My Mother’s Memory Loss Helped Heal Old Wounds Between Us

Four years ago, my mother, now 95, suffered a collapse due to a tiny, inoperable, nonmalignant brain tumor called a meningioma. I made the decision to bring her home to recuperate with me rather than placing her in a rehab facility. On the seven-hour drive from my home in Norfolk, Virginia, to New Jersey to pick her up, I had a lot of time to fret over how she would greet me, and how impossible the task of becoming her caregiver would be.

We had always had a touch-and-go relationship. Mom never seemed to like anything about me. She was a slender, stylish, beautiful, self-made Manhattan fashion designer; I was her chubby daughter who loved reading and comfortable shoes and had the additional bad luck of looking like my late father, who had been a violent alcoholic. I longed for her approval and always tried to protect her — from my father’s beatings, from my bipolar younger brother’s aggressive outbursts.

Author Lisa Suhay’s mother, 95, sports a flower crown to greet children as part of Suhay’s Fairy Tree project in Norfolk, Virginia.

Courtesy Lisa Suhay

Yet she resented what she considered my interference. At the end of our last visit before her collapse in 2022, she told me in front of my then-teenage daughter, “If I hadn’t been pregnant with you, I’d never have had to marry your father. Everything would have been different. I wish you’d never been born!”

I nervously entered the rehabilitation center in New Jersey and found her in the middle of a group physical therapy session. Imagine my surprise when she shouted to the room, “My daughter! This is my wonderful daughter! I told you she was coming for me.”

She appeared not to remember any of her resentment toward me. Dr. Mark C. Flemmer, a geriatrician and internist in Norfolk, later explained to me that “a meningioma would have to be very large indeed to cause this kind of memory and personality alteration, and hers is small. That makes it a puzzle, more likely to be caused by anything from multi-infarct or Lewy body dementia to PICS [Post-Intensive Care Syndrome].”

The cause isn’t as important as the result: I was greeted like a celebrity. My mother had been bragging about her daughter: the children’s book author, the journalist who defied death in the Gulf War, the chess teacher.