in Vermont where we spent our summers, when she went for a canoe across the lake at dusk and receded into the oncoming darkness. How could I go on without my mother?
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One morning in those years, in that final descent into truly old age for my mother, she called when nothing was clearly wrong but something definitely wasnât right.
She was panicked and breathless: âSomethingâs happening.â
I was trying to get my boys, then six and seven, off to elementary school. I was finishing up frying some bacon for Owen, the only thing he would eat for breakfast outside of Ramen noodles. I put the cordless phone on speaker, and the receiver on the counter, as I could do â often did â with my mother. âWhatâs happening?â
âThings are all jumbled in my head. I couldnât see for a few minutes...â
âYouâve had these spells before....â
 I gave Owen his plate of bacon and he pointed to the new dog coughing under the kitchen table. âMom, whyâs he doing that?â
Our new poodle pup had been coughing for a couple of days, like a cat trying to cough up a hairball.
Even if I had an answer to why our dog was coughing like a cat, I couldnât answer; I was on the phone. With my mother. Who was calling at 7 AM as I was mixing pancake batter for Owenâs big brother who would only eat pancakes for breakfast. Or cupcakes. And who hadnât even come downstairs yet. I imagined he was in his room distracted by his new Batmobile.
The dog was coughing, and my mother was calling to tell me she had an irregular heartbeat: âItâs all over the place. Iâve been lying here for two hours waiting for it to go away. Iâm afraid to even have coffee. I donât know if I should go to the hospital.â
The dog coughed again. âMom?â Owen had gone pale with fear.
âEat your bacon.â
âWhat?â came my motherâs voice from where, I swear, she was rocking the receiver on the counter.
âThese spells! Theyâre not new!â My excuse for yelling, her hearing shot unless she put her own phone on speakerâwhich she never would. And there were these episodes where her heart would âflutter,â ever since her cardiologist had her wear one of those boxes overnight to record her rhythms.Â
âNot for this long,â she said irritably. âIâm not ready to die. I donât want to die!â
She said this defensively as if I wanted her to die. Which I didnât. Except when I was trying to make a âgazillionâ (as Owen liked to exaggerate), breakfasts, on school mornings which usually wound up atypical anyway, with the pup pooping on the hall rug or forgotten backpacks. Well, not die, just not to call me at 7am.
Owen went quiet â too quiet, as he was listening too intensely with now big ears.
I picked back up the phone to take it off speaker and moved out into the hall.
Whispering now, I crouched on the stairs: âThen letâs call an ambulance.â
Lucas now was coming down the stairs, in a pair of too-short pants, and I reminded myself what I would forget, that he needed new clothes. âWhatâs wrong with Gramma?â
âGrammaâs having a heart attack,â Owen called from the kitchen, as if he knew what that was, as when heâd parrot me about the âridiculousâ cost of a candy bar from 7-Eleven.
Lucas looked at me as horrified as when his gerbil passed away. âIs she going to die?â
âSheâs not having a heart attack,â I snapped.
âYou donât know that!â my mother screeched, directly into my ear.
I didnât know, frankly, whether she was having a heart attack or not. I didnât know a thing in those moments. Except that the dog was coughing and nothing could happen to the dog.
âOh, never mind,â my mother said, as I could hear her drop her own cordless onto her bed, her way of hanging up, so that I got to listen to her cussing in the background, about how no one cared whether she lived or died, which only pissed me off and made me yell even louder, until she heard my tiny tinny voice and picked back up the phone.
âWhat do you want?â
âYou forgot to press the off button.â
âIâm not an imbecileâŚâ she said, sounding breathless again, and I was at once devastated and terribly satisfied that Iâd almost made her cry.
Then she hung up. This time for real.
In those last years there would be a lot of that â of her hanging up on me. So that we both could simmer at opposite ends of our landlines, as only mothers and daughters can do. Except for times like this when in that cutting of the line, I could feel the distance, the eighty-odd miles between us, as insurmountable.
I served Lucas a burnt hard pancake.
He poked at it. âItâs burnt. And hard.â
âThen starve,â I snapped. At a food-allergic child who was afraid of lots of foods and possibly could actually starve if I didnât insist he eat burnt, hard pancakesâŚ.
But if I didnât snap, then I was unable to make choices. To rationalize calmly as to what I should do in the next few minutes, when I was being asked to make a choice, and I never knew what or whom to choose.
Instead, I froze. I opened the refrigerator to stare into it for no good reason. At dumbfounded stock-still cartoons of juice and milk.
I called my mother back.
âHello,â she said, pretending as if she wasnât expecting I would do this. Call her back.
âWhat do you mean you couldnât see?â
She explained about how she had been unable to sleep, so turned on the television â once she could find the remote, which she first thought was the phone â meandering off into some story about how she was lying in bed watching this fascinating show on Antarctica, and there being seven species of Antarctic penguins, one with the âhootâ of a name MacaroniâŚ
 I didnât have time for penguins. âMom. Just tell me what happened.â
âOh, donât be so impatient!â
She told me about how suddenly she just couldnât see the television. Things went blank. âAnd then things got jumbled. Like things going around and around in my head. Wooden blocks and gears and cogs....â
âCogs? Are you dizzy?â
âNo, Iâm not dizzy but somethingâs happening. Iâm short of breath. Iâm feeling nauseous.... Oh, I donât feel good...â Now she sounded frightened.
Which made me frightened.
What my mother was finally diagnosed with after countless times over the years of having to wear those heart monitor box things which seemed never to catch the skipped beats, was atrial fibrillation. Which made her higher risk for strokes. Then there was her high blood pressure....
In an instant, my annoyance was whipped up into terror.
âStay on the phone, Mom.â On my cell in my other hand, I called 911.
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This was a very moving book and very raw. I have chosen to open my review in the same direct way that Sandra Tyler has her book, as you are exposed immediately to the extent of her grief at her mother's passing. It's like an emotional drenching.
And it is Tyler's candour which shapes this book, her memories from the loss of her mother transposed into a memoir, providing a description of the slow, prolonged loss of a parent, full of emotional moments, poignant and sometimes jarring.
Sandy is a mother of two young boys when her mother shows signs of losing her independence through the onslaught of old age. She falls and Sandy has to field hospital visits and continuing care, whilst juggling her role as mother. It is clear that the relationship that Sandy has with her mother is one of love and respect; that there is a mutual dependency.
When the signs of dementia manifest themselves in addition to physical instability, Sandy is faced with the fact that her mother is slowly dying and that there will be no drifting towards peaceful death and that this struggle is going to be something that she cannot shy away from; that as a dutiful and loving daughter, she will have to face up to it in all its sad, demanding and dignity-eroding painfulness to the bitter and grief-loaded end. She also has to accept that this will be to the detriment of her family life; that she will be called upon at a moment's notice and that she will have to find reserves of patience that she probably did not realise she had. She will be weary and drained and guilt-filled regardless of her dedication.
I think that this memoir is beautifully told. For anyone with ageing parents, it is an insight into a world that we may have to confront and it is bleak; however, Tyler is keen to show that there are moments of love in being able to give unreserved attention to a parent who has always been there for you and that, in being dutiful, the threads that remain of their life can be held more securely for that bit longer, despite the fact that you know they'll eventually break from your grasp.
Tyler has crafted something which at times is hard to read in its candour but whose essence is deeply touching.
Recommended.