“My mother always used to tell me, life is like falling down a deep hole. At the beginning, you don’t see the bottom of it and hang on to whatever branches are on the way. But as time passes, your strength goes too, and you can no longer hang on to anything. By the end, you can see the bottom of the pit, and there is nothing you can do, so you wait, you wait and eventually, you crash and die.”
There were exactly 136 guests in the room. All were chatting around luxurious hors d’oeuvres and drinking expensive champagne when I started talking. Now the silence was complete. All faces were looking up towards the stage. I took a few seconds to study my audience. Of course, everyone knew what this event was about. The speech was a formality, very unlikely to change anyone’s opinion. I still enjoyed it.
“As you may have guessed, my mother was not exactly the most positive person.” I smiled and felt the tension ease in the crowd.
“As long as I can remember, she always talked to me as if I was a full-grown adult. Probably because she didn’t have actual adults to talk to. For my 8th birthday, I asked her if we could organize a small event at our house like all kids do. She looked at me, frowned, and answered: ‘I refuse to host a swarm of inconsiderate parasites eating our food and soiling our house. These people, my son, they feed on your need for acknowledgment. One must be satisfied with one’s own company.’ Of course, she really refused because she was irrationally afraid of any sort of social events, but she liked to think of herself as some kind of wise Buddhist monk.
“She always saw the worst in people and I must say, she was sometimes surprisingly perceptive. In 6th grade, I made a new friend called Hector. He came home a few times to do some homework. One day, after Hector had left, she looked at the door, frowned, turned to me and said: ‘Your friend is fat and weak. You should end your relationship with him, weak people are not to be trusted.’ As often, I rolled my eyes at her comment: ‘Mum, normal people don’t say things like that. It’s mean and unfair. You haven’t even talked to him!’ As often, she shrugged my answer away and left the room. A few weeks later, our PE teacher introduced what he proudly called ‘one of the finest manly arts’: wrestling. I never saw how sweaty grappling was ‘fine’ or ‘artistic’, but the classes made Hector happier than I had ever seen. He was good—maybe the best for once. Girls sometimes finished their own PE early and crossed into our gym. One day, near the end, a few watched us roll under our teacher’s stern gaze. Hector won quickly and waited beside me for the next round. Two girls came over, giggling, praising his strength. I waved them off and told him: ‘Don’t pay attention to them, they’re messing with you.’ Anger flashed in his face. The teacher cut in: ‘You, you! Stop chatting, come on up, you’ll do the last fight!’ We started. I heard the same girls’ fake cheers from afar. I knew I should have let him win and be done, but I was angry at his reaction, so I gave everything I had. He caught me in a clumsy arm wrench. I went still; the teacher was about to blow his whistle when Hector shifted his weight onto my wrist. I screamed as something broke. It took a few days until I could come back to school. Of course, Hector apologized countless times, but I never found it in me to forgive him. The group of girls did not stop messing with him and he never managed to see the cruelty beyond their cute faces and short skirts. Eventually, they got him to terribly ridicule himself in front of the whole school. He moved to another school shortly after. After learning of Hector’s departure, I told the whole story to my mother, and as I saw her reaction, I immediately regretted telling her anything. She was bursting with self-satisfaction. Such a display of weakness and cruelty comforted her in her isolating bubble: she had been right all along, humans are terrible creatures that should be avoided at all cost.
“Unexpectedly, despite the influence of my mother, I enjoyed a rather normal social life throughout my school years. I started dating rather early, but it took me a long time until I invited a girl to my place. Given what I had told you, I think you’ll understand that I was quite anxious to bring my girlfriends home. Surprisingly enough, she welcomed the first girl I brought home very decently. She was nothing but polite and even conceded a smile. When my girlfriend left, I went to my mum, all bubbly and hopeful: ‘So? What did you think?’ She frowned, and stopped cutting her onion for a few seconds. ‘Well, I haven’t perceived any red flags so far.’ I must have looked too happy for her taste, so she added: ‘But don’t get too excited, she’ll probably cheat on you or the other way around. That’s how relationships usually go’. Well, today, Helene is my wife and the mother of my daughter.” I looked at Helene in the audience and smiled. “So I really hope my mother was wrong this time.
“We had always led a very modest life. She worked from home as a translator. It was just enough to pay the bills, but nothing more. I grew up very frustrated by the constant shortage of resources. It seemed to me I had to fight ten times more than all the other kids around, getting scholarships and working several student jobs. When my company started to grow, one of the first things I did was buy a house for my mother. Then I gave her a credit card, one of those black ones with virtually unlimited amounts of money. I somehow thought money would fix her. But money was my frustration, not hers. She had never cared for our lack of resources and the sudden influx of money did not seem to impact her at all.
