Mother 1915 - 2009

Mother (1915-2009)

My mother died this past January 1, 2009, New Year’s Day.
Actually, my mother had died over the previous several years. But her body stopped functioning shortly before I arrived at the Rose Parade in Pasadena with my wife and two children.

My father died on Christmas Eve. We’ll be getting to that. But as you can imagine, it has thrown a bit of a damper over the holiday. My mother did her best to increase the width, depth, and breadth of that damper by reminding me every Christmas Eve, for years and years and years, just how long it had been since he died. As if I could forget. There was also a bad Halloween story along the way, and a couple of other minor celebratory set-backs. In any case, how much misery I could ring out of any joyous occasion has been an ongoing theme among my families for time immemorial. And so it was when I called Barbara, my altogether too loving and forgiving ex-wife, and told her, as she sat watching the parade on television, that my mother had died, her first words were, “Oh crap!” I knew exactly what she meant.

It’s just as well. I probably deserve it.
She was not a good mother. But it was not her fault. She had a very limited view of the world. Nor was I a good son. But I can’t pretend it was as a result of not knowing better.

And I can’t say I wasn’t ready for her passing. In fact I had 47 years, 7 days, and 16 hours to get ready for it, which I had started doing the instant my father died. But it still gives one pause, and tends to pound incessantly on that ubiquitous mortality button.

As I prepared for her memorial service I arranged pictures of her throughout her life on a couple of poster boards to be displayed in the church lobby. This is now taken by most people to be preferable to having an actual body present. Talk about a mortality button. There were no pictures at my father’s funeral, by the way. We had the real thing, with the lid open and my mother standing at the foot of it shaking everyone’s hand as they passed by with their final respects. I was invited to stand with her, but couldn’t do it, and so watched from the front pew.

In any case, the earliest pictures of my mother I had were around the age of 19, I think, maybe younger. And some when she was in her early twenties. I surprised myself by being quite attracted to this young person. I almost cringe as I type it. But she looked, in the pictures, like a girl that had a hint of a playful, feisty side. Almost coy. I never saw that side of her. If it ever existed, it was long gone by the time my brain started sucking up impressions.

At least, if you don’t count the kind of women to which I have always been attracted.

But it made me wonder who she was then and where that girl went. Of course, she had lived through the Great Depression and a World War. That could certainly take the spunk out of anyone. To say nothing of two marriages to Baptist ministers and an atheist son. But I had seen those pictures before and couldn’t wait to throw them in a drawer. I was not the least bit interested in my mother’s past. I wasn’t even that fond of my own. I realize now I rarely asked my mother anything about her past, including the great historical events. I think I just assumed I could get a better, more thorough and accurate analysis in a book. And I was probably right. But now, here I was attracted to someone I never, and never would, meet. Wondering who she was and what had happened to her. Obviously I know what happened to her. But I just can’t seem to fit what I know with those pictures.

If my mother had once defined herself as coy and playful, she certainly hadn’t for many years. On the contrary, I was convinced, upon encountering the works of Tennessee Williams, that he had used my mother as a role model for virtually every passive aggressive, manipulative, southern female character he had ever created. Though I’m positive my mother did not define herself that way, at least to herself.

In point of fact, I don’t think my mother ever consciously defined herself at all. I don’t think she would even have had a concept of the process or its ramifications. My mother was, no doubt, like most people. But I think, unconsciously and often indirectly, she presented herself to the world in very specific ways that, more often than not, left an impression on people.

For example, my mother was a musician.

Some of my earliest memories of her are of the long-suffering, cross-gladly-baring piano teacher who struggled to teach a seven year old boy, with no talent for the keyboard whatsoever, how to play. But then, that had been her assigned task.

My parents were not able to have children. If I ever heard the reason I don’t recall it. And so it became their intention to adopt. However, while my father had been blessed with enough of a heart murmur to secure an honorable discharge from the army in the midst of wartime, that same irregularity had also prevented an adoption, and would, of course, soon kill him. In 1950, adoption agencies could afford to be selective. The world was not crawling with unwed mothers equally comfortable with tossing baby Harold in the dumpster as leaving him on the doorstep of the neatest drug clinic. And so my parents, burdened by a medical condition that might well leave a young child fatherless, had been repeatedly denied a baby.

