â PART I â
Angels
A Beautiful Mother
â MARIANNE GINGHER â
MOTHER HAS BEEN at the hospital all day but, exhausted, goes home around midnight, leaving her oldest son to keep vigil at our fatherâs bedside. Daddy has been in a coma for three days, and although death is thought imminent, no doctor or nurse is saying whether it will be hours or days.
At 3 A.M. a nurse nudges my brother awake and tells him itâs over.
My parents, married forty-four years, had raised four headstrong children during the turbulent sixties. Mother was a homemaker; my father, a doctor. Their arrangement, traditional for the times, had pleased them both. Mother, a charming, witty, emotionally intelligent beauty, believed sheâd done everything in the world that was worth doing as far as her own ambitions were concerned. She delighted in her marriage and her children, had devoted friends, and filled her leisure time with their company, with arts and crafts, voice lessons, cooking, garden and bridge clubs, and volunteer work, and she was always available to lend a sympathetic ear. If sheâd had both opportunity and fire, she said, she might have been a torch singer, but que serĂĄ, serĂĄ. My father joked she would have made an excellent psychiatrist, had she been able to pass organic chemistry. âIf I had wanted to pass organic chemistry, I would have,â she retorted. In our family, she was the go-to person if you had a problem, and we children tended to tell her everything because she offered solid counsel. Throughout my girlhood she gave no indication of wanting to be anywhere other than in the briar patch of her family, which, from my perspective, suggested that she thrived on sacrifice.
Her only daughter, I was restless for more than keeping the home fires burning, and Mother was not my role model for career aspirations. Nobody in my family was. I was just born restless for something arty more. Mother might sit on the living room floor, drawing with her pastels while we renegades whooped all around her, but I was not my motherâs daughter in that regard. I would have shooed us away. I would have shouted, âPipe down! I need to concentrate!â
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THE NIGHT MY FATHER DIES, Iâm sleeping alone in the bed where both my sons were conceived. Their father is sleeping across the hall. Weâre in the throes of separationâthe official documents have already been drawn up and signed. Iâve called my lawyer to okay inhabiting the house during my fatherâs deathwatch. A separation agreement in North Carolina in 1990 requires from couples a year of zero cohabitation, and Iâve already moved out, staying with friends and family until more permanent arrangements are made. Iâm nervous that moving back in might start the separation clock over, if my husband wants to make trouble. I suppose he has the right to make trouble. Iâm the one who wants to leave the marriage.
My sons are with my in-laws. My three brothers are all piled up at my parentsâ townhouse a block away. I donât know why my almost-ex-husband hasnât joined our little boys at his parentsâ house, but he is the one whom the telephone rouses when the hospital rings at 3 A.M. He is the messenger, snapping on the overhead light, shaking my shoulder. âThe hospital called. Your father died.â
No bedside manner whatsoever, I hear my doctor father say in his newly acquired language of Angel-ish.
My husband does not accompany us to view my fatherâs body. My brothers, my mother, and I ride in silence the few dark blocks to Moses Cone Memorial Hospital, where my father once strode the halls and commanded the diseases of others to shape up or ship out. I do not want to see him dead. He has been too much alive to ever be dead. I do not want to acknowledge the body without his distinct occupancy of it, whatever his means. It means nothing after death. The ability to possess no longer exists. Oneâs essence, yearnings, talents, beliefs, the complications of being humanâIâm about to gaze upon the ravaged lack of all that. My fatherâs essence has been variously vibrant, endearing, irritating, meddlesome, generous, corny, laconic, garrulous, ferociously Republican, tender, merciful, loyal, impatient, opinionated, humane, stubbornâcomplicated.
Death uncomplicates. It takes a personâs contradictions and complexities, the zigzags of life force and will, and flatlines it all.
There is the pale, untroubled face, superbleached under the florescent light of the hospital room. There is the frozen gape of the loved oneâs open mouth, evidence of a last gasp. Who could ever take a fish off a line again without remembering? But nothing is as disquieting as the absolute stillness of the body, its beyondness. All surrounding air turns to stone. The profound gravity of such stillness draws you like a sinkhole, even time collapsing into it.
We circle the bed as uncertainly as if viewing an imposter. He should be rearing up and telling us what to do.
I remember driving my mother home by myself in her parade float Chevrolet (the last car Daddy ever bought, I couldnât help thinking) while my brothers left together in a second car. Sheâd needed to sign some papers. She isnât feeling well, she says, slumping in the car seat. She feels strange. The black sky softens into lavender, and tentative birdsong floats through the open windows as if an orchestra is tuning up to play, as if nothing is wrong. We park in her driveway, but she makes no effort to get out of the car. Sheâs still trying to absorb the finality of the ordeal. Sick as he was toward the end, sheâd been able to give comfort, and my father had been able to receive it, to know she was with him. Her long days sitting bedside had united them in purpose the way their long marriage had. âI canât feel the left side of my face,â she says to me. âI canât lift my left arm.â
By 9:30 we are in the neurologistâs office. My father has been dead less than seven hours.
They order a CAT scan. Sheâs suffered a âwarningâ stroke, a mild TIA, or transient ischemic attack, they call it. The numbness in her arm and face begins to abate in the doctorâs office, but she feels weak and nauseated. Rest, they say. Take aspirin. Return for a complete evaluation, an MRI. Oh yes, and avoid stress. On the way home she puts a hand on my arm. âI think your father is trying to take me with him,â she says.
âWe arenât going to let him,â I say. âHe had you long enough.â But that isnât true. Nobody can have my mother long enough.
