‘Scandal’s’ Bellamy Young: Domestic abuse can happen at any age. My mom was in her 80s

My mom died at the end of 2023, right after her 83rd birthday. Which doesn’t sound all that remarkable — until I mention that she had been a victim of domestic partner abuse up until the year before her death.

Mom hadn’t exactly been lucky in love. She had already buried four husbands (cancer, heart attack, COPD, cancer) by the time she met This Guy, who doesn’t deserve to be named here. But Mom never wanted to be alone. It was her deepest fear. She would get the look I get when I talk about sharks.

She powered through her lack of computer skills and met This Guy online about eight years ago. We would joke that she had to import him from Tennessee because there were no good men left in western North Carolina. It was a long-distance relationship at first: She would cook for him at the house I’d helped her buy outside of Asheville, and drive to Tennessee to go to church with him.

Eventually, he brought his two cats and moved into Mom’s house. I’d watched her go through this phase with a new man a few times, bless her heart, but there seemed to be far less joy now. “At least he’s smart,” she kept saying, as if to excuse his excessive drinking or unnerving silence.

The life she made with This Guy got smaller and smaller. She dropped out of her book club and her service organization. They stopped going to church. They no longer made plans with friends. After experiencing the drinking and fighting firsthand — or just the tense silence — people stopped coming over. Mom closed the door to her own cage and chose This Guy. Over life, over fun, over safety.

As he drank more and more, he hit her. He did it while we were on the phone. I recorded it. Her cries of “Amy! Amy! Oh God!” The sounds of his fist? his forearm? pounding down on her. Her fear that he would kill her. I still have the recording. I played it at one of the restraining order (RO) hearings we had.

All in all, he was arrested three times, and we took out two RO’s. But she always took him back. At first, she would say, “But I love him.” (I remember that first court date was on Valentine’s Day.) Later on, she would say, “He has nowhere else to go.” Ultimately it was, “I’m afraid of what he’ll do to the dog.”

Mom was a whirlwind of opposing forces. She could be seriously fun when she wasn’t in her “blind reds.” That’s what my aunt and I used to call it when Mom was so full of rage that neither logic nor love nor human kindness could crack through. It was an obliterating heat. It felt like being burned alive.

There were the early years when I tried to fight back. Then there were the years when I tried to get in front of the waves and neutralize them. Then I grew up and moved away. Distance helped. Well, it helped me.

But even with continuous prodding from me and from her sister, Mom wouldn’t help herself.

She partnered with people who would do this dance with her. This dangerous, cruel, conscienceless dance.

There had been the threat of physical violence in Mom’s first marriage, the one I was adopted into, but it had mostly been from her: she would pull a knife on him, threaten to hit him with a frying pan. He drank too, but he was always weaker than she was, in my eyes at least. Through the years she found more closely matched sparring partners — with the exception of her third husband, he with the beautiful light that shone straight from his soul — but no one ever had the upper hand on my mom. Until This Guy.

As the court records show, on the night of April 9, 2022, he beat Mom so badly that she lost consciousness. For two days, according to the emergency room admission report, she lay on the sofa with a brain bleed, lethargic and increasingly confused, before he finally brought her to the hospital at my aunt’s urging. Mom had to have brain surgery. The hospital notified the authorities because of the nature of her injuries and This Guy was arrested. If Mom pulled through, it was in the state’s hands now — she wouldn’t be able to drop the charges like she had before.

Now we just needed her back.

Mom’s brain had been a thing of beauty: the flights of fancy she could follow to utterly uncharted places were both stupefying and inspiring. She was a fearless thinker, a champion debater, with surgical insight, completely untethered by convention. And she was the best teacher I ever had. Literally. Whether in her classroom, after a play or movie, or sitting around the dinner table at night, she made wild, completely defensible connections and found crushingly human patterns amid absolute chaos.

I never saw that Mom again.

When she regained consciousness, I was so relieved. I thought she would get better. That she was finally free. She’ll heal, I thought; she’s tough as nails. She made it this far. The rest is cake. Instead, vascular dementia began to take her down precipitously, mentally and physically, in jagged, irregular steps. We tried to keep up with the changes, but I couldn’t find the handbook for what we were going through. We moved her to assisted living, then swiftly to the locked dementia ward, for, as it turns out, she was a “runner.” After a month drifting in and out of consciousness, after losing half her body weight, after being beaten within an inch of her life, they found her almost all the way down the hill, pushing her walker, headed to the bus stop trying to get home.

Of course, there was no home to go to. The house was being sold. The dog had a new (safe) life. And This Guy was in jail, having pleaded guilty to assault with serious bodily injury as well as neglect of an elderly or disabled person.

Bellamy Young’s mother, Jane.

(Bellamy Young)

From there I watched her slip backwards in time. Being late for a plane was a recurring worry, even though she hadn’t traveled in decades. I tried to push down the thought that this was brought on by all my years far away, to tell myself she had a whole, big life of her own. Later, she would sob huge, sloppy, heart-rending tears asking why her parents wouldn’t come get her — had they forgotten her? Didn’t they love her anymore?

And then she became, to my awe, a sweet, kind, funny, caring little lady. It was the grace I am most grateful for in this mess: that I had a little time with my mom without the fighting. I got time to be gentle with her and tell her how much I love her, and to receive her soft, present love in return. She didn’t really know who she was or where she was, but she always knew me. And she was always loving to me. And proud of me. Some people never get that in a lifetime. I am lucky. I had a year and a half of it.

I got to be home with Mom the weekend before her (final) assault: My husband Pedro and I were in Asheville with the ASPCA to see their new Behavioral Rehab Center not five minutes from her house. Mom told stories, and Pedro listened in a way a child never has the patience for. We took her for her favorite ice cream and her favorite coffee and saw friends. Pedro played piano and we laughed by the fire. I try to think of that as my last memory with her. What followed is just a sad epilogue of court dates, hospital transfers, confusion, adult diapers, falls, agony and surrender that I want to keep separate somehow. I want to keep her safe from it, at least in my memory. I hope she really didn’t know what was going on.

I hope she fell asleep on that sofa, glad the beating was over for now, cuddled up with her dog, remembering happier times and planning what to cook tomorrow. I hope her mind didn’t record the rest.

This Guy got paroled the day before my mom went into hospice. I just found out that he’s back online.

If you are suffering in a similar situation, whether you’re 23 or 83, please reach out for help. Domestic violence doesn’t discriminate based on age — and the holidays are traditionally the most dangerous time of year for those being abused. A lot of people love you far more than the person who is hurting you right now. You deserve help and you deserve to be safe.

As for the rest of us, we must keep our eyes open. We can never know what’s happening behind a closed door, and we can never assume that someone is safe simply because of their generation, their job or their public persona. Check in on friends and family who seem to be withdrawing from the world — sometimes people just need to know that they have options. And people always need to know they are loved.

My only hope is that maybe, if we keep talking about it, if we tell our stories, we can stop this from happening.

I’d give anything to have stopped it from happening to my mom.