In 1951 my parents lived in San Francisco where my mother taught music at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary and served as secretary to the President while my father pastored a near-by church. In addition, my mother visited a hospital in Vallejo, just across the bay, where she volunteered to play the piano and teach music to the patients. As fate would have it, a line befitting so much of this story, an unwed mother in the hospital, having come in contact with the aforementioned itinerant music teacher, had contacted the hospital chaplain and informed him that she wanted this woman to have her baby “so that he would grow up to be a musician.”

She did not know this woman and her husband had wanted desperately to adopt but had been repeatedly refused. Nor did she know that her progeny had no more innate musical talent than the average house cat. My parents had prayed to God for a child and their prayers had been answered. My subsequent prayers regarding talent were summarily ignored. This may well account for our divergent views regarding The Almighty.

So at the defenseless age of six days I left the hospital with the only parents I would know for the next thirty years and my earliest role models would be a father who lectured rooms full of adoring believers and a mother at the keyboard exhorting them to song.

In addition to the virtually fruitless piano lessons, my mother played tirelessly for me as I learned to sing, forging through everything from camp songs to opera arias. She took me to musicals and set me in front of the television to watch Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, drove me to every audition and performance I ever had, and eventually checked my harmony and counterpoint. All the while she was the pianist or organist in every church of which she was a member, save the last one. And even there she was allowed to play once in a while, as much for her sake as the congregations I’m sure.

That my mother was a musician was as much a part of my world as gravity or the air I breathed, and just as taken for granted. It was just the way the world was. My mother never said, “I’m a musician.” It would have made as much sense to say I am a human. It just was.

Nor, frankly, did she ever say “and you should be a musician too.” In fact, come to think of it, I don’t recall my mother every giving an opinion one way or the other. Actually, my early intentions were to be a minister. A choice made for all the obvious reasons. And I firmly believed with all my heart that God wanted me to be a minister. The problem was: I didn’t want to be. This minor difference of opinion could be avoided during my formative years. But eventually, sometime during high school, the time came to preach or cut bait and so God and I had it out. The conversation was in the garage of our small, two-bedroom home. I remember it quite well. I flat out told God I did not want to be a preacher. I may have even said, “Go ahead, kill me if you must. But I’m just not going to do it.” I don’t remember. But I remember I told Him NO!”

Having thus turned to a life of crime, labeled either theater or music, it was as yet to be determined, I made the appropriate choices. My mother was never anything but supportive. I think she also would have been just as supportive if I had gone into any “professional” line of work. But music, the eventual choice, certainly did not disappoint her, though it was not until I was in my late twenties that I learned the adoption details I just related above. I had always known I was adopted, but the intentions of my birthmother were quite the revelation.

Because my mother was a musician, the sound of the piano was a constant in our house, along with the sun rising and setting. In addition, since my father was a good amateur artist, our walls were covered with original art, not posters and my grade school handprints. The resulting environment of a small, lower class house with frequent live music and original art in every room led me to believe, when first I began to sally forth, that other people led very odd lives.

And because my mother was a musician, several months before she died, I wheeled her over to the piano to see if she could still play. How could she not?

My mother had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last five or more years. The symptoms came on slowly. Forgetting words. Failing to balance the checkbook for months at a time. Things that could be dismissed. But for the last three years she had not been able to live by herself. And for the last year, it had been impossible to carry on a conversation. She never failed to recognize me, but she was an often agitated zombie living in a wretched and Godforsaken world of others just like her.

Thanks to my mother having tortured me on the rack of piano practice during my formative years, once in a while I imagine anew that I can play the piano after all. It just takes discipline and practice, I pretend. So I sit, re-accessing the underdeveloped part of my brain that remembers which lines and spaces go with which notes and for how long. This time it was the summer months, just prior to mother’s death, which allowed time for me to push that rock up the hill again. Of course, I did improve whenever I assailed the mountain, and this time was no exception. Practice will always result in some improvement. But trust me, I’m a musician, the miniscule improvement came at an untenable price.

It was undoubtedly this re-acquaintance with the instrument that led me to believe that playing it again might have therapeutic value for my mother. And so it came to pass that I wheeled her over to the piano that slumbered in the dining room of the mental institution, euphemistically referred to as an “assisted living facility,” where she dwelled.

