Kaddish
By Sarah Leavitt
Sarah Leavitt is a writer, cartoonist and editor. Her mother died of Alzheimer's in 2004. Sarah is working on a graphic novel about her mother's illness.
This piece was previously published in Geist magazine,
Issue #60, Spring 2006.
(See Sarah's other piece, Darndest Things)
When my mother Midge got Alzheimer's at the age of 53, the rabbi taught me the prayer that Moses said to God when God struck Miriam with leprosy: El na refah na la—Heal her Lord, please heal her. I said the prayer every day even though there was no possibility of healing. I never found a prayer for the terminally ill, and during her long death I envied the mourners who recited the kaddish—a prayer that was meant exactly for them and that marked a definite ending.
At first my mother fought hard against the disease, with a resilience that was as much a part of her as her tall, strong body, her potent sparking anger and bitter sense of humour. Then she stopped being able to remember or understand dates, or comprehend the passage of time, so my age and birthday were a mystery to her. She lost the concept of mother and daughter. She stopped saying my name. She asked me who I was. She did not respond at all when I entered the room. These were all deaths, weren't they? Or one long, slow death. Imagine if there was a prayer for every stage in a long death.
She grew less and less able to care for herself. We helped her bathe and dress. And then we started coming into the bathroom with her, pulling down her pants, helping her onto the toilet, wiping her. We stripped the sheets and bathed her after she wet the bed, wiped her nose, cleaned food from her chin. She wandered the house blank faced, humming.
After seven years she died.
I said the kaddish, that prayer I had wanted, but it didn't fit. The prayer praises God, who my mother never believed in anyway.
Allen Ginsberg's poem "Kaddish" was written in honour of his mother, Naomi, after he learned that no one had said kaddish at her funeral. Naomi died in a psychiatric hospital after years of suffering from mental illness. Ginsberg remembers his mother not as the woman she was before her breakdowns, but as she was in illness:
Blessed be you Naomi in tears! Blessed be you Naomi in fears!
Blessed Blessed Blessed in sickness!
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Blest be your last years' loneliness!
Blest be your failure! Blest be your stroke! Blest be the
close of your eye! Blest be the gaunt of your cheek!
Blest be your withered thighs!
When I think of my mother, now burnt into ashes, I remember the hairs under her chin and the thin scar at the base of her spine and the ripples of varicose veins on her thighs and her dry peeling feet. The thick blue veins on her hands, her large ears, her bitten nails. The things that I was never supposed to know so intimately. I miss the mother I tucked into bed, the mother I bathed and dressed and fed as if she were my child. "Blessed be you Midge in confusion!" I say to her. "Blessed be you Midge in shame! Blest be your last years' nakedness! Blest be your forgetting! Blest be your memory!"
© Sarah Leavitt 2007
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