A Mother’s Exchange: A Story of Infinite Selfless Sacrifice
“She is sixty-nine years old and lies in the hospital room where she has been marooned for the past eight years, shipwrecked in her own body. “It” is the story that you are now writing – this beginning you have yet to imagine and the ending she will not live to see”.
An excerpt from the memoir by Jiayang Fan, June 14, 2023, The New Yorker
Motor neurons, among the body’s lengthiest cells, transmit electrical signals from the brain to various body parts. In ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) progression, cognitive abilities typically remain unaffected, but motor neurons fail to convey these crucial signals. Consequently, limbs and organs gradually deteriorate, leading to a loss of vital functions such as breathing.
At twenty-five, Fan’s mother’s illness surfaced, and the path forward became starkly evident. She relocated her to their apartment, meticulously chosen for the both of them, with separate spaces for each. Fan administered spoonfuls of Ensure until her medical condition required direct insertion of the feeding tube into her stomach. Setting alarms to monitor her breathing apparatus became routine. To shoulder the escalating responsibilities, Fan embraced additional freelance projects and leaned on borrowed funds from friends. Prioritising her care, the struggling young adult postponed acquiring medical insurance for herself until securing a part-time home aide, later upgraded to full-time, and then to two.
On the day Fan’s mother’s motor neurons ceased to reach her diaphragm, a call from the home aide brought dire news – “your mother is lying unconscious, her skin taking on a translucent blue hue”. Faced with the stark reality that her survival depended on artificial respiration, the weighty decision fell upon Fan’s shoulders to act on her behalf.
Will you save your mother or let her die?
It wasn’t a choice.
Neither of them dwelled in the realm of possibilities. This unspoken truth hung heavy as her eyes widened, her lips fell silent, and no words escaped. Fan thought to herself, flashes of her mother bedridden struck every now and then – “A broken bird, she acted on pure instinct rather than deliberation. There she lay, imprisoned within her own body. Her pallor resembled rain-soaked concrete, her eyes, deep, mournful, and screaming.” It marked the onset of the dreadful alphabet chart, which Fan had once encouraged her mother to learn while speech was still within reach.
The Last Time: An unsaid goodbye.
As Fan bid farewell to her mother for the final time, a lie escaped her lips. She fabricated an excuse about needing to attend to her occupational affairs, when in truth, she stole a precious moment to immerse herself in her storytelling, knowing it will evaporate with the dawn. Her mother nodded in acquiescence, but Fan avoided meeting her gaze. The weight of deceit made it unbearable to look her mother in the eye.
The last time she saw her mother alive, she lied.
She lied, and her mother had died.
The Morning After
In the morning, sunlight cut through the darkness like a sharpened blade, its intensity almost predatory. As Fan reluctantly opened her eyes, there was a fleeting expectation of dissolution, of being swallowed by the ethereal void. Yet, instead of oblivion, the world materialises before her. But could she have trusted it? Her world has always been intertwined with her mother’s presence. How could she believe that she was truly seeing it, or if this was even the same “it” without her?
~
Tell the story well enough, because you got to go to school while she scrubbed toilets.
Tell the story well enough so that time and space will collapse and the two of you will course in a single stream, like water. Tell the story well enough to abolish the end.
Tell the story well enough.
Tell the story well enough.
Tell the story well enough.
Tell the story well enough so that both babies will survive.
Writer’s Note
In the gentle ebb and flow of Jiayang’s narrative, the essence of a mother’s love unravels like petals unfurling in the dawn’s embrace. Through thick and thin, the connection between mother and daughter triumphs as a timeless consonance of devotion and sacrifice. In the tender twilight of memory, with whatever that lingers, their souls eternally dance as one, for their love is not merely a fleeting emotion, but rather an ode to the delicacy of the human spirit and the resilience that lies within.
An essay that transcends plain language. It’s about love. It’s about persistence. It discusses numerous cruelties – the harshness of poverty, terminal disease, bereavement, and generational trauma, but more importantly, a text that delves into the intertwined lives of the author and her mother, shaped by the difficulties of immigration and the author’s mother’s battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Amidst the physical and emotional challenges, the author reflects on their communication struggles and the urgency to convey meaning, while also juggling the grim realities of caregiving. Through vivid imagery, the narrative captures the rawness of a mother-daughter relationship and the looming spectre of mortality.
“Write as if you were dying, “ Annie Dillard once said.
But what if you are writing in competition with death?
What if the story you are telling is racing again?”
The Conclusion
Once, there dwelled a woman longing to bend time and space. Her aim? To barter her own destiny for her ailing mother’s future. Oh, how the tables have turned now. Little did she know, this exchange would meld them into a beautifully difficult entity, fragmented yet fused, with time coursing through them like a solitary stream of water.
But the stream. How strangely that stream would flow, not forward but in a loop, as the mother became the child’s purpose.
“But I am free to do whatever I want now, she says.
Now that you are dead?
Now that I live only in your story.
But my story is your story, you say. What am I without you?
A thing that moves, your mother answers. A thing that is alive”.
[Mother’s Day Special; Written By: Shree Pavana Kurunsikumaran, Edited By: Adryna Chin, Teoh Jin, Li Wen and Bryan Lue]
