Molly Jong-Fast on Human Frailty and Unlearning Erica Jong’s Lessons

It was a week that felt like a year, one of those weeks that contained all the scary things you might spend your life worrying about, the things that might never happen. Our very elderly diabetic dog, Spartacus, had had a grand mal seizure on our bed.

During the seizure, I wondered if I too had slipped into unreality. (That was the problem with the demented-mother thing: I was so codependent, so enmeshed, that I always wondered if I also had the same bad brain my mother did.)

Spartacus bit his tongue and bled all over the fancy quilt I bought with the money from my podcast. Spartacus survived, continuing his existence as an animal now largely Scotch‑taped together.

The seizure occurred the night after Matt and I had signed the power of attorney for my eighty-one‑year‑old mother and eighty‑two‑year‑old stepfather. Or maybe the seizure was the night after that? It was just too much to absorb between the dog and my mother and my stepfather. All these things happened during the same week, but the order of them was in my mind never entirely clear.

It had already been three years since we started talking about Mom’s mind going. It had been almost two years since we’d gotten the diagnosis from Dr. Devi. Covid had finally gone away but you wouldn’t have known it, since Mom and Ken never left the apartment.

Ken had settled into Parkinson’s. He refused to do much of the treatment plan. Mom could still remember who I was, but often not a lot else. Sometimes she didn’t remember her grandchildren. Sometimes she didn’t remember that she is—that she was—a writer. Things didn’t fit together for her anymore. Sometimes she was a little girl, and sometimes her parents were still alive.

She and Ken spent a lot of time in their living room, reading, or trying to read, the paper. The weird thing was that, although they had no idea what was going on, they actually seemed pretty happy. But I knew that they were at the end of the road, happiness-wise. I knew what was to come, and I feared it, and so with the lawyers I did the papers that would let me take over my parents’ lives.

And then the writer Fay Weldon died. I didn’t know Fay all that well, but I loved her. I’d stayed at her house a few different summers when I was a druggy teen in the nineties. She was the kind of writer I had always wanted to be. Hilarious, stylish, sardonic, and also just completely focused on the plight of the middle‑aged woman. She was funny, but also had a rage that I admired.

I had spent the day of Saturday, January 7, working on an essay about her. Even though she was ninety‑one, I was bereft about her death. Because I’m a terrible person, Fay’s death wasn’t, for me, really about Fay; Fay’s death was about the end of my life, my nineties life, that is, the end of summers smoking pot on Hampstead Heath. But the big trauma of a week of traumas was to come later that night.

Matt went to the ER that Saturday evening for stomach pains. He’d believed the irritation was caused by the weird diet drug he was taking, because it gave everyone diarrhea and bloating. It’s a drug whose side effects basically mimic Crohn’s disease, a disorder my family knows well, since one of our kids has been suffering from it since he was five.

I went to bed, sad about Fay, sad about the dog, sad about my mother’s future. But I wasn’t worried about Matt. Yet.

I was sleeping, or sort of sleeping, when my phone rang at 3:00 a.m.

“They found a mass on my pancreas,” Matt said.

I responded to Matt with one of the things people say when confronted with bad news. I can’t remember the exact string of words. Maybe I said “Fuck.” Maybe I said “No.” Maybe I said something else, maybe I offered a platitude. I had gotten good at platitudes recently. I had gotten really good at talking but conveying very little actual content.

“They say they think it’s maybe probably possibly cancer,” he added. “I’m going to walk home.”

That phrase “Maybe probably possibly cancer” jangled in my head. My husband comes from one of those cancer families—his aunts, uncles, and a cousin: all dead from cancer.

Even though Matt and I are distantly related, my family isn’t a cancer family like that. We’re an autoimmune family: Crohn’s (as I said), MS, Parkinson’s—all the nasty stuff that doesn’t kill you right away but that you suffer with for years, for decades and decades. Like being stuck sitting next to my mother when she makes one of her drunken toasts—the Jong brand is all about suffering.

An hour later, a half hour later, two hours later—who knows—Matt came home and got into bed. I stared at the wall and told him I didn’t want him to die. Or maybe I dreamed that part. I was never a good sleeper as a child. I would sleepwalk. Sometimes I just wouldn’t sleep for nights and nights in a row.

I thought about the article I read about the Italian family of aristocrats who didn’t sleep. They each went mad and died. I understood this now.

I have been with Matt since I was twenty‑three. That’s more than twenty years, for those doing the math. I’ve never been an adult without him.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. All I could think about was the idea of living without him. Matt, I should add, is not one of those people who is easy to live with: he is removed, hard to connect with, sometimes fragile, and slightly terrified of people.

I am not that way: I’m bossy and annoying. I’m just as hard to live with, but in an entirely different way. And of course, you don’t marry someone who is fourteen years older than you are without the knowledge that you will probably outlive them, but I had never played it out like this. Matt was only fifty‑nine.

The following morning was Sunday. We stared at each other blankly and tried to think of things to say that would stop us from feeling scared. What lie would we tell our children? Matt wanted to tell them the truth. I wanted to lie. Should we call it a “mass” or a “tumor?”

We decided we didn’t want to call it a tumor because a “tumor” sounded quite a lot scarier. A “mass” could be anything—a group of people, a group of blood vessels, a group of cockapoos meeting in Central Park for a cockapoo meetup.

We pretended to be normal people that day. We did things normal people do. I didn’t visit my mother in the weird apartment that smelled like dog poop that I would soon need to move her out of. I couldn’t handle the added stress of her weird state. Instead, I just watched The Larry Sanders Show with my eldest child, who was supposed to go back to college in a few days.

Later in the afternoon, Matt told me about all the places he’d stashed our money—in checking accounts and in crypto. He was oddly thrilled to tell me about all these contingency plans. When you’ve spent your entire life obsessing about worst‑case scenarios, there’s something weirdly gratifying when it happens.

I didn’t mention this to him, of course, but I couldn’t help noticing that Matt had…well, a smell. It was a smell that showers seemed unable to dislodge. He smelled sick. I’m not a doctor (I mean, obviously), but I’ve always been able to tell when people are sick.

I kept having obsessive thoughts. I kept thinking, “I am a widow. I am a forty‑four‑year‑old widow.” But one of the benefits of being the daughter of a world‑class narcissist is that I can look at my situation and know that I shouldn’t behave in it the way my mother would.

I kept thinking about when my stepfather was diagnosed with Parkinson’s—it was before my mother was diagnosed with dementia, and I could tell that she was actually toying with the idea of leaving him. I could tell it was happening right in front of my eyes. I could feel it. Even later on, as her memory started to go, she still experimented with the idea of putting him in a home.

I remember the following strange exchange like it was yesterday. We were sitting in her office, drinking coffee. She was speaking in hushed tones. I kept wondering what she was getting at. It’s funny, but even after so many years of knowing my mother, I could still be surprised at who she was.

Or maybe it was that I just could never really accept who she was. “Maybe it’s time to put your stepfather somewhere,” she said. “Somewhere he can get the help he needs.”

As soon as I realized what she was saying, I was furious with her. Yet I understood why she was saying it. He had stopped being able to devote himself to her. He had stopped being the person she had married. For so many years Mom had made me compete with Ken for her love, and now I had won—sort of. But I wasn’t going to enable this betrayal.

“No, Mom. We’re not doing that. You are not leaving Ken.” Here is something crucial to remember: I am the product of that person, that person who left every man the instant he got sick, or, even worse, boring. That woman created me.

______________________________

How to Lose Your Mother by Molly Jong-Fast is available via Viking.