I opened a hymnbook in front of her and said, “Go ahead, you can do this. Remember? You used to play all the time.” Bless her heart, she tried. And it was not that she didn’t have the strength. She was weak, but she could have done it…..physically. No. She couldn’t read the notes. I watched her try. I saw how her fingers moved. I saw how her eyes darted from the page to the keyboard. I know that experience…..INTIMATELY. She didn’t know how to play the piano anymore.

I tried to show her. My recent practice had given me just barely enough confidence to play the piano in a dining room full of Looney Tune characters. I played the soprano and alto line together, hitting an occasional base note for good measure. It was identifiable, but would not have pleased my mother. Yet she just sat staring, her fingers resting immobile on the keys. If anything, it seemed as though she enjoyed it. But when I stopped she looked uncomfortable, ill at ease. “Here, just play one line,” I encouraged. But she shook her head. She wanted to go back to the dinner table. “Are you sure? You used to enjoy this.” I might as well have asked her to interpret the Koran. Dinner was waiting.

At this point I was on the verge of an embarrassing, emotional collapse. I just wanted to delay it until I could make it out the door. As I pulled her wheel chair from the piano the inmates applauded and called for more. They loved me. And I wanted so desperately to be good for them. I wanted so much to bring joy and happiness and peace into their miserable and doomed lives. I dreamed, in that frozen moment, of sitting down and playing for hours until they were all asleep……..or better…..much better…..wafted to their eternal reward, free at last, on a cloud of musical ecstasy. I wanted to give them that. I wanted to have that Power. And not just over the walking dead, but over all humanity. Imagine the awesome Power of manipulating people’s emotions, their very essence, of irreversibly altering their lives, of ennobling them, and making the world a better place. Imagine it!

But I didn’t have the Power. And worst of all, neither did my mother. The God that had always denied me had now turned Indian-giver, and left His deprived beloved without an identity.
I took her to the table and said goodbye quickly. I was desperate to get out of the room, if only the door would remain in focus. I hoped no one would interfere with my departure. I did not want to break down in this place. I was terrified I might never leave. I aimed for the door and bolted. A large, gentle bear of a man stood up from his chair and blocked my path. He stuck out his hand. Looking me straight in the eyes, he said, “Thank you for coming.”
I disappeared down the gapping black hole, the embracing maw of mortality.

I called Barbara. I got lost on the way home. I think maybe I went to bed. I don’t remember.

My mother was a Musician and on the urn that holds her remains I have had chiseled that word. I have restored what God took away. I have that power.

The other word I have had etched into the marble is Teacher.

Of course she taught public school, sixth grade English, for years. Before that, of course, music on the graduate school level, and throughout her life in an infinite number of Bible studies, Sunday School classes, and Wednesday night prayer meetings. But all of that pales in comparison to teaching me. She taught me just about all the practical things I know in life.

Within days of my father’s demise she taught me how to balance a checkbook and do the laundry. She taught me how to cook, from scratch, and clean the house to her exacting standards. She taught me how to iron and arrange books on the shelf so they look better. She taught me how to answer the phone and write letters. She taught me how to set a table and how to talk to adults. She taught me to open doors for ladies and to walk on the outside of them, next to the street, in case cars were to splash mud as they drove by. She taught me when to use the word “was” and “were” correctly and never to end a sentence with a preposition. She taught me how to make a bed and fold a fitted sheet so you couldn’t tell it from the flat one. She taught me how to arrange flowers and how to hang pictures. She taught me how to organize a kitchen as well as a monthly budget.

All of these things are useless, of course, when it comes to earning a living, unless you run a hotel or a concentration camp. But they edify the spirit and enhance the beauty of life, as well as provide a distraction to keep the voices at bay. They also program you to abuse your own children despite your best efforts to the contrary. The fact is that, like Leonard Bernstein, my mother’s greatest legacy may be more as a teacher than a musician. Certainly, with me, her success was greater in the former than the latter.

