At twelve years old my mind ran a peculiar course. Perpetually through the day and often as I lay awake through most of the night, I worried about the death of my mother. She worked as an emergency room nurse in a hospital on the north side of Chicago, and she worked the graveyard shift. Whenever she got ready at night, putting on her makeup, fixing her hair, dressing in her white nurse's pantsuit, I found the same sickening feeling rising from my gut. I was afraid of losing her.

When I think about those nights I remember the fragrance that she always put on before she went to wait for the bus. My father would give her those flattish bottles of Shalimar with the pointy crystal stopper and golden label. The scent is especially distinctive and whenever I smell it now it reminds me of her. At one point I purchased some of it for myself to wear. It smelled awful on me. I never wore it again.

Why it seemed imperative for me to wear Shalimar perhaps stemmed from the fact that my mother and I share the same name. We are both Annabelle Georgette. I have always believed in the magical potency of names. I often wondered if mother and I vibrated at the same psychic speed because we had the same names. I have also worried about what I would inherit from her, not only genetically, but from the energy of our unique identical names. This fact created a kind of twinning between us that caused in me both a feeling of warming continuity and a fear of her legacy.

But for a while I was afraid. I thought if she went to the grocery store by herself, if she went up and down the stairs, if she went to wait for the bus on the corner, that something horrible would happen to her. I never imagined that she would be the victim of some act of violence, but I was sure she would fall, would slip, would hit her head. As a result, I found myself offering to help her in a dozen small ways. I went to the store for her, the bank, I ran all her small errands. She wrote me notes that I took the drugstore so that they would let me buy cigarettes for her.

I think it had to do with Dad. I've had nineteen years to figure this out. Many times my mind has returned again and again to that agonizing year when I was terrified to lose her. Dad was boozing heavy that year as he had for all of my childhood years up to that point. Nothing new. Perhaps it was my developing cognisance that allowed me to imagine the natural progression of his sickness. Maybe, as my eldest sister Grace says, it had to do with my burgeoning womanhood. But Dad became a real threat to me. His abuses were increasingly more physical than they had been before I reached puberty. He would slap me, punch me, spit on me, and worst of all, take off his belt and beat me with it. One time, he beat me so badly with it that I was unable to walk. My ass and the backs of my legs were covered with welts. Even now, as I write, something comes up in me that wants to keep it hidden, not to think about it. My belly starts to quaver and my shoulders contract. He broke my records, threw things off my dresser, and most damaging I believe, constantly attempted to change my behavior through the harshest criticism. On top of, or as a result of everything, I had become terribly moody and a desperate sulker.

The natural progression of this then might be that he could kill mom or if something happened to her that I would be in his sole custody. All my siblings were much older and had flown the coop. I think that year was bad for me because dad did not have anyone else to pick on. Perhaps too I became a target because mom had stopped sleeping with him. I don't remember when this happened, but at some point she shared my bed with me. She slept in my room for at least a year and a half, maybe two. It wasn't until later on the heels of events to which I was not privy did they have some sort of sexual reconciliation, and she joined him again in the big bed.

Mom had developed an elaborate screening mechanism which she called "tuning out"; she never listened to him when he became abusive. She thought this was funny (her sense of humor rarely failed her) but this mode became a site of her own psychologcal isolation and later became a type of literal deafness. As she grew older, she couldn't hear very well, I believe because she practiced that skill so frequently and for God knows how many years. This same impulse reminded me of her eventual dementia.

So Dad's sickness produced my anxiety on some level. One does not need years on a couch to figure that one out. But the anxiety in restrospect also foreshadowed the strange loss of my mother that I was to experience when I was twenty-five, some thirteen years later. Eleven years after my parents finally divorced.

I was living out in Los Angeles at the time, working for a woman of erratic personality, to put it kindly. I had graduated from college and failed to find editing or publishing work. After a stint in retail that lasted three years I finally took a job for an employment agency. Suddenly the phone calls from Chicago became more alarming. All contacts indicated that mom had gotten increasingly more confused. On little walks to my sister Grace's house who lived only four or five blocks away, mom had gotten lost. One time she got lost in the rain and had been crying. She said that a man who saw her wandering the rainy streets picked her up and drove her home. Somehow, she was able to tell him her address. She would burn up her pots and pans on the stove and was no longer able to wash dishes properly, to keep her place clean, or her self clean. Grace took her to a neurologist and she had a series of examinations, including an MRI and a Catscan. It was determined that mother had had a series of small strokes and that she had an Alzheimer's-like condition that produced senile dementia. This was the disorientation and confusion that she suffered. The neurologist recommended that we find her an alternative living situation, one which was more supervised. She absolutely forbade mom to cook for herself; she said it was dangerous to her and to anyone else in her building. She could easily burn the place down by altogether forgetting that she was cooking. We had already seen examples of her forgetfullness. On top of all of this, one of the physicians who checked her did a routine breast exam. She discovered that mother had a lump in her breast. The ensuing biopsy brought the worst news. Mom had breast cancer. I immediately left Los Angeles and headed home to Chicago to be with my family.

