It took novelist Brian Morton decades to realize that he didn't always have to say yes to his mother. "It can take the better part of a lifetime to learn that you don't actually always have to be so damn good." Welcome to "Tasha: A Son's Memoir," Morton's bracing account of his late mother's final years.
Morton's novels — including the beautiful "Starting Out in the Evening," which became an equally fine film starring Frank Langella — all have in common a calm, caring voice that imbues the prose with a wry, pained tenderness, as if shaking its head at the human folly it describes. That same voice sustains this memoir, opening with the startling image of Morton's 85-year-old mother's car slowly filling with water, stalled in a terrible rainstorm en route to a granddaughter's dance recital.
Dramatically, Morton cuts to an early memory of himself, age 4, and his sister, 7, watching his mother jump from a moving train — luckily, not hurt too badly.
It's a useful reference. Morton had known that his mother was hellbent on driving to the recital, storm or no. But, he writes, "I'd learned long ago that when I tried to talk her out of doing something she was intent on, I had no chance."
This stalemate defines the grown son's lifelong predicament. Stakes now, however, have soared: The storm event causes his mother to have a stroke, which precipitates a steady decline that she denies almost every step of the way. Morton's burden looms: "I had successfully kept her at arm's length for many years ... and this was comfortable for me." That distance, he knew, was about to change. "I might have to call on different capacities in myself, and I didn't want to."
Checking her into a rehab hospital, he's touchingly hopeful: "Everything that can be fixed, we'll help her fix. ... The small stroke could be a turning point."
Alas, Tasha refuses "the audiologist, the urologist, and the shrink, and although she keeps going to physical therapy, she won't take it seriously." She won't let Morton remove a single swizzle stick from her junk-laden, cat-feces-and-dead-mice-riddled house. Morton must take her driver's license. She stops changing her clothes; her senior center peers complain. (She remains "almost feral in her refusal to even look at us. ... My mother's mind was alien to me now.")
Alternately furious with or covetous of Morton's care, she can still sometimes bristle with logic, as when arguing with a nurse about God's existence: "So [life's atrocities are] like a TV show to [God]? A TV show that he doesn't really like but he doesn't turn off?" At that, Morton can't suppress his pride, nor his laughter.
