10. LOVE OF INDEPENDENCE

As her husband Martin aged, my mother Edith finally came into her own. After all, she was ten years younger than him. Leaning on a cane, she even commuted to a job in downtown Manhattan for a few years after Martin retired. When that factory in the garment district closed down, it was time to nurse her husband through his long illness and then to fight in the courts for the right to keep her half of their savings after he had to be put in a Nursing Home. She won her case, but by then he had passed away, closing his days of unknowing existence that he would have wanted to end earlier.

After his death, almost twenty years of widowhood alone awaited her, and a brand new social life. With her sturdy cane, on weekdays she crossed the street in front of her building to join the other old people at the Nutrition Center for lunch, then maybe Bingo afterwards. Card games at each others’ houses livened the ladies’ weekends. Monthly trips to restaurants or the theatre were a treat that she allowed herself, just to be “in company”. Photo30 The rest of the time, when she was at home, her love of reading took over, and luckily the Public Library was full of books, free of charge.

Her health was as good as could be expected for an old lady in her seventies and then eighties: the lack of balance left from her long-ago stroke was now a common complaint of others her age, and some were much worse off. She only worried when the heavy snowstorms of New York laid down high barriers to crossing the street and going to meet “the people”. The arrival of the snowplows was greeted with glee: “Tomorrow I can go out again”, she told me on the phone. We communicated through weekly letters written in Hungarian, a chance for me to keep up my mother tongue.

There was a return to religion, abandoned so many decades ago at the behest of her atheist husband. Lighting the Friday night candles, she would thank God for how well off she was and ask him just to be patient with me, the errant daughter. They had raised me to be an atheist too, convenient under Communism but it stuck even after my transfer to countries more hospitable to all kinds of belief. For her, the community of the Jewish people in her Bronx neighborhood was another godsend, though she also had Christian friends of all races.

She was in touch by phone and mail with what was left of the family: Martin’s sister-in-law Lilly and his nieces Edith and Eileen, all of whom had left New York for warmer climes in Arizona and Florida, and with her own sister-in-law Eva in Australia, even further away. No relatives were left in the New York area if she had needed help, so she got along on her own.

Each summer she traveled to Italy by herself to visit us, staying for a couple of weeks. Photo31 Fourteen times she crossed the Atlantic Photo32 (though a neighbor once said “you must be wrong, you must mean four...”). Here she also spent much time reading and sitting outside enjoying nature – along with me. Photo33 During our conversations, she only remembered the good times and how much she had loved my father Martin all those years. When I reminded her of how he had treated her badly at certain points, she just couldn’t recall any of it. This must be the sign of a survivor.

At 84 years of age, when her passport expired and her health insurance would no longer cover her abroad, she decided that her traveling days were over. Now it was my turn to make the two or three annual trips to New York, where she continued her usual routine while I enjoyed the tourist life in the city for a week or so at a time. She never blamed me for not having her come to live with us in Italy, her independence was just too important. “While I can go on living like this, I want to be here, not in a country where I can’t talk to anyone. Once I’m no longer able, I certainly don’t want to be a burden to you and your husband”, she insisted.

In her 90th year, a first heart attack took her to the hospital emergency department and from there directly to a nursing home. She could no longer live on her own as she had to be supervised 24 hours a day, but adjusted extremely well to her new environment. “It’s just like being at home and going to the Center for meals and company, except that I don’t have to worry about crossing the street in the snow any more!” Photo34 I had managed to get her into a place right in her neighborhood, so her old friends could visit and even play cards on the weekend as usual.

Unfortunately, she only lasted a couple of months in this new solution, until another heart attack took her away peacefully in her sleep. Then, a different kind of rest was in store for her, next to Martin in the cemetery: the end of a century of love “Beloved husband, beloved wife...”