Please, Mother, Enough

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/10/opinion/please-mother-enough.html

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TOKYO — It was the mad, busy time just before New Year’s, the most auspicious holiday of the year, when the hospital called to tell me that my mother had just been brought in by ambulance. She had slipped on the sidewalk and broken her shoulder and hip.

“Not again!” was all I could think as I rushed to the emergency room. I did not at first realize that the call marked the beginning of the end of what little independence my mother had left.

Despite five hours of surgery and two months of rehabilitation, she became wheelchair-bound and had to enter a nursing home. There, she slid rapidly into dementia, and became more difficult and demanding even as she grew frailer.

A year and a half later, she was back in the hospital with aspiration pneumonia. Day after day, I sat by her bedside, exhausted, while I struggled to finish work on a book for which the deadline was long past.

“Mom, when are you ever going to die?”

These blunt words, which echoed my thoughts at the time, became the catchphrase that the publisher printed in large type on the cover of my subsequent novel, “Inheritance From Mother.” Subtitled “A Newspaper Novel,” it had begun in serial form, appearing weekly over 15 months in The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper.

When first asked to write a serial novel, I immediately thought of basing the story on the recent experience of seeing my mother through the final stage of her life. I knew that the topic would interest mature women, the core readership of newspaper novels. But for such a large audience, I felt obliged to broaden the story’s appeal, and so I mixed in the theme of marital infidelity by introducing a wayward husband.

Letters from readers soon started to arrive. To my surprise, nearly all of them dealt with readers’ own experiences of elder care — especially the care of an aged mother. Clearly, marital infidelity was far less compelling to Japanese people than caring for “Mother.”

Elder care has become a serious concern in many developed countries in recent years as our societies have aged beyond previous expectations, but the situation is especially severe in Japan.

Not only are Japanese among the longest-lived people in the world (the average life span is 86 for women, 80 for men), but the country also has by far the highest proportion of people over 65, who constitute 24 percent of the population (compared with just 14 percent in the United States).

On top of this, the myth of the selfless mother has a strong grip on Japanese heartstrings. Precious, precious Mother, who sacrificed so much in bringing me up: Her praises are sung by schoolchildren and popular singers alike. Reinforcing this myth is the idea — a vestige of Japan’s Confucian tradition — that to honor one’s mother is a virtue and that to strive to extend her life by even one day is a solemn duty.

In the past, the burden of elder care fell disproportionately on the shoulders of women who married the eldest son, the sole heir. But after World War II, as all siblings came to inherit their parents’ assets equally, each began to feel equally responsible for their mother. Japanese mothers, for their part, believe that it is only natural to rely on their children, and many live with a child in old age as a matter of course.

Elder care is often a thankless task, and longevity compounds its difficulty. Providing care over a span of so many years is bound to take a heavy toll on the caregiver, whether a daughter, a daughter-in-law or even a son — and now more than ever, since the use of life-prolonging devices is taken for granted.

Mythology and Confucianism aside, many people caring for an aged mother genuinely love her and wish to honor her to the end of her days. Yet, as time drags on excruciatingly, there are bound to be moments when they wish heartily for her to die. Facing this truth, however, is difficult.

Among the readers’ letters I received, some were touchingly brief, while others went on for pages. All were emotionally restrained; I can recall none that spoke belittlingly of the one receiving care.

Many people, of course, wrote about their own trial. “I am so tired I wish it were not my mother but me lying in that hospital bed. I even wish I could go before her, just to be set free,” wrote one.

“My health collapsed, so I quit my job when I was 55,” related another, “but the job of taking care of my mother went on for 20 more years, until she died at the age of 103.”

But what struck me and moved me most was how people wrote, over and over, that they felt “saved” by my novel, “able to forgive” themselves for having wished their own mother dead. Some said they used to blame themselves for being “so coldhearted”; others, for being a “terrible woman.”

One such letter I vividly recall ended with these words: “My heart is now at ease. And yet, I still do not have the courage to sign my name. Please pardon me for writing to you anonymously.”

I turned over the envelope, and on the back where the sender’s name and address should have been, there was nothing. The blank space was an eloquent reminder of the heavy load of guilt so many caregivers bear.

Nothing is as painful as the inability to forgive oneself. To wish for the death of one’s mother is universally taboo. Yet technological advances that extend life have driven us to the point where we do just that. To admit that one wishes one’s mother would die; to forgive oneself for the wish; and to go on trying as best one can to make her happy to her dying day — is this not a true expression of love? For how can anyone riddled with guilt, thinking the unthinkable, find the courage to continue down a seemingly endless road?

On “Haha no Hi,” the Japanese version of Mother’s Day, Japan overflows with carnation bouquets. Those flowers that my younger self thought merely pretty now bloom, I find, with many shades of meaning.

Minae Mizumura is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction in Japanese and recently, in translation, “A True Novel.” This article was translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter from the Japanese.