This is Getting Old (20 page)

After high school, through various adventures and misadventures of my own, I clearly established that I was
not
my mother, and I stopped worrying about it. But now again my identity overlaps with my mother's. Sometimes people tell me I look like her, and now that she's gone I don't mind it as much as I used to. I'm not happy, though, about all the food stains I've been getting on my shirts, just as my mother did—spots of yogurt on the front and smears of chocolate ice cream on the cuffs.

It's strange how family likeness rises to the surface later in life, especially after a parent dies. My sisters, too, increasingly resemble my mother, and after my father died, my brother quite suddenly came to look startlingly like him. After my paternal grandmother died, my aunt took on my grandmother's face and form. She even seemed to foster the likeness, cutting her hair in a short gray wave as my grandmother had done and wearing what could have been the very same navy blue skirt and matching jacket my grandmother wore. Once, seeing her at a family gathering after an absence of a couple of years, I thought for a frightening moment that she
was
my dead grandmother. Perhaps our DNA is a time-release capsule, and at a certain stage the genes kick in to say: this is how the people in your family look when they get old.

I miss my mother more than I expected to. I'm also sad that she died because of an accident, before she was quite ready to go, and that her last three weeks were spent in the hospital, painfully encumbered by machinery that tried, and failed, to save her life. I want my sadness to be erased—for her to stop being dead, or for me to stop minding—but no such tidiness is likely to come while I'm alive.

And I'm finding out something surprising: even after my mother's death I still have a relationship with her, and it's a
relationship that can change, even though she keeps on being dead. How I relate to her now is up to me.

I have a friend who used to take her father to a waterfront park in Berkeley and sit with him on a particular bench to look at the view. He died fifteen years ago, and she still goes there to sit on “Bubba's bench” and talk to him. After my mother died, I hung a photo of her in the stairwell of my house so that I meet her face to face every time I come downstairs. Sometimes I hear myself saying out loud, “Hi, Mom.”

My mother had published several books of poetry with small presses, and at the end of her life, she wanted to publish a collection of her autobiographical short stories. She asked me to be her editor, which I was glad to do, so I helped her choose which of her stories to include, and I made suggestions as to how she might revise them. She also wrote some new stories for the collection. We had a good time working on this project together; I respected her writing and was moved by the life she told of in the stories, and she trusted my editorial responses.

A year before my mother's death, I took her to a writing workshop taught by an old friend, at Glenstal Abbey, a Benedictine abbey in the west of Ireland. It was our last big adventure together. There were only seven students: my mother and myself, four literary monks from the abbey, and a woman from Dublin. My mother worked on her last story there, about her painful marriage to my father, and she bravely read a piece of it aloud to the group each day when it was her turn. It was brave because the story told of intimate marital unhappiness, and the group included both celibate monks and her daughter. Everyone listened hard and gave her helpful feedback, and all that week she threw herself into her work, rewriting by hand because she didn't have a computer there, cutting and pasting with scissors and tape. One of the monks, with whom she fell quite in love, made photocopies for her in the library. It was a good story, and she made it better.

At mealtimes I pushed her in her wheelchair down the gravel
path to the refectory—it was slow going, crunching through the gravel—for blood pudding, brown bread, and tea in bowls with the monks. Evenings, in the late sunlight of the Irish summer, I took her to the walled garden, and she sat on the stone edge of the raised lavender bed and leaned into the smell.

The only moment of tension between us came one morning when my mother said, “I like your hair so much better when you brush it back.” It was a familiar refrain, but this time I took it as a compliment, as I had just finished brushing my hair in the bathroom.

“Thank you,” I said.

“No,” she said, “not like that. Can't you just brush it back?” I was outraged, but later, looking at photos of myself on that trip, I saw that my hair was indeed unruly. I didn't cut my hair short and neat, getting it out of my face as she always wanted me to, until after her death. It must have been unconscious filial perversity that made me withhold this satisfaction from her. If she could only see my hair now, she would finally approve.

I was in her room in the abbey guesthouse when she received a call from an old man in Chicago who had shortly before become attentive to her. From across the room I could hear his voice at the other end of the line, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, shouting, “I love you!”

“Me, too,” she said, too embarrassed in my presence to say the words back. She didn't know I'd heard his words, or that I was pleased by them, for her sake.

Soon after the trip to Ireland, my mother finished her revisions of all the stories, and it was left for me to do the final editing. I was making slow progress, because I was working on another editing project.

“When are you going to finish editing my book?” she asked me, every time we spoke.

“As soon as I finish this other project,” I told her.

And then I did finish editing the other book, and I turned my full attention to my mother's book. I had just sent her my
final edits when she was in the car accident that caused her death three weeks later.

I felt terrible that I hadn't finished the book in time for her to see it in print. But this is what happens when people die. Death interrupts life. Some process is going on, some piece of business, large or small, is unfinished, some words still unspoken, a letter unsent, a cup not yet washed, a shirt on the bed waiting to be folded.

I promised my mother in the hospital that I would finish the editing and publish the book, and so I did. When it came back from the printer, I opened the box with excitement and pulled out a copy, with a painting by a friend of my mother's on the cover. I held it, and it was perfect. My hands ached to complete the gesture—to put the book in my mother's hands.

