- I put my sick elderly mom in a nursing home because my new husband called her a burden, and I chose him over her — which is the sentence I’ve had to live inside for 2 years now. She begged me not to leave her there. She held my hand at the door and said “my life is over” and I told her it would be fine, which we both knew wasn’t true, and I left anyway. I visited twice in two years. Both times I told myself I’d come more often. I didn’t. On my third visit the receptionist looked at me strangely when I signed in, and when I reached my mother’s room she refused to see me. I stood in that hallway trying to absorb it when I noticed my husband’s car in the parking lot, which made no sense because he was supposed to be at work and had never once offered to visit her himself. I found him in the common room. He was sitting beside my mother at a small table by the window, reading to her from a large-print novel, his voice low and unhurried. My mother’s eyes were closed but she was smiling slightly — the particular expression she used to have falling asleep in her armchair at home when she felt completely safe. He hadn’t seen me yet.
A nurse materialized quietly at my elbow and told me he’d been coming every Thursday for 14 months — every single week I hadn’t, every Thursday I’d found a reason not to make the drive. He’d apparently shown up the first time out of guilt, she said, and kept coming because your mother told him stories about you as a little girl and he said it was the best part of his week. He’d never told me. Not once. I stood in that doorway for a long time, watching my husband read to my mother in a nursing home and I understood that he’d been living with his own guilt in the only way he knew how — quietly, privately, without asking for credit or absolution. My mother opened her eyes eventually and saw me. She didn’t smile right away. She just looked at me for a long moment with the expression of a woman who has had 14 months to think about things and has arrived somewhere complicated. Then she held out her hand. I crossed the room and sat on the other side of her, and my husband kept reading, and the three of us stayed like that for an hour. On the drive home my husband said, “I should have told you I was going.”
“You should have never given me a reason to leave her there,” I said. “I know,” he said. “I know that.” We drove the rest of the way in silence, the useful kind, the kind that means both people are finally thinking about the same thing at the same time. I visit every Thursday now. Sometimes my husband comes too. My mother has started saving the good stories — the ones about me at seven, at twelve, at fifteen — for when we’re both there together. I think that’s her way of putting us back in the same sentence. I think she’s been trying to do that for a while now. I’m trying to deserve it.
