Joyce Zonana

Not every boomer spends a lot of time helping aging parents, but so many do, we thought it would be useful to read the reflections of just one, writer Joyce Zonana. What she is going through is in one way unique, but in another way it’s precisely what so many baby boomers are facing right now.

The mothers of four different friends have died in the past month, and my own mother, 88, has turned her face to the wall.

“I’m finished,” she says when I urge her to join me for a walk in the park that stretches invitingly just outside her windows. “I’ve had enough.” Although The New York Times recently published a story on adventure travel for seniors (90 and hiking in South Africa, 89 and wing-walking across the Atlantic), my mother will have none of it.

“I could do that,” she assures me, “but now I am too tired.”

Ten years ago, when she was 78, my mother had spent a decade nursing my father through his advanced Parkinson’s disease: bathing, dressing, and feeding him devotedly. Until the very end, she sat beside her husband of more than fifty years, urging him to eat, holding spoonfuls of ice cream to his lips, singing, cajoling, clinging to his dwindling presence. After his death, we feared she might fall into despair, but following a year of deep mourning, she rallied – planting a garden, swimming daily, making new friends, and exploring New Orleans, the city she had moved to to be near me.

But now, after relocating in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, her usual fortitude has crumbled. She does not have any major illness, no life-threatening disease, but chronic pain and the beginnings of dementia have debilitated her. A woman who never before buckled in the face of adversity—anti-Semitism in her native Egypt, immigration, privation, a cruel mother-in-law, rebellious American children—she insists her time is over.

As I watch my mother retreat from all activity or desire, I wonder: should I be at her side, as she was with her husband, urging her return, or should I gracefully, graciously, wish her godspeed? The words of Dylan Thomas’s plea to his father, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” resonate as I too rage against the dying of her light. But was Thomas being selfish, speaking more of his needs than of his father’s? “Curse, bless me now I pray,” he had demanded. What is it that I seek? What is my role in the drama of my mother’s decline? What blessing or curse do I crave? What might I bestow?

As is true for so many women of my generation, my relationship to my mother has been deeply conflicted, at times appearing to be nothing less than a desperate struggle for survival. “You will kill me,” she said when I was growing up, and now these words—prophecy or threat?—return to haunt us both.

So, when my mother tells me she doesn’t want to see another doctor, a specialist who might help diagnose and treat her latest symptom, I am stumped: should I insist or acquiesce? When she admits that she forgets to take her medications but refuses to accept help, what is my responsibility?

Is it my fault that my mother wants to die? Is it something I have done or failed to do that has caused her so profoundly to withdraw? For me now, at 60, life has unprecedented value. After many years of struggle, I have found my stride as a college professor and writer, I am back in New York City after thirty years away, and I have stumbled into a stunning, surprising new romance. How lovely it would be to share these pleasures with my mother, to make up for our lost time. But two thoughts compete within me: she wants to die because she knows that I am happy and she can abandon her vigilant efforts to sustain me, or, she wants to die because my happiness is destroying hers.

And then the third thought, for so long unthinkable, arises: she wants to die for her own private, unknowable, good reasons. My mother and I are not inextricably bound; our fates are separate, our lives (and deaths) our own. Here then is the “chill wind” Sophocles wrote about in Oedipus at Colonus, the encounter with separateness that Dylan Thomas so dreaded. I can hire all the aides and consult all the doctors I choose, I can redress all the wrongs, admit all the faults, heal all the wounds. But the abyss we each must face remains unchanged.

Once, hiking by myself on Elk Mountain in Oklahoma’s Wichitas, I came face to face with an old buffalo who had separated from the herd to die. On that windswept height we stood for a moment not twenty feet from one another, looking into one another’s eyes. Now, alone with my mother, I again find that grace. It is her path to walk, mine to witness. No curses here at all. And her blessing, too, comes to me at last. Godspeed.

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When I started having nightly dreams that my mother was cutting my long dark hair, I knew it was time to move out of my Egyptian-Jewish parents’ Brooklyn home. The year was 1968. I was eighteen, and I had tried leaving twice before— once when I went off to college just after high school, and a second time, the following year, when I came close to renting a studio apartment on a quiet street in Manhattan. Each of my earlier attempts had ended in failure: the first when I returned from college without completing my freshman year; the second when I allowed my mother to talk me out of making the move.

This time, I kept my plans to myself, locating a cheap, fourth-floor, rent-controlled walk-up, not far from Brooklyn College. The building, one of three identical brick structures that lined the street, had a dim central lobby with two worn staircases on either side; on each floor, four apartments opened out from a small, dark landing. My apartment was in the top right corner of the building, with a bedroom to the east and a living room facing south. I envisioned mornings watching the sunrise over the college clock tower, afternoons drinking tea, and evenings of quiet study looking out into the sky. I signed a three-year lease and surreptitiously transported my books and clothes.

“How, Joyce, can you do this to your mother?”

The voice was that of my mother’s best friend, Suze, calling me a month later, as soon as she had heard the news. For my mother had tried to keep my departure secret. That her only daughter was living in an apartment by herself was a shame, a sign of the family’s failure. But Suze must have sensed something wrong, must have questioned my mother until she confessed.

“You are killing your mother,” Suze said to me.

