Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death (18 page)

in a tiny, nearly illegible script. “Your legs never let you down even

though put under great pressure. Such legs are not available to

every body.” My parents had a good week in Maine, and not long

after they returned, my mother decided to quit Remeron on her

own. I came to visit in November, got the flu, and extended my

stay to a full week. Oblivious, I lay in the guest bedroom blowing

my nose in my unmade bed, her calligraphy desk littered with

the galleys of my finally completed magazine story.

I cooked in my mother’s spotless kitchen the way I did at

home—piling up mountainous salads at dinner and working my

way through big plates of rice, vegetables, and chicken at lunch.

My mother pursed her lips and sat down with my father, each

before a translucent white plate holding half a peeled, sliced

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katy butler

apple fanned like origami; three spears of ruffled romaine; and

two or three translucent curls of sheep’s’ milk cheese. At tea, to

her annoyance, I refused her offer of toast and jam. When my

father methodically wheeled out the television and turned on

the evening news—one of the few chores he was still capable of

doing—I declined to join her in her ritual evening glass of wine

accompanied by a thimbleful of peanuts in a tiny blue and white

Chinese eggcup. She asked why I deprived myself of all pleasure.

I asked her to let me be. She said I was paranoid and oversensi-

tive. The next day I borrowed a pair of socks and returned them

without washing them. I withdrew to my room, nursed the tail

end of my flu, and moved up my return flight up by a day.

The day before I was due to leave, as we unloaded groceries

from the car, she stood on her doorstep and shouted that all I

thought about was “Me! Me! Me!” My diet, she said, was “rigid,

excessive, and ridiculous.” I could have been a teenager again,

standing in the cold, tears filling my eyes. There on the doorstep,

as alive as ever, were our ancient angers and griefs: my desper-

ate need for autonomy and hers for control, our mutual inability

to say, “I need you,” my craving for her love, and my fury at not

getting it. I ran upstairs weeping and pulled my Rollaboard out

of the closet. I was nearly fifty-six, and she was eighty.

In the emotional world there is no time. Staring out the

window as my Southwest flight descended once again over the

Cargill salt ponds into San Francisco International Airport, I

mentally ticked off my resentments. She’d brusquely told me to

eat the big zucchinis and the dark chicken meat and leave her

the small zucchinis and the white meat. She’d forgotten to put

out an extra cup for me at tea. She’d mocked my father when

he couldn’t finish his sentences. Whenever my brothers—who

barely remembered to call her on Mother’s Day, while I usually

sent a card or a book—hinted they needed money, she’d mail

out a thousand dollars to cover a month’s rent, or car insurance,

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or an acting workshop. But she’d insisted I pay separately for a

$1.29 Burt’s Bees lip balm that I’d put in her supermarket cart.

My mother called to make up. She’d just been irritated and

impatient, she said, it was her besetting sin, and she was too

ashamed to talk further about it. I said I wanted an apology.

“Do you mean to say I habitually treat you with disrespect?” she

said in surprise, and then wailed, “I have limitations!” I got off

the phone and called my brothers, indulging in our cherished

tradition of bashing absent family members behind their backs.

My brother Jonathan told me to give up on the fantasy that if I

played Perfect Daughter, I’d finally earn her love.

He put down the phone, found his well-thumbed copy of

The Big Book
of Alcoholics Anonymous, and read a page aloud

to me:

Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I

am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing

or situation—some fact of my life—unacceptable to me, and

I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing

or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at

this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God’s

world by mistake.

Over the phone, I could hear him close the book with a snap.

“Your mother is a rattlesnake,” he said. “She was a miserable

bitch before the stroke and she’s still a miserable bitch. Don’t

try too hard.” On my next call, my brother Michael offered me

empathy and called her “the cute little monster.”

Lisa, one of my closest friends, who was a long-distance care-

giver for an elderly, recently widowed mother and a disabled sis-

ter, advised a showdown. Some months earlier, she’d flown to

New York to help her mother complete the final tax return for

Lisa’s deceased father. One night at 1:00 am, when Lisa was on

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the phone with her husband, her mother flew into her bedroom

and scolded her to put out the light and go to sleep. The next

morning, Lisa sat her mother down at the breakfast table and said

that at fifty-three she was old enough to choose her own bedtime,

and that if this continued, she’d stop coming east to help. “Do

you understand me?” she said, and would not let it go until the

old woman dropped her eyes, intimidated, and said yes. Circum-

stances had changed, my friend told me. We dutiful daughters

had to turn the family hierarchy upside down or perish.

The physical world was my mother’s arena: I was too intimi-

dated to confront her there. I retreated instead into the written

word, and sent her a heavily revised, six-page letter of com-

plaint, detailing every insult and every blow. “I will not be your

convenient Cinderella,” I wrote with a flourish, “to be praised in

your hour of need and denigrated when no longer useful.”

Silence.

Brian and I held a New Year’s Eve party, and everyone wrote

down what they wanted to get rid of and what they wanted to

bring into their lives, and threw the shiny papers into the blaz-

ing fireplace. One of our guests, a writer named Noelle Oxen-

handler whom I then barely knew, burst into tears. Her mother,

who’d been living in Provence with a lover who could no longer

care for her, had dementia. Noelle, with a daughter in college

and a mortgage to pay, had been forced to fly over and trick her

mother into returning to the States. She had set her up in a

townhouse in Sonoma and was paying a full-time caregiver out

of her mother’s dwindling savings.

