I started throwing birthday parties for my mother when she turned sixty.
I was in my twenties, and sixty sounded incredibly old. I began a campaign of relentless teasing. When she turned fifty-six, I said,
“Four from sixty!”
And she’d groan, and we’d laugh. Then with great affection, she told me what a terrible person I was.
I loved teasing her. It was hard to do, as she didn’t take most ribbing well. But there was something about her age which allowed her to laugh. My mother was such a life force, old age seemed ridiculous.
It’s funny. I’ve lived long enough to understand just how ridiculous it is. In September, I will be one from sixty. It’s absurd, impossible.
She turned sixty in 1989. I was home for a month or two. I’d try and get away to Virginia for a bit every summer I lived in New York.
There were parts of a New York City summer I loved, like the emptiness of it. Back then, the rich people left the rest of us to the terrible heat and overwhelming smell of garbage. It was a lovely feeling, this absence of stockbrokers and ladies who lunch. It was strangely romantic. I remember walking to work at twilight with such happiness.
I connected to the deep gratitude I feel for the existence of New York City, and the relief of living there.
But it did wear on me, so the privilege of trotting off to Virginia for a month or two and working on my tan at the pool had an appeal. I was there the summer she finally reached the dreaded age.
After many years of poking fun, I decided to celebrate the event and throw her a big party.
It occurs to me, in this moment, that birthday party was the first big party I ever threw. I love to entertain, to cook, to throw a good time for my excellent friends. I didn’t realize till now it started with my mother’s sixtieth.
This has been a week of realizations. I am in Virginia, alone with my damned feelings.
The biggest realization is it’s no use fighting grief, no matter how inconvenient. I can move through it.
I don’t have to stay stuck there if I’m willing to sit with it for a bit. It’s a visitor, not a roommate.
I told my mother I had plans.
I couldn’t give her too much information because she’d tell me I couldn’t possibly have thirty people over, it was too much trouble, and a thousand other reasons not to have a party. So I just told her to be there or be square.
And I started frying chicken. Because fried chicken is something everyone down here loves, and I could do it in advance. I started cooking.
Pro tip: frying chicken for thirty people takes a long time. I was still frying at 4 am on her birthday. She came downstairs into the kitchen because she heard me. She walked in and said,
“What on earth!”
“I’m almost done,” I said. “This is the last batch.”
She asked why I needed so much chicken, and I finally told her thirty people were expected. She couldn’t believe it.
I love remembering our chat in the wee hours.
I have a distinct memory of her delight as each of her friends got out of their cars and wished her happy birthday. It was beautiful. Occasionally, if you’re lucky, you get to see what you mean to the people in your life. This was one of those days. She saw what she meant to her friends.
She had a wonderful time but told me I wasn’t to do something like that every year, once in a lifetime was enough. She was never comfortable being celebrated.
I compromised. Every ten years, I’d throw a big party. My brother and I threw her a big surprise party at her dance studio on her 70th. Her 80th was held at the local French restaurant.
But as her 90th approached, she let me know she couldn’t handle being around so many people. She didn’t use the word overwhelming, but it was.
She loved to play bridge, though, and did accept a bridge party.
Starting with her 89th birthday, I’d host a bridge game in her honor. The year she turned ninety, we had two tables instead of one. I’d make tea things, like cucumber sandwiches. We kept doing it.
The last couple of years, she told me she didn’t know if she could even play bridge. She ended up being the winner both times.
Bridge is a game involving math, strategy, and concentration. You have to count, keeping track of four suits of cards and forty points in the deck. It’s a lot of information to process.
She didn’t have devastating cognition issues, but in her final few years, she wasn’t able to hold information in her head the way she used to. I noticed she could only deal with one thing at a time.
For instance, if we were talking about one topic, and an additional topic was introduced, she couldn’t think straight. Multi-tasking and multi-thinking were gone.
She hated it. Nothing upset her as much as the idea of her brain fading. To win at bridge was a victory, a confirmation her brain was still right.
And it was, most times.
The aspect of aging most of the press got wrong about President Biden is that cognition problems aren’t linear. Neither is aging. You can have a bad moment or two, and still function at a high level.
The aspect of aging President Biden may have initially gotten wrong is that cognition problems are a part of getting older. And just because you can run the country today, doesn’t mean you can do it for the next four years.
The aspect of aging we all get wrong is how terrifying it is. Living to a ripe old age is not always fun. It can be a brutal experience physically, mentally, financially, and worst of all, emotionally. We become a witness to our own slow death.
The aspect of President Biden’s condition we don’t talk enough about is that he’s had COVID three times.
I didn’t realize till I heard it on the radio. It might explain a lot.
My mother had a pacemaker put in when she was 92 years old. She wasn’t at all sure she’d survive the surgery, but it ended up being a miraculous cure for her Afib. After the surgery she had a fantastic year and was suddenly capable of things she hadn’t been able to do in a long time. She no longer had chronic exhaustion.
The Bettie Machete photo I have was taken that year.
But at 93, she got COVID-19 for the first time.
