That night, in Jamie's old room, I remembered a scene that was, and I hope will remain, the worst moment in my life. Once, years after her fall in Vermont, but before I knew how bad she was --- although my father knew --- I was alone with her in the kitchen. She was chopping up a chicken at the cutting board on the counter with a sharp knife. I could see from her back that she was upset about something, and I sent up quietly beside her and put my hand on her shoulder. She was hacking and stabbing at the chicken. I stood there at the kitchen counter with my arm frozen around her shoulder and watched her stab that raw meat with the knife. She turned to look at me. And I saw --- taking it in slowly --- that her face was livid, pale, and flushed at the same time. I realized, incredibly slowly, that after all those years of too much painful sensitivity and insecurity and that weird secret hidden anger, she had now gone mad.
My poor mother was not Ponnie and she was not my mother. The magician of the kitchen had vanished, and the protective or overprotective mother and grandmother who held my boys' hands in New York City with what we used to call the Grandma Ponnie Grip.
"You fucker," she said. The voice was not hers. She growled a rage I had never heard before and words I never thought she knew. She cursed me and everyone in the house in a storm that was much larger than she was, some of it incoherent and some of it pretty clear. She was utterly lost from this world. If she had been in the room with me, she would have been more horrified than I was. But I kept my arm around her shoulder and she put down the knife.
Then all of us were standing together in the kitchen, my father, my wife, my sons, my mother, while she wailed a wail that meant the abandonment of the universe, the universe we build for ourselves and one another with such hard work for all our lives together, constructing and reconstructing the world of things as they are. It was a howl from a place where nothing is true, where nothing is the way things are. I see now what it was, what I felt then, though then I could only feel it: the horror of a world without supports -- for me, for her, or for any of us. The horror of the unbuilding of everything.
-- Jon Weiner, His Brother's Keeper p. 220