I'll never forget the chain of events that followed and that still sickens me with regret. I had spent the night with my sister, Grace and in the morning we were talking animatedly, trying to make up for time spent apart. Mom called that morning to say that she had bumped her head. I asked her if she was okay and she said she was but that she felt a little funny. I asked her was it bad or was she bleeding and so forth and she responded dismissively. Mom and I hung up. Grace and I talked on. After an hour or so, I hopped in the shower and finally headed over to mom's. I will never forget what I saw there. She had a huge knot above her left eye with traces of blood in her hair. The blow to the head had already caused both of the eyes to begin to become black. Her left arm was hugely swollen and had the ring of bruising around it characteristic of a fracture. I was sick. I couldn't believe I had disregarded her phone call. I couldn't believe that I had waited so long to come over. Mom could not move her left arm.

That night, some friends of mine from high school had arranged a surprise party for me. I had to cancel, much to their consternation. The surprise party didn't get its guest of honor. Instead I took mother to the emergency room. That night we went to two hospitals. St. Francis in Evanston took the Xrays of her skull and arm/shoulder, but they were unable to treat her. I took her straight to Illinois Masonic, where she had been treated for her strokes and cancer, and they read the Xrays and put her in an elaborate sling. They determined that she would need surgery on the shoulder. I was devastated. This would be the third major ordeal for her in less than two months.

Later that night, after an exhausting stretch of hours at hospitals, I tried to figure out what had happened. How she received the injury. That day she had gone for her radiation therapy for her breast. The van from Illinois Masonic came to get her as always, but she never came out. The landlord of the building found her in the stairwell; he said she was very disoriented. But they put her on the van and she got her radiotherapy that day and was brought home. Two things about this tortured me. One was that I had suggested to her that she take the stairs (she lived on the second floor) more often. I thought that the exercise would do her good. Secondly, I thought that the radiation therapists had lifted and manipulated her arm when they gave her the treatment. This must have exacerbated the injury. The whole affair seemed so horrible to me. The notion of health care practitioners hurting her when she was already hurt was beyond painful. I was sure that she fell going down the stairs, caught her shoulder on the bannister and hit her head on it, though she remembered nothing. I felt to blame.

As mother began her long recuperation the only thing that really upset her was the black eyes. It seemed to her a very real emblem of her suffering. She wept and wept. I felt as if I could not love her tenderly without condemning myself.

It was only through active attentiveness and care of my mother that I was able to begin to dispel some of the overwhelming guilt that I felt. In retrospect I was able to see that my judgment had been poor, but that I had also been young. Realizing this enabled me to let go of some of that pain and start to forgive myself.

The byproduct of the my mother's physical deterioration was the loss of the person who had been my close friend and supporter throughout my life. At twenty-five years old, I no longer had a mother who was parental. I now sent money to support her and sent her gifts and little kindnesses. The place we finally found for her to live was expensive, but very nice. It required additional economic support. My sister Jane and I provided this.

At the time I seemed so ready to assume the responsibility of my mother. It wasn't until a year or so later that I realized exactly what I had lost. I felt as if the mother that I had had died. I grieved the loss of the intelligent, kind woman whom I had loved. This created another layer of self-castigation. It seemed inappropriate to grieve and feel loss when my mother was in actuality still alive. At twenty-nine I discovered the emotional sense of my feelings and finally stopped blaming myself. I am still able to love my mother, and I am happy that she does not fixate on her suffering in her new simplicity. She still is greatly emotional, but she is forever positive, and this is her gift in this phase of her life.

I have two photos of my mother that I love. In one she looks about twenty-five and she's wearing her nurse's uniform: a to-the-calf loose white dress that's belted at the waist. She seems innocent and demure. She wears the characteristic white triangular nurse's cap. A dark jacket is draped over her left arm and her hands are linked at her waist. It's a sunny day in early spring in Chicago. The bushes are bare yet, but the sun is warm enough to shed jackets. Her hair both curls softly and is severely parted down the middle. I know that it is sunny because her eyes are squinting a bit and there is a small shadow behind her. She is standing on grass. The photo is black and white, but the grass seems newly green. She is so young, but her face contains something both serious and light.

The other photo is the most glamorous of her. It is in sepia and lightly colored. The first thing you notice is her hat which is large and brown and sweeps up in a triangular point the tip of which is out of the photo. Her full lips have been colored red and her eyes glisten blue. Her dark hair cascades down in a controlled forties style. It creates a different triangle as the hair widens in its descent, this one opposite to the one of the hat. The dress is spectacular brown, perhaps of velvet. Here we only glimpse the shoulders, nothing below. Her earrings are pearls. I think it's her eyes that make her look fragile. They shimmer and trust.

The third photo that I see before me is one of myself. In it I am lying on the ground. The photo is taken from an odd angle above me. It is high summer and the grass is lush. My legs are white and bare beneath the drapes of the sarong I wear. They are bent at the knee as if I were propping myself in a disorienting sea of brilliant green. My medium brown hair spills onto the grass. Someone had put clover flowers in it which can just barely be seen. I wear a white v neck t-shirt and sunglasses. And one arm ( a pronoun without a referent) enters the photo from the left and that arm holds my hand. It steadies me in this dizzying place, it comes from without, and firmly steadies me.