I reassure myself that the pain of not finishing this project before she died is more mine than hers, for she had finished her work on the book, and she seemed to be focused on other concerns as she was dying: on her family and close friends, on breathing. Besides, putting the book together and getting it published gave me a way to work closely with my mother even after her death. She was a quieter collaborator than she had been when alive, but I continued to feel her presence as my siblings and I gave readings and sent the book out into the world, where people appreciated it.

My mother stopped taking care of her children in the ordinary sense long before she died; we have been grown-ups for a long time now. But she encouraged me and gave me comfort. She always wanted to hear from me, she always wanted to see me, and she admired whatever I did. As long as she was alive, I could keep on hoping that when I was having a hard time she could somehow make it better. Now that I'm an orphan I have to admit she isn't going to step in anymore.

I wish I had been better able to offer her comfort in return. She didn't ask for it often, but it was hard for me to listen to
her when she was unhappy about something. As the mother, she was the one who was supposed to comfort me. I jumped too quickly to “Oh, it couldn't be that bad, I'm sure he didn't mean to hurt your feelings,” and this made matters worse because she felt dismissed.

As I experience some of what my mother went through when she grew old, I sympathize with her in a new way. I realize in retrospect how little she complained, in spite of serious problems like the disabling pain in her back that limited her walking. Paradoxically, she got tougher as she got frailer.

But she did complain that I didn't visit her enough. I used to go to Chicago to see her a couple of times a year, for about a week each time. My stepfather died two years before my mother, and after his death it was more intimate, visiting her. I felt some awkwardness as the two of us sat in her living room, and I crocheted, and she stroked her cat, or tapped her forefinger against her upper lip, hoping for confidences from me that I didn't offer—how I felt about my life and the people in it. She didn't ask, but I could feel her wondering:
Did I have a lover? What was I writing about?
Damn! How hard would it have been to let down my guard? But I was relieved when it was 10:00
P.M
., and we could turn on the BBC news, as was her habit. “I don't need to watch the news while you're visiting,” she'd say. “I can watch the news any night.”

“Oh, that's OK,” I answered. “Let's find out about those forest fires in California.”

My fear that my mother's needs would become too great for me made me keep a certain distance from her, out of a misguided self-protection. Now that she's dead, I have more distance than I want.

I used to call her every Sunday. We chatted about the weather, what we were reading, movies, news of her grandchildren, and she would tell me what she was seeing out of her sixth-floor window
overlooking Lake Michigan. “Men in yellow hats are spreading sand, making a beach at the edge of the lake—they look like yellow ants.” Or, “There's a fat woman jogging along the lake—I can't understand why such a fat person would ever go jogging. It's ridiculous!” One time she told me with great enthusiasm about the newly elected senator from Illinois who came from Hyde Park, her neighborhood of Chicago—Barack Obama.

A few years before she died, I started telling her I loved her, the last thing before I hung up the phone. I was over sixty and she was over eighty—an old daughter telling an old mother a simple thing that she was glad to hear. It was true, so I don't know why it was hard to say when I first began the practice, but it got easier as I got into the habit, and in the last couple of years it rolled right off my tongue.

Lots of things have happened that I would tell my mother about if I could call her next Sunday. I'd like her to know that people are crazy about her book of short stories. I'd like her to know that her great-granddaughter can talk in both English and Spanish. She would have loved to be at my nephew's wedding last summer, with the extended family all around. And she would be thrilled about Obama. I wish I could tell her—“Guess who's your president!”

The more time that goes by, the more events she'll miss: graduations and weddings and births, and she'll slip further into the past, and her grandchildren will marry people she never met, and take up interests she never knew they had, and her children will get old and feeble, and have joints replaced and troublesome organs removed.

I can appreciate my mother more now that I'm not reacting defensively to her criticisms of my unruly hair or feeling guilty that I'm not visiting her enough. As long as she was alive, she was Mom, and I, being her child no matter my age, became childish.

She birthed me twice: the first time when I was born, and the second when she died. Now that she's gone, there's no person on
earth whose child I am. So I have to grow up, at this late date. It takes so long to grow up.

A year after my mother died, I was sitting in my parked car in the California countryside. My cell phone rang on the seat beside me. I fumbled for it and barely managed to answer it in time. “Hello?”

“Hello, it's
your mother
.” That's how she always identified herself when she telephoned me, saying the words “your mother” with ironic emphasis, as if it was our private joke. Nobody ever reaches me on my cell phone, not even the living, because I never leave it on, so this was truly a miracle.

“Mom!” I said, overjoyed to hear her voice, “how wonderful that you've found a way to reach me even though you're dead! Thank you so much for calling.”

“Please take good care of yourself, Susan,” she said with affection. That was all, but when she said it, I knew it was exactly what I wanted to hear. Then I lost the connection.

It was enough. I was overcome with gratitude that she had contacted me from the other side. And when I woke up and realized it was just a dream, it was
still
a miracle. She had found a way to reach me.

For the Time Being

The self is time . . . Do not think that time merely flies away . . . If time merely flies away, you would be separated from time.

—Zen Master Dogen, “The Time Being”

W
HEN
I
WAS FORTY-NINE
and my sons were more or less grown, I kept a promise I had made to myself to go on a long retreat before I turned fifty. I arranged a leave of absence from my job, had a set of robes sewn for me, and went to a “practice period” at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, deep in the coastal mountains of California. For three months I followed the strict monastic schedule: meditating, studying Buddhist teachings, and working in silence at whatever I was assigned to, whether it was chopping carrots or cleaning kerosene lanterns. I didn't get in a car or hear a phone ring the whole time.