My mother, a “mirror image of my Motherland,” died on March 24.  She was in bed, watching her favorite figure skating program, and she simply fell asleep, simply glided off to another world.  A seemingly painless end to a long life.   Three lives, to be exact.  First was Ivanovo, where she sewed up the wounded in a military hospital one mile from the front line; where she buried her younger brother maimed during the war, gave birth to my older sister, and married my father, in that order.  Then it was Leningrad, where she gave birth to me at 41 before burying my father and her parents, all while teaching anatomy at a medical institute, both to maintain her professional skills and to make ends meet.  Her last life was in my house in New Jersey, where she realized – straight from her arrival – that every Russian official had lied to her, that there was no bright future shining on the Soviet horizon; where she raised my daughter and, at my request, wrote down the story of her life.  As Frank McCourt would say, she had a good run.

And maybe she did, but knowing that does not make it any easier.

All I can think of is how I resented all the small things I had to do in the last few years – take her to never ending doctors’ appointments, cut her hair, cook buckwheat with onions, a taste from the kitchens of her two earlier lives, and watch her deteriorate before my eyes.  Her legs refused to walk, she would lament, her ears refused to hear.  How I resented that my husband and I couldn’t jump in the car and spend a weekend with friends in Shelter Island, that every trip had to be planned and thought through. Things that seem so small and ludicrously unimportant now seemed so monumental then.

She stoically endured my inattention, my total immersion into my own life, filling her days with reading mysteries, chopping vegetables for salad, and watching figure skating on a television channel from Moscow.  Orderly and determined to survive, she plodded on, just as she did in Ivanovo, just as she did in Leningrad.  She was always a survivor and she kept on living, as she used to say, for her two brothers killed in the war  – the one who died in their Ivanovo house in 1942, the other whose body had been plowed into the warm earth of western Russia when German tanks crossed the Soviet border with Poland in June of 1941.  She survived 98 years – thanks to her tenacity, my grandparents’ genes and good American medicine.  She was fortunate to have lived three lives, the last of which turned out to be my responsibility and my privilege.  I only hope she was happy.

My mother – a World War II surgeon, the permanent chairman of the family Politburo she had installed in our Leningrad kitchen, and a mirror image of my Soviet Motherland – was lying in Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, NJ, hooked to an IV and an oxygen tank.  She had grown frail within a week or two prior to her scheduled departure for New Orleans for an annual three-month winter stay at my sister’s.  The day before her flight she had difficulty breathing and could barely get out of bed.  I was at work on the morning when I called her doctor, who told me to dial 911.

It was the last day of the semester; I had thirty students to advise and register.  When I reached the hospital around 3 in the afternoon, my mother was just being admitted to the cardio unit.  “Congestive heart failure and probably a touch of pneumonia,” said Dr. Sharma, a soft-spoken woman in her 30s, whose badge identified her as a hospitalist.

My mother smiled when she saw me, relieved.  She looked small in the middle of the tangle of tubes, her gnarled fingers over the cover, like a small bird’s claws.  When did this all happen?  Did I miss the obvious signs of illness, the inevitable cues of aging?  Did I ignore her complaints of dizziness, her frequent refrain that her legs refused to walk?  Or was the deterioration so gradual, so insidiously slow that I simply did not notice it, like you don’t notice a rotting tooth until one day the pain stabs through your gum and the dentist tells you she has to pull the tooth because it is too late to save it.

Or maybe it was much more simple and ordinary.  I lived my life – teaching ESL classes, making soups, checking my daughter’s homework, walking the dog – a life where my mother, living downstairs in the basement apartment of my house, was nothing but a parenthesis.  In the morning I heard a vent go on in her bathroom; in the afternoon I heard a knife drumming on the cutting board as she chopped vegetables for salad.  Her Russian TV programs used to boom all the way up to my kitchen, until we bought her a pair of headphones.  Then I barely heard her at all.  As years passed, I talked to her less and less frequently.  Back in Leningrad, I used to have heated arguments with my mother, needing to defend my ground; here, with our roles reversed – with her living with me and not the other way around – I no longer had to assert myself.  In essence, I stopped talking to her about anything but the most trivial things: dinners, television news, birthday cards from our Russian family.

I come back home from the hospital and go down to the basement where a packed suitcase is still sitting on her bed.  What needs to happen to push us out of the rut, to break through our apathy?  What is the final crisis that makes people take to the streets to protest as they recently did in Moscow?  My mother, a mirror image of my far-away Motherland, makes me wonder if it is at all possible to slow down in order to notice important little things, if we are capable of gaining even a shred of insight into the fragility and impermanence of life.

We hear so much about Vladimir Putin these days.  When he isn’t driving race cars and snowmobiles, he dives to the bottom of the Black Sea.  But something was off in that picture of the Russian prime minister wading out of the water with two ancient amphorae…

Please check out my essay in the New York Times Magazine:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/from-russia-with-lies.html