My mom had three children, but only one she’s ever really had to worry about. That would be me.
I had a sketchy employment history. After a few years as a struggling freelance writer, I fell into a successful run of ad agency copywriter and creative director jobs in the 1980s and ’90s, but even if I hadn’t crashed that career, ‘creatives’ age out of the ad biz in their forties.
All that time, I also had a very dangerous hobby, racing motorcycles. That arc took me all the way to the Isle of Man TT – almost certainly the world’s most dangerous sporting event. When I hung up my leathers, I never really even hung them up; I tested motorcycles for magazines and websites. I’m still doing it – or at least, I was though 2019. I’m surely almost the oldest journalist in that niche. It is (was?) fun; motorcycle companies flew me to race tracks around the world. But it is almost as dangerous as racing and the ‘enthusiast publications’ I work for provide, at best, a hand-to-mouth existence. Basically OEMs treat me like a rock star but publishers pay me like a roadie.
You can imagine my poor mom thinking, “He’s 50, living out of a duffel bag half the time, choosing which credit card to pay off.” My friends from high school were paying off mortgages and planning to retire. I used to joke that my only retirement strategy was, “Pray for a miracle.”
Then, a miracle happened. I met and married Mary – an ex-ballroom dance champion who’d moved from competition to teaching and coaching. I told my mom that in hindsight, I would not have changed any of my crazy life choices; I no longer regretted decisions that I’d long thought were serious mistakes, all because that track had finally led me to Mary.
At the time, Mary and I were living in California, and my mom lived up in Calgary, Canada. So I’d spoken of Mary in phone calls, and Mary and my mom had talked. I’d sent my mom photos of us together. But it was probably a year or two before I actually brought Mary up to meet her in person.
No photo or description could have really prepared my mom for Mary in the flesh. My mom opened the door of her seniors’ condo to let us in, and involuntarily gasped, “Oh my God, you’re lovely.”
My mom who was then 80-something, and Mary, then 40-something, really hit it off. Each immediately felt that the other was family.
And over the next decade another miracle happened. Although Mary’s financial history had been at least as checkered as mine, we somehow got ourselves onto a sound financial footing. We moved to Kansas City to cut costs and though it took a while, Mary became one of the most respected ballroom dance coaches in the Midwest. I wrote a funny play for the local Fringe Festival; Mary starred in it and we won ‘Best of Fringe’ for our venue. A production company bought the rights to ‘Riding Man’. One of my friends told me, “If you two were a publicly traded company, I’d buy stock in you.”
The person who took the most joy in all that was my mom. We talked all the time about how great it was that Mary and I were building equity in our little home and, mainly, how happy she was that I was in a loving, stable relationship.
This isn’t a fairy tale. Considering my background – having raced in the TT – you might be surprised to learn that I was the financially cautious one. (People often think that motorcycle racers are adrenalin junkies, but most of us are actually control freaks.) That was a source of disagreements, and either or both of us could sulk for days.
Both of us are prone to bouts of depression, too. Early in our relationship, Mary went through a series of devastating blue periods and every time one hit, I stopped whatever I was doing to build her back up, and gently cajole her out of it.
I worshipped her through every up and down. Imagine the countless thousands of times that she left and then re-entered my field of view in ten years of marriage. Every single time that happened, I had to catch my breath a little.
In September 2019, I spent two weeks up in Calgary, helping my mom move from her condo into an assisted living facility. It was her choice; she was moving into a great place, while still mentally sharp and in remarkable health for a woman of 93.
Still, it was a difficult time for me. I had to sort, cull, and pack up a lifetime’s accumulation of stuff. Coordinate the move and get her reinstalled in the new place. All the while doing my best to protect her both physically and emotionally. There were a few times I nearly had to dive to move a box that would’ve tripped her.
Sixty may be the 40, seventy the new 50, but 93 is still 93. I laid awake wondering whether I was going to do all this work and have the move kill her anyway.
I’ve always been grateful for my mom’s robust health, but there were times during that move when I felt a little sorry for myself, and thought, “I’m too old for this, too.” It would have been a lot easier for me to have moved her if I was 50, not sixty-four.
My mom left many friends back at the old condo. There were people she’d played canasta with every Tuesday night for decades, and people who’d shared their door keys in case they were ever locked out or needed checking on. One by one, they came by to ask about the move, but the subtext of all those conversations was, “Neither of us can drive, so this is probably the last time we’ll see each other.” It broke my fucking heart, but I got her installed in the new place, and stayed for week while she began to meet new people. She has better social skills than I do.
Not long after I got back to Kansas City, Mary told me that she was leaving.
I always knew what I’d gotten into. She’s a beautiful ballroom dance teacher. Well heeled men fall in love with her every month. But this time it was mutual. Anyway, that may have influenced the timing, but it wasn’t the whole explanation. The world of ballroom dance is very traditional; men lead and women follow. As her business took off and mine – specialist journalism – was disrupted, I wasn’t enough of a leader in the financial sense. That was another part of it.
She watched me get sucked into feature film projects that almost always come to nothing and seem like a vain waste of time. I’m trying to edge back out of the motorcycle space and into mainstream journalism, so following the news is an important part of my job. The problem is, that doesn’t look like work.
If I was a good enough writer to really convey how I felt when Mary told me she was leaving, I’d be a rich and famous author and, ironically, she would probably still love me. (Perhaps I should say, ‘love me in that way’; I believe she still loves me in some lesser way.)
My second thought, after suicide, was “What will I tell my mom?”
My first instinct was simply not to tell her. In a strictly actuarial sense after all, she’ll probably only live another few years. The kindest thing by far would be to let her to die thinking, “At least Mark is happy.”
I thought I could keep coming up to visit every few months, as is my habit, and just tell her, “Mary’s too busy with work,” or “Someone has to stay and care for the dogs.” I discussed it with Mary, and she agreed to play along. After all she lovesd my mom, too.
But after a week I realized that my mom could live to be a hundred. I am not a good enough actor to pull that role off. As much as I wanted to protect her, I knew that there was no way I could – at least not for long.
So I telephoned her. She was glad to hear my voice for an instant, but immediately knew something was very wrong. I fell apart. My mom was devastated, but she held it together.
“Listen to me,” she said. “You’re going to get through this. The best part of your life is still ahead of you. Your sixties and seventies are great decades; your whole perspective on life changes. They were my best years, and they’ll be your best years. I promise.”
So picture a 64 year-old, ex-death-defying motorcycle racer in tears. And that old, old woman who defaulted, instantly and expertly, to being a mom.
If I’d been there she would have held me and rocked me. I might as well have been 16.