The woozies was what I called the anxiety in my belly, because the feeling reminded me of being carsick “and a little sad,” as I’d explain. We used the term regularly.
My mother had her own struggles with the woozies, something I knew from a young age. It had been so bad that she had once stayed at a hospital. She told and retold the story like a bedtime tale. “I checked myself in,” she’d begin, and I’d picture her head against a stiff white pillow, her tanned arm circled by a patient wristband. I imagined my father entering hesitantly, with gift-shop flowers she wouldn’t like, wrapped neatly in newspaper.
“I graded all my papers from my hospital bed and got them back to my students in time.” I envisioned the thick stack of papers next to her legs, on top of the white blanket.
“We were worried you’d inherit all that, and I’m so relieved that you didn’t! My depression went away when you were born. It just went away because of you.”
I became used to the idea of being an antidote for both my parents. One evening, I must’ve been about fifteen, my mother and I were chatting in the living room. She sat curled up in her chair, which was always next to my father’s. Her eyes shone as she cradled a glass of wine in her hand. Golden light fell across her nose and forehead. She was relaxed, I could tell.
“Your father and I have said if anything ever happened to you, we’d kill ourselves.” She spoke matter-of-factly. “That would be it for us, there would be no reason to live.” She lifted her glass and took a sip.
“I don’t want to be your only reason to live,” I said, haltingly, stumbling over my words. I tried again; “I don’t want to hear that.”
“Oh, Emily, I wasn’t saying it like that.” She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Still, I got the sense that, striking out on my own, leaving them—leaving the house—would kill them.
After I moved out, my father told me: “First it was just me in the house, then your mother, then you. Then our first dog, then a cat. Now you’re gone, and the animals are dead and buried in the backyard. One day soon, we’ll be dead, too, and then it’ll just be the house.”
* * *
My father always joked about dying early. “I won’t be at your wedding,” he’d say. “Big guys are like big dogs! We don’t live that long.” But over time, as I became twentysomething and my parents hit their sixties, it became apparent that his health was actually stellar. My mother, on the other hand, was beginning to have more and more complicated health problems with each passing year. Her father （“a small dog,” my dad would have said） had lived to 103 and had not had so much as a single cavity over the course of his life. We’d always assumed that my mother’s later years would be much the same as his had been. She was wiry and driven, and her hair was still thick and grew lusciously on her head. At first, her sixties seemed to suit her, as if she’d reached the age she was always meant to be. She looked like a poster child for the Golden Years: she was going to finish the book she’d been trying to write since the Berlin Wall fell in 1991 （my birth year）; she was going to start working out and making new （women!） friends.
But instead of long lunches with these friends or afternoons spent writing at her desk, she became increasingly preoccupied with arranging medical tests and meetings with specialists, trying to find ways to manage the pain she had begun to feel in her back and hips. Doctors were quick to diagnose and cut open my mother’s body: she had three hip replacements and neck and back surgery in five years. It seemed every ailment led only to more complications. As her energy faded and her pace slowed, she became steadily more infirm, depressed, and confused.
The first sign of a grave illness appeared in my mother’s hands, which began to go numb in her sleep. I’d always admired her hands; they were the same as her mother’s hands: elegantly shaped and feminine without being dainty. I have a version of them, too. She’d wake up to find them curled into each other and close to her face, arms braided together on her chest. She was folding into herself like a flower in a time-lapse video, collapsing in an unnatural rhythm.
Next came the blisters, bold and dark and hard. They appeared when she used her hands: she’d open a jar and an angry-looking blister would show up on the inside of her thumb. Press a button too hard and a blister would emerge at the tip of her finger, purple and flat.
I’d wake often in the middle of the night, worrying, and turn to the task of attempting to diagnose my mother’s illness. I’d search “blisters on hands” and find myself looking at dire WebMD descriptions and frightening images of old men with deep purple circles around their eyes.