Data was just beginning to emerge that COVID can affect every system in the body, including the brain. My mother’s health plummeted. Countless times I asked my older brother, a physician, how on earth she could have gone back into Afib when she had a pacemaker.
The infection itself was brief. She was hospitalized for a day or two because of pneumonia but got better.
Her overall health was never the same. I can’t help wondering if the President’s COVID infections had something to do with his debate performance.
I have no reason to think he isn’t perfectly capable of running the country to the end of his term. But those lapses of uncertainty, on such painful, public display, do make me wonder how COVID affected him.
There’s been a lot of talk in the press about who knew what when, concerning his health. But it’s not easy for anyone to tell, because cognitive decline as we understand it may be a myth. Whatever it is, it’s rarely linear.
We have no reason to fear the next six months. As a friend reminded me—the presidency is not really one person. There is a team of advisors around him.
When we played bridge on my mom’s 94th I thought it was probably her last game, and I was right. I remember she looked at her cards once and said,
“I don’t know what to do.”
And we just replied it was time to bid. We kept the tone very matter of fact. People get confused at bridge all the time.
Now seems to be a good time to mention how painful it is to watch someone as their mind changes.
When people say they want to live longer, they don’t realize they won’t have more years in their thirties and forties. The nineties are a very different decade. Those are the extra years we get.
She did not want to be alive when her body couldn’t function, and she definitely didn’t want to be alive when her mind was gone.
If I were offered the years my mother lived through in her nineties, I’d respectfully decline.
For the last couple of birthdays, we’ve been lucky enough to have my friend Jeanette play with us.
Jeanette is an excellent player and from a family like my mother’s, entrenched in the area for ages. When we first became friends, she said to me,
“It’s so nice to know someone who eats the old foods!”
These weird, quasi-British-Southern recipes handed down generation after generation are the old foods.
Jeanette makes a kind of green tomato pickle my mother adored. She always brought her a jar for a birthday present. It was undoubtedly my mother’s favorite present, and the only one she wanted. I put a slice of it on her every sandwich.
We do love our pickles.
July 9th marked six months since my mother died. Right around then, Jeanette contacted me.
“I’d like to do Bettie’s memorial bridge party, are you going to be in town?”
Yes I am, I declared. I was delighted.
I’ve skated through grief until recently. I’ve been too busy to be sad, and I was relieved when my mother died for the reasons I’ve addressed.
This month has been tough. I was glad to know I’d be with friends.
The morning of my mom’s birthday, I got up very early. I’d purchased some flowers at the farmer’s market for her grave. I went outside and cut some crepe myrtle for my father’s. Then I got in the car and drove out to the cemetery.
I felt peaceful there, seeing my parent’s graves together. But I cried on the way home.
I don’t want anniversaries and birthdays to get me like this. I expected this kind of sadness right after she died, not now.
And what I want has nothing to do with it. I can scroll through my Facebook feed to see countless others post things about the anniversary of a loved one’s death. They’re hard.
It’s very irritating to join the human race.
My oldest friend and neighbor Tammy played. She was closest to my mom. And our friend Karen drove from the Northern Neck to join us as our fourth.
She’s gone through the ringer the last few years with cancer. She looks better than I’ve ever seen her, absolutely brimming with good health. It was wonderful to see her in person.
As I place the fruit salad I brought, I see all the care Jeanette took with the food. She made cucumber sandwiches. There is a Victoria sponge cake she’s cutting, filling with jam and whipped cream. All the things Bettie loved are on the table for us to enjoy.
And then Jeanette’s husband comes in and says,
“Biden just left the race. He’s out.”
I sit at a table of women my age, at a party to celebrate my mother, with the prospect of a woman our age as the next president. We are giddy with relief. A huge weight has lifted.
A friend of mine said it best. She wrote on social media,
“Things have righted themselves.”
They have. I got through my own grief with my beautiful friends. I’m on the other side.
And it looks like our nation has gotten through ours. We have hope again.
You cannot tell me my mother did not speak to The Management.
What?
People believe all sorts of weird things to explain life. I’m happy to believe getting Kamala on her birthday was not a coincidence.
Even I can get mystical one percent of the time.
I know I’m in dangerous waters writing about cognition and old age.
But this is both what I know, and don’t know. The brain is mysterious. Old age is mysterious. Grief is mysterious. And both my mother and I worried about her brain as she aged.
It’s enraging the press doesn’t hold the GOP to the same standards as the Democratic Party. I wish Trump’s psychopathy got the same attention Biden’s age has.
But at least half our presidential ticket is now unequivocally devoid of the problems which can accompany an aging brain.
The relief I feel is simple:
I spent years worrying about my mother’s mind. I don’t want to worry about our president’s.
If Kamala Harris is elected, I won’t have to.
I'm so grateful that I got to know your mother even though it was only for her later years. She was a force to be reckoned with even her nineties! I do believe in a bit of divine intervention and am sure she was involved in the change in candidates. I hope we still celebrate Bettie's birthday when we're in our eighties and nineties by playing bridge.
What a BEAUTIFUL thought. Thank you.