My mother and I did not speak for months. In the early

spring, after teaching my annual writing workshop in Washing-

ton, I took Amtrak north, stayed with an old college classmate

in Larchmont, and met with editors in New York for whom I

wanted to write. Then, rather than taking the Metro-North to

New Haven and having my parents pick me up there, as was our

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custom, I went back to California. I did not want my mother to

touch me with a three-thousand-mile pole.

My father kept laboring over his torturous handwritten let-

ters to me, full of love, odd sentences, and wisdom. One letter

read, “This is a bad time for you and your mother. I know you

are having a ‘frightful row’ but that must be got over as soon as

possible. You should be able to do so fairly quickly.”

I did not. One day in California, I drove to the end of the box

canyon I lived in, took a wooden footbridge over a stream, and

climbed through a stand of second-growth redwoods and up a

slope lined with blackberry bushes onto Mount Tamalpais, my

sacred mountain. Up the steep railroad-tie steps to Cowboy Rock

I sweated and panted, my buttocks and lungs burning, up past

the county water tank and the dozen rich houses built where the

Flying Y Ranch used to be. At ten in the morning, I breached a

ridge and entered a vast bowl of unpopulated hills. Car sounds

died away. Finches twittered in the chaparral. I followed the trail

beneath a bent bay laurel, bonsaied by the winds. A madrone

showed its red bones.

“Mountains,” the Zen master Eihei Dogen told an assembly

of Japanese monks in 1240, “are our Buddha ancestors.” Inside

my brain, an invisible hand turned the volume knob down. I

moved deep into the sock of the valley—the only visible human.

Except for a ribbon of yellow-lined asphalt below me, there was

no sign of human making. Beyond the last hills lay the Pacific.

Over the ridges at my back, far to the east, beyond three thou-

sand miles of deserts and mountains, my mother was proba-

bly putting away the Manchego cheese as my father hovered

around her in the kitchen. Perhaps she was shouting at him to

sit down and stop crowding her. Helping her, I thought, was like

reaching through barbed wire to water a rose.

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katy butler

*

*

*

From my earliest childhood memory, my mother was beautiful,

bewildering, and dangerous. When I was four, she’d stopped our

car on a road through a great beech woods. We were driving from

Oxford to pick up my father, who was teaching in High Wycombe.

It was autumn. All the leaves were golden yellow. The branches

of the beeches met high above our heads, making an arched and

open cathedral. The very air was yellow with the glory of the trees.

My mother turned off the ignition and put the keys in her pocket.

“We are going to build a house for the fairies,” she said, and opened

the door. We walked into the yellow woods. At a hollow place at

the foot of a tree, my mother knelt down. She brushed away leaves

and stuck forked twigs into the ground. She balanced sticks across

the clefts, making roof-beams, a ridgepole, then rafters. I propped

yellow leaves against the sides and roofed it in beech leaves—they

were broad-bladed, like spears, and their points made a jagged line

along the peak. We put moss in the front garden, and round white

stones to lead the fairies to the door.

Even then she was a rebel and an agnostic, with nothing

good to say about reverence. But that day she led me to some-

thing she could not give me and taught me something close to

prayer. All the way back to the car, beneath the blazing beeches,

I held her hand.

When had things gone wrong between us? Was it after my

brother Michael was born, when I stopped serving her “tea” inside

a hollowed-out bush in Oxford’s University Parks? Was it the

day I was five and she strolled away from me on the Woodstock

Road, pushing Michael ahead in his pram, leaving me bereft on

the closed, hard street to run alone, weeping, back to our locked

brick row house on Thorncliffe Road, because I’d stamped my

foot and argued with her about which playground to visit? Was it

the evening not long after my brother Jonathan was born, when

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she collapsed in tears and exhaustion and my father helped her

wash the boys’ nappies, pulling them through the mangle with his

teeth while he turned the crank with his only hand?

Was it coming to America that broke us, stripping away from

our little émigré family every relative, colleague, neighbor, and

friend we’d ever known? Was it building that first Techbuilt, that

bare house, empty of furniture, where my father tried to finish his

thesis in a dark corner of the master bedroom while my mother

laid a cork floor downstairs? Was it the way my father and I treated

her like an idiot because she couldn’t spell? Was it her loneliness,

after my father got tenure at Wesleyan and grew increasingly pre-

occupied with teaching, writing, and hiding out in the evenings

behind his newspaper and a dark glass of bourbon and soda?
Was it the day I came back from boarding school at the age of seventeen and argued with her until she slapped me in the face on the

stairs of her new, bigger, better-furnished Middletown Techbuilt

and I slapped her deliberately back—the only way I knew to put

an end to a lifetime of her impulsive hitting and random cruelty?

Was it simply that I rubbed her the wrong way because I was by

nature chaotic and messy, and she was neat?

All I know is that by the time I was twelve, I hated her, and

I believed she hated me—a feeling confirmed when I found

a letter she was writing to my father while he was in England

doing research. “Katy has been awful,” it read. “But then she

always was your child, anyway.” I wrote my hate down in my

diary, which she found and read. I hated her when she tried to

teach me to sew and tore out and resewed my crooked seams