When Kathleen was 15, her mother barely survived an accident that totaled her car. A woman of extraordinary vitality, she awoke from months in a coma to struggle with suicidal depression, finally reaching a new normal defined by losses unimaginable to most. Brain damage on top of the inevitable friction between any mother and daughter almost guaranteed an end to a loving connection. Yet theirs endured and grew.
Here are some of the questions Kathleen agreed to answer for us.
What was your mother able to do after the accident?
Except for the bruise on her forehead, there wasn’t a scratch on her. The car was totaled. In a sense, she was too. After February 19, 1960, my mother was unable to stand or walk or speak clearly or read or write. She couldn’t drive or bathe or leave the house on her own. She couldn’t fix a meal for someone she loved. She never knew how old she was, where she lived, or what day it was. She didn’t know what was next or what just happened. She recalled little of the past. For the most part, she lived in a free-floating cloud of present moments. Nonetheless, she maintained her sense of humor and could sort of play games she had learned before the accident.
How did the accident affect your life as a teenager?
The accident occurred at a time when I was distancing myself from my mother in every way possible. And then she disappeared from my life. I wanted her back more than I’d ever wanted anything. I wanted things to be the same. She spent three months in a coma, and when she returned home by ambulance, she resumed her place at the center of our family, only it was her needs that held her there, not her high spirits and energy. My father hired a full-time nurse on weekdays. My grandmother came on the weekends. My brother and I had few additional responsibilities. We stayed with my mother when my father had evening meetings, and I cooked dinners a few times. But my father took over her household responsibilities. At school, I pretended nothing had happened, but I didn’t invite friends over anymore. For a very long time, I faked being someone on whom the sky had not fallen. I prayed for my mother to be my mother again. Gradually, over the first decade after the accident, bits of her old self—her spirit, her sense of humor—reappeared.
Did you ever get counseling for the impact her accident had on you?
Talk therapy might have benefited the family, but at the time, only the severely mentally ill saw psychiatrists or psychologists. It was the fifties. People didn’t delve into their feelings or openly share them. And perhaps more than most, our family “stiff-upper-lipped-it” and carried on. “Suffer in silence,” was my father’s mantra throughout my childhood when my brother and I complained about cuts, bruises, blisters, mosquito bites, or sunburns. Each of the four of us grappled with our changed lives on our own.
Why did you decide to write The Lady with the Crown?
Since the age of fifteen, whenever I met someone new and began talking about my life, I’d end up at The Accident, my mother’s accident. One day she was baking a chocolate cake for my brother’s thirteenth birthday and quizzing me about whether I wanted a blue satin prom dress with short sleeves or a taffeta print one with spaghetti straps. The next day, she was in a coma. The Accident is the one story I can never omit in even the most casual getting-to-know you exchange. I wrote The Lady with the Crown to probe the ways it has shaped me and honor the way my mother went on to live. I wrote the book to honor her and individuals like her whose worlds are small, who live in anonymity, who face each day with courage and strength.
Why is the book called The Lady with the Crown?
My mother grew up poor. She was frugal. In the name of saving me money, she “collected” things like boxes of cereal and packets of mayonnaise from the dining room at the nursing home, table decorations, books from the library there, magazine coupons from her hairdresser’s, and once, a wallet. She hid these pilfered items and passed them on to me.
On her 90th birthday, I gave her a crown to wear, and she insisted on wearing it every day for about a year. During this time, she “collected” something that belonged to a little boy who was visiting his grandmother. No one could find it, but he remembered where he’d last seen it. “The lady with the crown had it,” he told his parents.
What do you hope readers will take away from The Lady?
It would be lovely if this story surprised readers’ expectations given the announced subject. For the narrative is not about silver linings. My family was never grateful. We weren’t specially equipped to handle a random colossal accident. We did not gain anything that compensated for what we lost. In other words, we would have been worlds better off if The Accident had never happened. Yet the fact is, we all survived and carried on our lives with as much love and creativity as we could muster, my father with uncommon grace. And it was my brain-injured yet remarkable mother who showed us how.
The Lady with the Crown can be found at Fuze Publishing and Amazon.
Kathleen would appreciate your comments and feedback!