Toulouse, France. Photo by Larissa Pham.
In part because it has been almost two years since I began taking them, in part because my old medicine is too expensive in France and Zoloft didn’t seem to be working, in part because I felt it was time to try going without them and in part because I ran out of money: after I finished my box of antidepressants, I didn’t buy more. Of course, if this experiment failed and I even briefly thought of killing myself or remained in bed for a considerable amount of time, I would, after my next paycheck, take my prescription to a pharmacy and that would be that.
I can’t identify a time in my life, though, when my mother shouldn’t have been on antidepressants. She must have always thought it perfectly natural that she be unhappy: a divorced immigrant who left poverty in a communist country to ruin her back working in a small town, continuing to live in poverty, losing her father to colon cancer and being an ocean away without the money for a plane ticket, having the miscarriages, and working the shit job as a single mother that would send her home in tears. As far as I know, she has never seen a therapist and she never has tried antidepressants.
My mother’s laugh, as you can imagine, is a rare sound, which chirps like the laugh of an astonished child and is reserved for family dinners at Pizza Hut every Thursday, when my brothers and I were a decade younger and we could still make each other laugh so hard that she couldn’t breathe, when she would wipe her eyes and shake her head so we would be sure to know how embarrassed she was at how loud we were. Her laugh is reserved for when I am particularly clever, years ago when she would drive my brother and I to visit our older brother at Cornell and then later, when I was the one being driven to college, when I wanted to re-assure her that she had raised not only two, but three intelligent sons, when I would make inappropriate references to literature and films and she would shake her head. And her laugh, of course, was reserved for watching Robin Williams.
The TV room, like the rest of the house, had been a mess since a few years after the divorce and the furniture was stained and falling apart and there was trash piled in one corner and a stack of empty seltzer bottles in another and if the entire family wanted to watch TV two of us would have to sit on the floor, which never bothered me much. We watched Friends or The Drew Carey Show or The Simpsons or Whose Line is it Anyway? and even now I can still see her face the night Robin Williams guest-starred, leaning forward in her seat, eyes bright, biting her lip and smiling but maybe that’s a detail I have since invented, laughing until she cried. I was never amazed then by how well and how quickly my mother learned English, well enough to understand subtle and smart humor and sarcasm, well enough to use it, which she did so often.
I remember walking down the aisles of the rental store picking out movies to watch, and because we were in public she seemed happy, but I remember how happy she really was when we watched Good Will Hunting, and Bicentennial Man, Mrs. Doubtfire and Aladdin and Jumanji. The only movie we ever saw as a family in theaters was Mortal Kombat when I was five, and the only time she has tried to go since was the opening night of Flubber. We were driving by and she saw the movie was playing and she parked the car on what must have been a whim and I watched her walk inside. Soon she walked back out and she told us that there were no seats left. She suggested to the ticket counter that we could sit in the aisles, but the aisles were already full. I remember, though, how excited she was when we watched the HBO special with Robin Williams. I remember being amazed at how much that man could make her laugh: by pantomiming cunnilingus on his forearm, by shouting and doing impressions, by being so full of the energy that she never seemed to have.
My family was never an active one. There were the soccer practices, and the swim practices, and the Tae Kwon Do lessons, but these were activities for my brother and I. We were never active as a family. Our family time was composed of moments spent being in the same place together: eating while watching TV, talking during long car rides, sitting in silence when she was too tired to talk. And our happiest moments as a family were when we all sat together and watched TV, and she was happiest when we were watching Robin Williams. And I was happy and my brothers were happy because she was happy.
I am not devastated that a man I never met has passed away. I am not mourning the loss of what could have been, what this great man could have done had his life not ended so early. I don’t mourn what more joy he could have added to the world. I haven’t watched one of his films for years. I couldn’t tell you the last film he made. But I learned that a man, a famous man my mother loved, died of the disease that has been slowly killing her my entire life.
I imagine how my mother must have felt, learning about his passing. I was hungover and had just woken up, sleeping for just “ten more minutes” when my girlfriend told me that Robin Williams died, and even in that blur the first thing I thought of was my mother. Knowing depression for years now and having been treated for two, I can just begin to get a glimpse of what life for my mother must have been like, knowing that however bad it was for me, she has known it for longer than I have been alive. I’ve learned just what those long car-rides where my mother was too tired to talk meant, what the pile of garbage in the corner meant, what the nights spent in front of the television meant, and I’ve come to imagine just how much my mother must have hated being too tired to talk, how much she must have hated having a pile of garbage in the corner, how much she must have hated having the only time she spent with the family she loved so dearly be spent in front of a television. And then I remember that woman watching Robin Williams. I have been in France for a year now, and I haven’t seen her for longer, and I can’t remember the last time I heard my mother laugh.
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