I had promised that I would digitize, translate and publish my mother’s first book by the time of her birthday, November 23. But I have failed to do so.

Excuses are a dime a dozen. (A metaphor that is not tied to CPI, for sure.)

But, in my defense, I have been somewhat busy with my mother’s most involved project: my father.

I write you from the 5th floor of the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena; the hospital where our two children were born and where my father has been admitted after falling five times this week.

Is five a high number? I’m told that n > 0 is too high.

My father has fallen some 12, 13, 14 times in the last four months. When he last fell, yesterday morning, I thought he had impaled himself through the eye. Luckily, he had not, or else our son, 13, would have seen the aftermath. And while our son may still become a doctor, there’s a time and place for anatomy class and it’s almost certainly not 7:30 am on a rainy Friday morning.

My mother’s book, Pensando en ti, (Thinking of you), is a slim volume, written quickly in the months after she arrived to the United States. She had a weekly radio program on a local AM station and the chapters were informed by the calls she took, and advice she gave, on that show.

After Cuba, we left Spain because my father decided we needed to. Or, simply, because he wanted to. (She did not.)

That was the way our family worked. Or didn’t.

As those of you who have read my mother’s autobiography will remember, the subtext on most pages and literal text on more than a few, is that my mother had low self-esteem. A product of the patriarchy, she struggled quite literally to become her own person up until the moment she passed away.

In this way, she was like most of us, born into a world that is at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile to our wellbeing.

That she became a caretaker, a healer, is not ironic. It’s trite.

She wanted for others what she herself may have lacked. Tranquility, perhaps. But more likely the grace of God, which is something else entirely.

Gracias.

During my last few months with my father, the longest we have lived together in some 30 years, I’ve had many occasions to remember the past he cannot. And here I don’t mean that he suffers from memory loss – though he may, in fact have some kind of dementia – but that his ego cannot allow the wound to self that such remembering would cause.

For example, when he tells our 13 year-old son that he is gentler than I am, I cannot remind him that when I was our son’s age he would regularly call me a degenerate.

I did not know what the word meant. Perhaps, neither did my father, but he had a bad habit of hurting those around him. It was only a few years later that my mother had to call the police to keep him from entering their home during one very special Christmas.

All of our holidays were marred, one way or another, by his mental illness. And here I speak not just of chemical imbalances but also the kind of moral rot that such illnesses can fester.

Morality is simply believing that other people matter. And mental illness forecloses people from their own reality, let alone the permanence of others.

My mother, a psychologist, knew mental illness intimately. Her mother was mentally ill. So was her husband.

Living with the mentally ill means there is no tranquility. But grace is always achievable. Or so we may choose to believe.

Physician, heal thyself.

The common understanding of this phrase is that a doctor, say, a psychologist, should first heal their own infirmities before attempting to heal others.

But that understanding is wrong.

In context, the person to whom the phrase is most often attributed is discussing the inevitability of suffering.

After withstanding the temptations of earthly power, of a life without suffering, Jesus returns to Nazareth and is greeted warmly. While visiting the temple, he says:

“Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’”

[Translation: “Heal some people! Show us a magic trick!”]

To which Jesus replies:

“No prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”

In sum, good, pious people will suffer. There’s no avoiding it. What then, can a good doctor do?

Harm reduction

When you understand the source of your pain, it hurts less. This is an observable fact. We are wired this way.

My mother’s faith in God was such that she chose, time and again, to suffer in the image of God.

Almost certainly, she believed that such suffering is a natural phenomenon, not unlike the sunsets she admired.

I have a different point of view.

I choose to regret some of her choices; some of the battles she chose not to fight. I fully acknowledge that doing so is an exercise in nihilism: there is no alternative to the history we know. It is unknowable and thus impossible.

But I question her decisions to subjugate herself, and our family, to my father’s will, time and again.

Some ten years ago she chose to tear herself away from her grandchildren so as to spare them her husband’s faults, saying, explicitly, “We can’t live near you, it will hurt your family.”

But the moment she died (as per “God’s plan”), she returned him to us. Almost as helpless as when she found him. A true child of God.

This wasn’t her plan. And yet, I can’t help but think she prayed about it, long and hard.