Slumped on my narrow mattress on the floor, I had no words with which to answer this woman I had known since childhood. I could see that she was right; my behavior was killing my mother, or a very large part of her dreams for me. Yet I was certain that to have remained at home would have been to court my death, the devastation of my dreams. For while my family hoped I would marry an Egyptian-Jewish man, keeping house for him and raising children who would themselves marry other Egyptian Jews, I cherished another ideal: the life of a writer, an artist, an independent woman— a woman who took lovers perhaps, but never a woman who settled into the domesticity and despair I could see had engulfed my mother.

But for a young girl, or as my mother called me in French, “une jeune fille,” to live alone, without husband or parents or other relatives, was among the greatest transgressions our Egyptian-Jewish immigrant community could imagine.

“You should be finding a husband,” Suze said now. “You should be out enjoying yourself. Instead you will be in your filthy apartment cleaning your filthy toilet.”

We both knew it was not the filthiness of the apartment that was at stake. I was the one who was filthy, I was the one who would never become clean, no matter how hard I scrubbed. The only explanation for my actions must be that I had given myself up to indiscriminate sexuality, refusing all respectability. I was “une femme perdue,” a lost woman, “abandonée.” How could I explain? It was not sex that I was after, not really.

Yet I was indeed “une femme perdue”— adrift in an uncharted and terrifying New World, without bearings or direction. It had taken all my strength to make the move, all my energy to shut the door against my mother’s grief and my father’s shame. Now that I was in possession of my apartment, what was I to do in it? Most days, I lay on my mattress, unable to rise, afraid to walk outside, paralyzed by the enormity of my offense, overwhelmed by the magnitude of what I had done. Authenticity? A life of freedom and creativity? It was all I could do to brush my teeth each morning and take a shower in the, indeed, filthy bathroom.

The apartment I had imagined as a sunlit nest loomed now as an alien darkness, inhospitable and cold. Mold grew in the kitchen sink and cockroaches prowled the hall. The empty living room— without furniture or window coverings— echoed loudly to my step. Only in the bedroom, with its mattress on the floor and a few wooden crates stuffed with books and papers, could I find any peace. Yet even there I could not still the voices that told me I was wrong, bad, ungrateful, sick.

“You are killing your mother,” Suze said again. “You should be ashamed.”

We are the generation that invented a new necessity: discovering our identity, retracing our roots. So it’s not unusual to hear of yet another baby boomer going back to see the land from which parents, grandparents, or earlier ancestors came. But in 1999, Joyce Zonana took it to the extreme, for she is an American Jew, with roots in Egypt. She has written a brilliant book, “Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile’s Journey (Jewish Women Writers),” and allowed BoomerCafé to publish this excerpt.

After nearly three decades of deliberation, I was at last on my way to Cairo—a pilgrimage my relatives did not hesitate to call foolish, but which I knew to be essential. Several times already, I had come close: I’d contacted travel agents, learned the price of a ticket, toyed with possible dates. But then I would hear about a bombing, a hijacking, a fatal attack on tourists visiting an ancient site, and my resolve would crumble. “It’s not safe,” I would tell myself, “I won’t be able to manage there alone.” I am, after all, female, Jewish, and American—all characteristics, I believed, that would make me vulnerable in Egypt. I would be a target, an easy mark. Men would accost me on the street and follow me to my hotel; shopkeepers would suspect that I was Jewish and refuse to serve me; at the airport when I was ready to leave, officials would examine my passport, discover my nationality, and detain me. It was impossible to think rationally about what ought to have been a simple journey back to my birthplace. My family’s reluctance to reopen the door they closed nearly fifty years ago made my own desire seem like the most daring transgression. Surely I would be punished for my temerity: the terrorist who brought down my plane would be answering a call, if not from God, then from my own unconscious.

My parents left Egypt illegally in 1951, just a year before the revolution that transformed their country and led, ultimately, to the expulsion of most Jews. When the official inspecting their bags found silver and jewelry among the tightly-packed clothes, my father slipped him several one pound notes. “Every time they found something, Felix gave them another pound,” my mother has told me. Rugs, linens, photographs—for each item, a one-pound note. I was eighteen months old then, impervious to the details of this drama. But I imbibed its essence—my parents’ paralyzing fear—magnifying it as I matured. At every border crossing now, I stiffen, cling to my passport, strive to make myself inconspicuous.

So when my plane lands in Cairo and I approach passport control, I am rigid with fear, certain no one will ever hear from me again. I await my turn in a tumult of anxiety. And then it happens.

I give a man behind a glass barrier my passport.

He peers at it blankly, then hands it back to me.

I am in.

I am stunned, breathless, thrilled. But there is no one with whom to share my joy, no one to hug or pat or kiss, and so I do what I everyone around me is doing: I walk onwards towards the baggage-claim area. Here, three Muslim men unroll a worn brown prayer rug beside the still-empty conveyor belt. They take off their shoes, step onto the rug, and begin a series of deep prostrations. I cannot tell whether they are performing one of the five daily prayers mandated by Islam or if this is a special prayer of homecoming, a formal expression of gratitude for safe landing. Whatever the nature of their rite, their actions mesmerize me, and I watch silently, envying their unselfconscious reverence. I want to make their gestures mine, to bend my knees and bow my head, to touch my forehead to this ground.

Egypt. I have arrived in Egypt. Around me I hear voices. “Ahlan wa sahlan!” people are saying to their relatives and friends, “Welcome!” And in the distance I see the man from my hotel, carrying a small sign with my name on it. Later, in the taxi, when I tell him that I am Jewish and that I was born here, he will smile broadly and touch my hand. “Welcome to your homeland,” he will say in all sincerity, “Ahlan wa sahlan!”