I’m not sure my mother thought in terms of leaving a legacy, anymore than she thought of defining herself and her role in the universe. I think my mother saw herself not so much as an individual as rather a partner, a member of a team. Once, during a mutually unfortunate starter marriage, my altogether unloving, unforgiving first wife and I took my mother to lunch. While grazing my way through the buffet and trying to ignore as much of the conversation as possible I heard my mother say, “A woman without a man is only half a woman. But a woman with a man is a woman and a half.” I looked up just in time to see a look on my soon to be ex-wife’s face that silently demanded I set the woman straight, or she would choke her to death with her bare hands. “What did you say?” I parlayed for time. My mother repeated the offensive catch phrase. The wife who was just months away from total ownership of my house may have been Missouri white trash, but she had been to graduate school and knew better than to stand for this drivel. So before the bitch could do serious harm with a butter knife, which, incidentally, she had not placed correctly next to her plate, I offered up a, “Well, that’s just silly.”

Like water off a duck’s back. I should have as easily scaled the Great Wall of China with Bibles and religious pamphlets as assail my mother’s beliefs in this matter. That was what she believed. That is who she was and she had spent years amassing evidence to support it.

Seconds after my father died that Christmas Eve, she knelt down in front of me in the hospital lobby, as I returned from a fruitless conversation with God in the back seat of our ’52 Plymouth, and said. “Honey, our daddy’s dead. You’re the man of the family now.” And off she went to make phone calls.

My mother could no more be without a man in her life than our country can be without a president or lesser nations without a king. There are rules in place, courses of action lain down for generations, to be scrupulously followed on these occasions. There is a time honored system carefully crafted by our founding fathers. There is a pecking order, and I had ascended to the throne. There was no more point in fretting over the ability of a nine-year-old boy to cope than worrying about Alexander the Great. I was in charge. I required adoration, not care; obedience, not condolences. I was the head of the family now, with all the omnipotence accorded thereto.

My first official act was to develop an almost paralyzing fear of death, specifically that of my mother. If God could kill my father, of what else was He capable? I’d read what he had done to the children of Israel, and he supposedly loved them. Only hours before, this minister had stood in the pulpit and exhorted the people to love the Lord and obey Him always. Some gratitude from God! Now, on another whim just as capricious, I realized He could take my mother and then I would be truly and completely alone. I began to assemble reinforcements. This was war.

I began to kill off my mother almost immediately, reducing her to the role of a sacrificial pawn whose demise could not hurt me. In addition, I began creating a powerful, almost unassailable ego. Ironically my mother was complicit in this, heaping boundless praise and adulation at every turn. But it was important to know that, should the worst occur before help arrived, I could hold off the Enemy single handed.

Then came phase two. I needed to invest in someone else. I needed a substitute mother. Someone younger with a better shot at outliving me. And so I created an early marriage to the aforementioned unloving, unforgiving bitch, moved out of my mother’s house, and went away to graduate school to further fortify the ego blockade. Along the way I amassed a bank account that would both allow me to wage a comfortable war as well as purchase distractions when the battles went badly. I created defensive walls by piling up the bodies of meaningless, if entertaining, sexual relationships. I read books and kept lists of them to prove I was smart and had made good use of my time. I balanced my checkbook to the penny and kept my house like an elegant museum. I struggled to become a great musician and have the Power. Of course you can’t win every battle.

The demise of my first marriage proved both an economic and psychological setback. Clearly I was still vulnerable. But I was not defeated and the war waged on. And well after I had reduced my mother to an impotent, useless pawn in my war with the God of Death, she died.

During the last year of her life conversation was virtually impossible. She could only speak a few, often nonsensical words in a row and no sooner did I ask for clarification than she had already forgotten what she had said. Any thought that might have animated her had vanished into the limbo where people in her condition must live. And so it was on the last time I saw her. In fact, the only two words I understood were, “I’m sorry.”

There are a number of ways this could be interpreted. For example, “I’m sorry your father had to die when you were young and that I forced you to grow the fuck up in a split second,” or “I’m sorry you have never achieved the Power and therefore wound up leading a life of not so quiet desperation,” or “I’m sorry that you were scared so shitless of death striking again that you could never afford to love me,” or “I’m sorry I’m in this condition and wish it were not so.” But that’s not what she meant. No siree. I knew for an unquestionable certainty what she meant. I saw it in her eyes.

She meant, “I’m sorry you have to take time out of your important life to take care of me.”
As God is my witness that is what she meant.
I know it for a fact.
I absolutely do.

