A Mother's Gift (a memoir)

(c) Christine Menefee 2018

In the early 1970's, after escaping a foolhardy and damaging relationship, I found myself living again with my parents while I started over in the Washington, DC area. One day I heard a story on National Public Radio about the consequences of a nuclear bomb. This was not a new subject, since I'd grown up during the time when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a recent memory and above ground nuclear testing was constant, but to be honest, I'd forgotten about the horrors of nuclear weapons in the face of my own coming-of-age war, the one in Vietnam, as both it and my life went from bad to worse.

Reawakened by the news story to the nuclear topic, I went to the local library to look at the new government reports and maps that had been referenced in the radio story. It was indeed very bad. Concerned about the immediacy and irreversibility of the sort of death we would face if Washington DC were bombed, I shared this information with my mother. Keep in mind that we were not communicating much in those days; indeed we never had. She had welcomed me back, but there was no way I could share with her the embarrassing details of my recent life. The only way I knew to deal with mistakes then was to look ahead and go directly on to the next thing. We could discuss current events, though, and so a bad death by atom bomb was something we could talk about.

My mother went away for a bit and came back with a prescription bottle of her favorite barbiturates. “This is the number you would need to put you asleep and you would die and not wake up to suffer,” she said. I looked in awe at the bottle, my escape and my salvation from the horror of the reality I had just faced. “I'll give you these to keep these on hand, but promise me you'll only use them as a last resort if there really is a nuclear attack. You shouldn't have to live in fear of that kind of death.” I received the bottle with a sense of wonder, and the memory of the moment has the feeling of receiving a sacrament.

Nearly fifty years later I still wonder at her trust in me. Though she didn't know the details of my recent life, she knew I'd had a bad time since going off to college, and then dropping out, and anyway I'd always been the child who never quite got things right. She would not have admitted that, since all her children were by definition perfect, but she must have noticed a thing or two. My hard times weren't over yet; in the next few years I'd be shot at, gaslighted, and stalked, and nearly died twice from injuries that, doctors said, few people would have survived.

Through all that, and more, I kept my secret escape hatch with me, but even in the worst periods of delusion, shame, despair, or sheer physical agony, I don't think I ever thought of taking those capsules for any purpose other than the one intended.

Many years later I discarded the capsules, assuming they were no longer viable. But I think I still have the bottle, somewhere. Now the Powers that Be are again discussing the possibility of a nuclear strike as if it's a thinkable option, and I wish I had my mother back.