The Most Beautiful Pain in the World
I am a 55 year old man who believes that in my life I have only been loved by one person, my Mother. Sure, sometimes I feel sad that her love is the only love I have received in my life but on most days I am just thankful to have had any love in my life at all. I do not take that for granted as I am very aware that every single day that human beings exist someone will die without ever having been loved.
My Mom was 45 years old when I was born. She told me that she had tried to have children her whole adult life but it only happened when her “change of life”, as she called it, happened, that being menopause. I was her only child and clearly the love of her life.
At 16 years old on Easter my Mom was in a car accident that changed our lives forever. She barely survived the accident, almost lost a leg and was in a coma for several months. She also had brain damage which changed her forever, she would always be my Mom but she was never again the same person I knew before the accident.
This was really tough on me but I was simply thankful she was still alive and that I was not all alone in what, at that time, I found to be an imposing world. I had family but was not close to anyone mainly because most of them were so much older than me.
My Father was 65 years old when I was born and had died a few months before Mom’s accident. I was not close to my Dad, I do not think he hated me but I do think he resented me as I believe he expected to grow old and die with the full attention of his younger wife. I screwed up his plans when I popped up so late in his life.
Mom recognized me for the first year or two after the accident but as the years went by she eventually did not recognize the older version of me. As best I can tell she always remembered me as the child she knew before the accident and we all know how quickly you can physically change at that age.
My Aunt, my mother’s sister, lived with and took care of Mom while I fulfilled her dream of me going to and graduating from college, the first person to do that in our family. After my Aunt died I found someone to live with and take care of Mom while I finished college.
I lived with Mom for awhile but eventually made the decision to put her in an assisted living facility. This was the toughest decision I ever made in my life, a decision to this day I regret as I feel so much guilt that I did not personally take care of her and spend as much time with her as I possibly could until the day she died. She gave me life, that was the least I could have done for her.
I have no memory of exactly when she first no longer recognized me but when it happened is when I discovered the most beautiful pain in the world. The only way for me to explain her mental health at this time is to imagine someone with dementia or Alzheimer’s. She did not really have conversations with anyone, beyond telling you if she needed something or to maybe answer a simple question, but would basically talk to herself at you.
She did not have many topics, she rarely mentioned my father, her husband and mainly would talk about her Mother and me, her son. She would, on a regular basis, reference her Mother in stories of what she taught her, this being her greatest hit, “Mom taught me to be kind to everyone, no matter the color of their skin, and anyone that knocked on our door and said they were hungry would be fed, she turned no one away no matter how little we had for ourselves.”
I would imagine I heard that line or some variation of it at least five hundred times before she died. Mom was a child during the Great Depression and I can only imagine the pain and confusion of people knocking on your door and telling you that they are hungry.
That left me as the main topic in her life. She could talk about me and how much she loved me for hours at a time. She never once had a bad thing to say about me, did not have one complaint about her son, her love was as pure as anything I have ever experienced, seen, read or heard about in my life. In her damaged mind I was perfect.
Sitting with her for hours was both the most beautiful and the most painful experience of my life. Beautiful because I will never experience such a pure and perfect love ever again in my life but it was the most painful because I could not share it with her, she was telling a stranger about her perfect son.
That is what truly made it such a beautiful experience, she did not recognize me, she simply felt a need to tell anyone that visited her, sadly few visited, about how much she loved her son. Even her caretakers would tell me, “she truly loves you, you are all she ever talks about.”
I would tell her at least once on every visit, sometimes several times, that I was, in fact, her son. I did this for a moment of perfect personal joy as she would light up and smile at me with true happiness in her eyes for a few seconds after I told her this only to quickly dissolve in to confusion as she obviously did not recognize this adult man sitting in front of her. After a few seconds of this confusion she would forget what we were just talking about and the routine of my visits would start over, my telling her that I was her son so quickly forgotten.
I will never be able to describe to anyone the exquisite pain I felt on these visits. The only metaphor I have is, imagine having true happiness sitting a few feet away from you only for it to always quickly dissolve when you desperately reach out to grab it, already knowing that all you will be left with is this beautiful and perfect pain.
The insane thing about this routine was that every single time I told her that I was her son, when she lit up and smiled at me with joy in her eyes, I would always believe for just a moment that she would go back to normal and tell me that she loved me. In this moment we would sit and have one of our silly Mother and son conversations complete with bad jokes, laughing and talking about nothing really that important. This moment of insanity and joy that I lived over and over hundreds of times with her was a big reason I was able to survive life for so many years.
Mom has been dead for 15 years now and a day does not go by that I do not relive this moment I describe above. I no longer care if I live or die but I do know that she would want me to live and that is all I have left to give her, the only way I know how to express my love to her, and that is to continue living no matter how painful I find life.
With that said, I can not lie, I would gladly give up my life if I could share that moment of joy with my Mom just one last time. I would tell her that I am her son and that I love her, she would smile at me with joy on her face and in her eyes and then death would visit both of us just before reality sets in and the smile leaves her face. In this moment before death my life would be perfect.