“One day, she even complained to me that the new house was uselessly big (especially since she was now living alone) and required too much time to maintain. I offered to pay for a housekeeper, she ardently refused, but I paid an agency to send someone anyway. The first maid they sent quit a few days after starting. The second one they sent was Betty. Betty was a young woman attempting to earn enough money to pay for an education. She was the exact opposite of my mother. Forever joyful and positive, full of irrational hopes and unrealistic dreams. I wasn’t very available at the time, so I can’t tell you exactly how the transformation occurred, but the result was beyond anything I ever imagined. In half a year, my lonely, hateful mother started smiling and laughing. She started going out for other reasons than grocery shopping and one day, when Helene and I came to visit her, she hugged us and complimented Helene on her (apparently) new shoes. I felt incredulous joy at seeing my mother’s transformation, but I must admit, a big part of me was jealous of Betty: if she had been capable of changing, all this time, why did she change for Betty and not for me?
“A few months later, Helene gave birth to Molly. My mother came to help with the baby a lot, she was happier than I had ever seen her. She still often went on quite a few unsolicited rants about humans, society or life, but it seemed as if she repeated these things more out of habit than true conviction. One day, Betty left for another state. I think my mother used the credit card I had given her to pay for her university. Several times, I tried to ask her if she had any news of Betty, but each time, she looked at me, frowned and ignored my question. I think she could always tell my intentions were tainted with jealousy and refused to give in to what she perceived as weakness.
“My mother had an obsessive need for control. This is, I believe, one of the reasons that led her to isolate herself since you can’t really control others. Another element my mother could not control was time. She had been fairly good-looking in her youth but never cared much about it at the time. She only started caring about her beauty when she realized it was slowly fading. One time I surprised her looking at the mirror, covering some parts of her face, pulling the sides of her cheeks to make some wrinkles disappear. She looked determined, as if she was defying time itself. She eventually released the skin and stood still for long seconds, boiling full of violent anger, but no one to blame.”
Eventually, age started taking away more than her beauty. Her sight went bad. Too bad for any kind of glasses to really help. I guess she had spent too much time translating novels in her barely lit bedroom. Reading had always been her only hobby. I had always known her with a book in hand or passionately talking to me about how poorly written her last book was. Now each time I visited her, she was sitting still in one of the hundreds of chairs in the house in front of a TV. She had always hated TV. The only events in her life were my visits. I usually brought Molly with me. Molly was a normal little girl, all happy and bubbly. She told her passionately about the hundreds of incredibly uninteresting things that happened to her during the day, and unlike me, my mother followed Molly’s stories with fascination. She was Molly’s best audience. She reacted to her stories in such genuine ways: ‘What? But Sara has been in love with him since the beginning of the year and she’s her second best friend!’. She never lectured her about society or humanity. Once again I admit I was even sometimes jealous of my own daughter. When I talked to my mother, she was grim and unresponsive. All her life, she had complained to me about life. Now I talked to her about changing the world and unlike her, I could actually do something that would change humanity forever and she still seemed more absorbed with Molly’s stories than with anything I had to say.
During the last year, her condition worsened. It was always something different. One day her heart, another her back or her leg. She could barely stand for more than a few minutes. She was on pain medication most of the time which rendered her in a state of constant numbness. Molly was 13 at this stage. She was no longer as carelessly joyful, but she still continued with the stories. Like her father and grandmother, Molly loves to talk. She would tell her everything, from the new cereal brand she ate in the morning to her ever-changing dreams for the future. Sometimes she tried to ask in return something like ‘what about you? What’s new?’. But there was never anything new. So my mother just found a way to elude the question and get Molly to talk some more.
On her last day, the hospital called me. I arrived as soon as I could. She was sweating, burning with fever on the hospital bed. I sat next to her, holding her barely shaking hand. After a few minutes, she turned to me and I saw she was crying. ‘Why? Why can you save everyone, but not me?’ She looked up towards the large TV hanging on the hospital wall. As often recently, I was on the screen, talking to the press about saving the world. ‘I told you, the medicine is still experimental and it must be taken from a younger—’ ‘I wasted it, it’s over, there’s so much I didn’t do, I understand now, I just want a second chance, why can’t you give me a second chance?’ These were her last words. I stared at her, incapable of anything. The world moved around me, the instruments started to beep. The doctors took me away. They managed to decrease the fever, but she never woke up. It was late in the night and Helene was with me when a doctor came to announce it was over. He said the reason for her death was very common for people her age. And he was right. He said she had gone without pain. And he was wrong.”
I took a deep breath and looked at the audience. My marketing team would probably have me go on and talk more about our miraculous anti-aging “SecondChance” cure. Part of me still wanted to go political and say that letting these tragedies happen now that we had the power to stop them was a crime. A crime no philosophical argument on life’s meaning or societal consequences could justify. But my audience already knew all that and saying it out loud would accomplish the exact opposite of what I intended. So I just stepped off the stage to timid applause, and the chatter cautiously resumed.