The next time I saw her she was in a cardboard box.

When my mother was coherent, she had always said she wanted to be buried with my father at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Francisco. Upon remarrying, however, the plot next to him and reserved for her, had been sublet. Now, widowed for the second time, she was eligible once again to join my father, but this would now require cremation. She told me this and said she was “alright with it.” Given her conservative religious beliefs, I would not have been surprised if she had felt otherwise, but that was not the case and so, for her, it was settled.

I was offered the opportunity to attend her cremation. Since I had not seen her since she had died exactly one week earlier, I arranged to go. I went alone. Who would go with me? I have no siblings. My mother had no relatives living in the state. I would not impose it on my wife, or even my loving and forgiving ex wife.

It was 6:00 in the morning. A warehouse in a rural community of agriculture and light industry. And people who park cars on their lawns and don’t know shit about music. People who never balance their checkbooks or iron their sheets. People no more capable of setting a correct table than digging the Panama Canal with a toothpick. People who wouldn’t know great art if it bit them on the ass. People who enjoy bowling and video games. People who have absolutely no knowledge of the Power. These were the very people my mother had warned me about, though professed to love in the name of the God of Death. And now, like His only begotten Son, she had returned to die among them.

It was cold and it was gray. I was greeted when I arrived and taken through the messy office to a large garage containing two furnaces. My mother’s body lay in an open cardboard box just outside the door of one of them. Two men gestured me forward and then stood back to give me some privacy. “Oh mother,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

As I stepped back and turned, one of the great unwashed held out a small necklace and said, “I found this on your mother and wondered if you wanted it, or if you preferred it left on her.” I was in charge, you see. I was the one to make the decision. I was the man of the family.

I took the necklace and watched her body pushed into the furnace. The door closed and the man pushed a button. “The process has begun,” I was told. “Thank you for the necklace,” I said, to this gentle and kind man who genuinely seemed to care about me and my mother’s necklace.

I drove home, barely holding The Void at bay.
The Void is the God of Death’s welcome mat.

It was Julian Barnes in his book Nothing To Be Frightened Of (which, incidentally, ends a title with a preposition) who wrote that there are four categories of people. First there are those that do not fear death because they have faith. Equally honored are those who do not fear death despite having no faith. Less respected are those who, despite having faith, still suffer from a perfectly rational fear of the God of Death. Then finally, the scum of the philosophical earth and completely without merit, come those who fear death and have no faith.

I believe that blasphemy is a victimless crime, and yet, even on my worst day, I dread leaving this interesting, ever eventful, totally random life for a cold, dark, and mindless eternity. What Lily Tomlin said is true. “Hell is having imagination but no talent.” But as long as there is life, there is hope. Hope for the talent. Hope for the Power. And once in a while, glimpses of it. Moments when I think “yes…..yes, just like that.” And then it’s gone. But I’ve seen it. I have.

There are those who believe that when the God of Death finally wins, it will be like that all the time. Living in the Power. But I don’t know. No one does. And as long as no one knows for certain, it seems the best course of action to keep fighting………or not.

French philosopher Emile Zola said, “Mine has been a happy life, tinged with despair.” I know just what he means. But worse than a gnawing undercurrent of inadequacy must be
the hell in which I can only assume my mother lived for the last years of her life. I did not wish that for her, nor, can I imagine, she wished it for herself. And so I am glad that, given that singular alternative, she is gone.

When my father died, my mother created a scholarship fund in his honor at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in San Francisco where she used to teach. I have arranged to add her name to it and endow it so that it may exist forever. I don’t like the Baptists, mind you. They may be a harmless cult compared to the Muslims, but they brainwashed me nevertheless. If it weren’t for them I wouldn’t be burdened with this war thing against the God of Death. However, it was her money and she would have loved it. More than peace in the Middle East it would have made her happy.

Finally, on the new tombstone that will stand above the preacher and his wife who adopted me, I had chiseled the word “Together.” I hope she would have liked that too.

Not dead of wounds, not borne
Home to the village on a litter of branches, torn
By splendid claws and the talk all night of the villagers,
But stung to death by gnats
Lies love.

What swamp I sweated through for all these years
Is at length plain to me.

Edna St. Vincent Millay