MOTHERCARE

An extended essay plumbs the effects of aging and illness on patient and caregivers alike.

“Mother was a smart, resourceful, attractive, tactless, competitive, and practical person.” Novelist and critic Tillman emphasizes these qualities of her mother’s to convey the shock she felt when, in 1995, she returned from a trip abroad to find her 86-year-old mother unusually passive and disheveled. After several tests, one doctor offered a diagnosis of normal pressure hydrocephalus, a condition virtually unknown then—and one that remains poorly understood today: “700,000 people in the United States are supposed to have hydrocephalus, but only 20 percent have been correctly diagnosed.” Tillman’s mother had a shunt implanted to drain excessive fluid from her ventricles. However, though this treatment is common and effective, it isn’t perfect; over 10 years, she would receive seven revisions. Tillman never shies away from the difficult realities of her mother’s illness nor from the fact that her mother was a harsh and narcissistic person all her life. She painstakingly catalogs the numerous challenges of illness, not only for the patient, but also for those around her, including the frustrations of finding good or even adequate care. Doctors and hospitals could be indifferent or unhelpful, particularly because her mother was elderly, and “the elderly especially are seen as dead weight to the medical industry.” Some of the most affecting passages are about caregivers, one of whom the family employed for a decade. Most often women of color and frequently undocumented, these women were crucial to her mother’s care and allowed her to maintain some measure of her own freedom, but their role, integral to the family’s functioning and yet still outsiders, proved difficult to navigate. Tillman’s detailed account will be enlightening to readers who, like her, had no idea how horrible these processes could be until she cared for someone who was sick and comforting to those who see themselves represented in such struggles.

An unsparing and heart-wrenching exploration of serious illness and its impact on everyone it touches.