My mother, myself.

My mother died tonight.

In fact, her essence was lost to us several years ago, when Alzheimer’s began to wreak its terrible toll on her mind. For the last year it was doubtful that she knew her children had once been the most important beings in her life, and the delight with which she usually greeted us was dispensed in equal measure on perfect strangers. People who have not experienced the non-recognition of a parent think this must be a dreadful thing, but our capacity to convince ourselves that, on some level, she couldn't not know us was greater than the evidence that she didn’t have a clue who she was talking to.

But this is not about Alzheimer’s, and how it destroys and kills so cruelly. This is about coming full circle – reassessing and forgiving what once seemed incomprehensible and impossible to accept. I am the only daughter of my mother, and inherent in our relationship was complicity and conflict, initially more the latter than the former, then the reverse, then swinging back again, to come to rest finally in the way that it should. We daughters struggle to understand and be understood by our mothers, to be accepted and to accept, to love and be loved.

Before I go further, I must explain that I had a mother who thought I was clever and beautiful, who supported me in most of the decisions I made, who never criticized how I raised my children, who loved me unreservedly and unconditionally. If all daughters were as lucky as I am, there would be no market for books on how to survive one’s mother and therapists’ appointment calendars would be half-empty.

Nevertheless, we had trouble with each other. It didn’t really start until I was well-grown, when I had children myself and could not deal well with the dual role of being a mother and a daughter simultaneously. I was an adult, responsible for the well-being and education of three very dependent human beings, a competent and capable woman who, for some odd reason, could not bring that confidence into my relationship with my mother. For various reasons — and I’ll spare the analysis — I wished to assert my independence from her, but in doing so, was so afraid to hurt her that I ended up hurting her more than I could possibly have imagined. Suffice to say that my wish for independence made me feel bad, and that bad feeling became blame, and the blame landed squarely on my mother.

We both tried to avoid a wall going up, but neither of us was skilled or prescient enough to find a better way to communicate. She still came for Sunday dinner, we still talked on the phone, but the gulf between us yawned wide and empty for the better part of ten years. Then it got much, much worse, and only in hindsight did I realize that her encroaching dementia had had a devastating effect on her behaviour and my reactions to it.

What saved us was a combination of things. One was the realization that my fear of being a bad daughter, my almost continual self-flagellation over my lack of compassion, had not had and would never have the desired effect of making me change my reactions. It simply made me dislike that part of myself so intensely that the wall got higher, and thicker, and became the symbol of everything I lacked. Once I stared that particular issue in the face, I could begin to dismantle the wall.

The second thing that brought us back together was my awareness of the increasing disintegration of her mind. My almost constant mantra over the ten lost years had been: What if she dies and we’re still like this? Well, she was dying, little by little. The person she had been was taking her leave, unwillingly, unwittingly, irrevocably. This person, whose opinion I had been so afraid of, was slowly losing everything that made her who she was, becoming a diminished, lost soul who I could only love again, unreservedly and unconditionally.

And so it was not too late, for which I will always, always be grateful. I wrote of my mother in my first essay for this blog, and had she known that her daughter would finally make the decision to write - well, and often enough - she would have been fiercely proud. I am sorry not to be able to say to her, ‘Look Mom, this is for you’ because she would have understood and forgiven and just been glad that I do what I do.

I have come full circle.