Love in the time of delirium: As my mother fell into a strange new reality, I found romance again

Four years after being suddenly widowed, my mother was ready to date. After divorcing my husband of 14 years, so was I. It was the first time she and I were ever single at the same time, yet we had different romantic goals. My mom was going for big love; I just wanted a little fun.

She saw a man once a month for expensive dinners. He was kind, but he didn’t want to do any hugging. My mom wanted to hug. And more.

Now that I was ready to get back out there, I imagined us swapping stories and talking about what we planned to wear on each date, like the best friends we were.

That wasn’t what happened.

“The good news is that your mother’s panic and anxiety are lifting,” the social worker said when she called with an update. “The bad news is she thinks she’s in Italy.”

My 79-year-old mother was actually on a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital, where she’d been for four weeks. I had to commit her on Christmas — not because she refused go to, but because she was unmoored in time and space. She couldn’t sign herself in because she didn’t know where she was. While volunteering at an elementary school in October, my mother had fallen and fractured her pelvis. Her body was healing; her mind was not. The fall and resulting hospitalizations triggered delirium which stubbornly refused to lift.

My mother had a history of stubbornness. When I was young, she’d talked often of divorce. Yet her complicated 51-year marriage to my father only ended when he died. I guess that’s love, but it also looked like pain. My mother was the weakling; my father was the smartest person in the room. They once did go to Venice together for the wedding of their friends’ daughter. I wondered if, in her delirium, she’d returned there to be with him, or if she was traveling alone now.  

During her hospitalization, I did some casual dating. A few hours away from the relentless demands of elder care a few times a week was a welcome respite. I wasn’t looking for anything more than that.  

Then I met Andre.

Invited to a New Year’s Eve-Eve party, I decided to wear a black leather dress I’d last put on for my 25th high school reunion. It made me feel bold. I talked to friends and then sat down to listen to music. Someone was playing the piano.

“How do you know Doreen and Ayo?” asked the man sitting next to me, with the smooth voice I later found out he’d used to narrate one of Barack Obama’s audiobooks.

I told Andre I’d met the hosts when our kids were younger. We talked about my son and his two children, his work and mine.

“Like any good West Indian,” he said. “I have four jobs.”

“Like any good Jew,” I said. “So do I.”

I said I regretted not learning to play the piano despite the three years of lessons I took in elementary school.

“My mom plays beautifully, though,” I told him. “I mean, she did. She’s in the hospital now.”  

He spoke with reverence about his own mother, alive and well in her mid-80s. Venezuelan-born, she’d emigrated to the U.S. from Trinidad with nothing to become a successful movie producer while raising three children and helping her 11 siblings.

A man this good-looking who was also caring and family-oriented? He had on nice leather shoes, tan with red stitching. I was impressed.

We’ll tell people we met at this party, I thought. We’d go back next year, for our anniversary. It was an annual event.

Then Andre stood up and said he was going to get a drink.

“So that’s it?” I asked.

“I’ll find you later,” he said.

Unconvinced, I remembered the first rule of parties: Like a shark in water, keep moving.

Meanwhile, my mother was drowning. She didn’t know it was almost New Year’s Eve, or that she’d fallen two weeks before Halloween, or that Thanksgiving had passed, then Hanukkah. The doctors said her delirium might lift, or it might evolve into dementia. The psychiatrist kept referring to “the tincture of time,” promising we’d know more in three months, or six, or nine.

In my family, it had always been like this: If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. My mother’s bipolar disorder had overshadowed my childhood. Her moods had a centrifugal force, pulling in everyone in her orbit. When she was sick, we were all sick.

Years of therapy helped me see that my mother and I could be two separate people having two separate emotional experiences at the same time. A month before I turned 50, I realized that her being in a psychiatric hospital while I was at a holiday party didn’t make me a bad daughter.

On the dance floor later, I saw Andre come downstairs. He made his way over to me. We moved near each other, and then up against each other. At one point the DJ told everyone to grab a partner, and I wrapped my arms around his neck.

“Uh oh,” he breathed into my ear. “We’re in trouble.”

Later, taking a break from dancing, he asked for a kiss, and then for my number. I gave him both.

In the month she’d been in the hospital, my mother mostly thought she was at a school — an institution where she’d felt most at home. She’d held jobs and volunteer positions in elementary education for her entire adult life. In a recent call, she’d cheerfully told me about a celebration for her in the teachers’ room.

“Will you help me write thank-you notes after the party?” she asked. I assured her I would.

“You sound so good. I can’t believe it,” she kept saying. I knew what she couldn’t believe was that I was living a life apart from her. It didn’t mean I didn’t love her. It meant I loved myself, too.

As the party wound down, Andre walked me out and leaned me against my Honda Civic. We kissed again, then we each went into our own cars and drove away. I didn’t know if I’d hear from him, but I did. A first date led to a second and then a third.

One night in January, Andre’s children were at their mother’s, so I went to his place. He’d ordered what I’d told him was my favorite food, sushi. Suggested we watch the beloved movie I’d mentioned, "Terms of Endearment." Bought the whiskey I drank: Jameson.

Our hours together slipped by. Now I was unmoored in time and space, too.

I wished my mom could find this kind of happiness with her own dream man. The dam between us had always been porous. Now it had burst, and what she wanted most was rushing into my own life.

I wondered if what I felt for Andre was novelty, the newness of initial attraction. I’d never found romantic love to be enduring. I was worried I might look silly to friends I told about him, or get hurt in the end.

But who gets to say what was real? One person’s love could be another person’s lust could be another person’s pain. Maybe someone’s Italy was always going to be someone else’s psychiatric hospital.

What if early love was just another form of delirium? It might lift, or evolve into something deeper. We’d only know given the tincture of time. I told myself it didn’t matter if I felt this way in three months, or six, or nine. I felt this way now. I wasn’t going to back away from it. Instead, I’d going to lean in.

When my mother’s pragmatic sister asked for an update on my mom’s recovery in late January, I told her about the improved mood but continued confusion. My aunt liked rules and order. She was having a hard time with my mom’s delusions. When my mother asked her recently why my father hadn’t come to visit, my aunt answered, “Because he died four years ago.”

I told my aunt I was planning to go along with whatever my mother said, because if we wanted to be with her, we had to step into her reality. My mom’s psychiatrist suggested we pretend we were doing improv with my mother. Take her lead and run with it.

“But how will she feel when she finds out she’s in a hospital?” my aunt asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” I told her. “Right now, she’s in Italy.”  

On February 14, my mother was officially diagnosed with dementia. It hurt, letting go of the hope she would fully recover. Holding onto a different sort of hope, I asked Andre to be my Valentine. He said yes.