September 13, 1993

Yesterday afternoon my father called me with some bad news.  My mom died during church yesterday.  She had a seizure of some kind, some nurses, in the congregation I suppose, helped her, the EMT team arrived and revived her heart-so I suppose it had stopped.  They took her to the hospital emergency room, where she had another attack (of the heart?) and that was that, she stopped her breathing, her heart had had enough of this world.

Her old age, older than it should have been given her years, was a pretty cold and nasty place to be just lately.  It was like all her different parts just got tired of the monotony of doing their work day after day.  And her heart was the most tired, the most in need of some kind of break.  So she has died.  I am sad.  I awoke early this morning and thought of her craziness, her wild mood swings, and her eyes of compassion, sometimes, as one of my brothers said once long ago, much more compassionate for strangers than for us closest to her.  She included me in those eyes of compassion, however, and now that she has died, I feel strange- sad yes, but more than that.  She had a giant heart attack eleven years ago, I was a few months short of my degree at UMass.  She beat the odds then, but there was alot of damage to her heart.  And she gave it a shot, walking almost every day, eating fish and chicken, but, as time went on, she either got tired of the discipline of good health, or else she became aware (or felt) that it wasn’t doing any good- so, to find that happiness that seems so close yet allusive, she jumped back onto the wild abandonment of food ecstasy, which she knew better than anyone, provided no real joy at all.

And it’s funny, ironic, bitter, that it seems to me now that as her body melted away, breaking down bit by bit, her spirit became less and less angry and she came closest to having some happiness, some calm in her soul.  Part of it was embracing her religion, which comforts all us big brained types, and the other part was the awareness of her husband, my father, who she always gave the impression (as I grew up) was the cause of great angst for her, that he was a weight around her innocent neck.  Too young, too young, I was much too young!  As if he, only three years older and even less sophisticated, I suppose, had plotted some diabolical scheme to entrap her.  And we, her children, were another weight hanging there.  Stopping her studies, her potential for art or culture, we had made her old, and even worse, simply middle class.  But that was my mother of her middle age, when she saw her lost youth with bitter clarity, and she could still feel the righteous indignation of youth, that there were things entitled to, deserved, meant to be on a higher order.

But after her heart attack, after all those walks on the beach, after life with our Uncle Nate, where she saw a man whose wife and only child had been cruelly snatched away by indifferent Nature, and she saw him age, fall apart, she changed his diapers (or at least knew they were being changed, and felt the anguish of the changing of a grown man’s dignity and control), she started seeing my father differently, or at least talking about him differently.  He was no longer the interloper stealing her dreams.  Now he was just a man, trying to battle his own lonely childhood, who silently and often thanklessly went to a job early every morning day after day for year after year.She told me about his search for family, his horror and fear when my little brother died (prior to this I had heard only, through tears, of her own sorrow, as if my father weren’t even there.  How amazing that I only discovered in 1991 that my father was home alone with all five children, early one Sunday morning, when he found his baby dead in his crib, while getting all the kids ready for church), how he wanted to check everyone in the middle of the night, how deep his love for us ran.  This contrasts with the memories of a silent (now seen as shy) and awkward stranger- to me- that wandered around the house and drove the car.

What does it mean, a life well led?  How do we determine what path to take?  Maybe part of it isn’t determining things at all, it’s just living, making babies, swimming in cold water, risking the blank page and making it full.  How much will my memeories fade?  Maybe that is death’s real sting- that people just become forgotten, or remain as only faint inaccurate memories.  I remember my mother’s lullabies, which now seem as much for her as for me.  She lived with a great deal of pain when I was growing up, she once told me, when I was five or so, that she was going to run away, but that I didn’t need to worry, she would always take me with her.  Now she’s run away, in  a manner, but it’s curious, she finally really loved my father (or it seems to me) and now, after a lifetime of wanting to be somewhere else, she actually liked her life.  but the body says no this time.

Mom, what is a life well led?  the sadness I carry around inside of me, I can never tell if it’s good or bad, but it seems so much the indelible me- like my glasses, my height, my off center nose, my non-singing voice- memories of your angry sadness, and then your bittersweet sadness, and your firm committment that I must live my life, with risks, with heights and depths, with eyes of compassion.  I suppose I’ll never know what we all want to know, whether you can keep an awareness of how we progress, if there is some kind of heavenly monitoring system, so maybe I’ll just decide yes or no to that for my own internal world view.

I will walk along the beach and think of you...