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SHEâS SIXTY-SIX the night my father dies. Except for the TIA episode, sheâs in good health, mentally and physically. She gets on with her life, learning how to do the things for herself that Daddy had always managed: paying bills and puzzling out personal finances with the lawyers, brokers, insurance people my father had long trusted, calling repairmen, addressing the business side of life. She despises keeping track of money, but sheâs good at it, and she lives frugally. She takes out a long-term health care policy. She says she never wants to be a burden.
The first year after my father dies, I live with her. We are both in transition: she, adjusting to widowhood, and me, single with children. She gives me the master bedroom with its suite-size grandeur and bookcases and built-in desk and hires a carpenter to transform the spacious walk-in closet into a bedroom nook with bunk beds for my boys. She says she prefers to move into the guest room because itâs sunnier. Sunny is good, as the gloom of winter approaches.
We are doing all right, cheering one another on. And then on Thanksgiving, as my brothers and sons and assorted relatives and friends gather around our table, I look down at the food on my plate and see that everything on it is beige.
Beige, the least robust of colors, the blandest, the most namby-pamby. âNamby-pambyâ was my fatherâs word for dullards with limp handshakes. There is dressing, brown rice, turkey, oyster casserole, bran rolls, and gravy. The skillet squash has cooked to a scorch-colored mush. Even the bing cherry salad is beige that year because we havenât put bings in the gelatin after all but canned Queen Annes, beige as oatmeal. What had we been thinking? Were we thinking? Where is the livid cranberry sauce? We have forgotten to make it. We forgot to make snap beans. The whole feast looks as if it has been prepared by dullards with limp hand shakes. Who are we fooling? We the resilient are muddling through at best.
The year is 1990. South Africa finally lets Nelson Mandela out of jail after more than twenty-seven years of incarceration. The first George Bush is still president, flanked by Vice-President Dan Quayle who everybody thinks is a dope. My sons are into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in a big way and, on television, The Simpsons, which my mother enjoys watching with them before her favorite show, Seinfeld, comes on. Iâve lucked into a visiting professor post, teaching writing at Hollins College near Roanoke that requires a weekly commute and would be impossible without Mother taking up the childcare slack.
Both boys are in elementary school, but they need afternoon supervision, a cozy supper, baths, and tucking in, and my divorce-pending husband and I have divided those responsibilities. They greatly need unrushed tenderness. In the first months following our separation, a large amount of that tenderness comes from my mother, their grandmother, who has always prioritized love over grief.
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MORE THAN SIX YEARS LATER, I am in the little kitchen of my man friendâs house making dinner. I am so much in love Iâm whistling and dancing, pausing now and then to kiss my man, who sits on the countertop, grinning, watching, waiting for me to twirl by. My complicated life has turned fairy tale bright. What is going on in the world? Do I know? Do I care? The trouble with fairy tales is that theyâre fairy tales. The phone rings. My man answers it while I stir something on the stove. He listens, frowns, thrusts the phone at me.
Itâs October and Mother is away at her fifty-sixth high school reunion in Mount Vernon, Illinois. She got talked into it by her best old friend, and I egged her on. You are going to have some serious laughs and a really great time together, I told her. Two still-foxy seventy-something widows on a big nostalgia roll. But itâs her first plane trip alone, since my father died, and she had been nervous about the trip. Her friend, Jayne, promised to meet her at the St. Louis airport and drive the two of them the hundred miles back to Mount Vernon.
âHello, dear, itâs Jayne,â the caller says to me. âSomething is going on with your mother.â
When she puts Mother on the phone, I canât hear a word sheâs saying for all the sobbing. Jayne takes the phone back. âWe went to the Mount Vernon cemetery this morning,â Jayne says, âso your mother could visit her parentsâ graves.â
âAnd?â
âShe started feeling weird on the way home. I thought it was just emotional, you know? So I gave her a little glass of sherry and told her take a warm bath then, if she felt better, weâd go to the reunion cocktail party. She couldnât get out of the bath tub by herself.â
My mother has regained enough control to tug the phone away from Jayne. âUm sluhwing muh woods,â she says.
I ask her to put Jayne back on. âCall an ambulance,â I tell Jayne. âSheâs having a stroke.â
âShe wants me to call the ambulance,â Jayne tells my mother. My mother wails. âNo! No ahmblunce!â
âShe doesnât want me to call the ambulance,â Jayne says, then, more softly, confidentially, âShe doesnât want to make a scene. She doesnât want to ruin things.â
âThull ton on thuh suruns,â my mother sobs.
âShe doesnât want them to turn on the sirens, because itâll wake everybody in my neighborhood up,â Jayne explains, as if itâs a perfectly logical consideration.
They wonât call the ambulance, no matter how strongly I beg. I hang up, call my oldest brother. He used to be a nurse, but he also has the ability to stand up to and commandeer our mother. Despite her stubborn, independent streak, Mother defers to men, especially if they are tall men, like my father was. My brother is tall enough, and heâs also loud. My children call him Uncle Boom-Boom.
When he phones me back, heâs grave. âI had to cuss at Jayne,â he said. âIt got ugly, but they finally called the ambulance.â
Mother spends nearly two weeks in the Mount Vernon Hospital before she is stable enough to travel and we are able to charter a medically equipped plane to fly her back to North Carolina. Sheâs suffered a stroke that leaves her physically disabled on her left side. Her arm and leg are most affected. She has no facial paralysis; her speech difficulties are improving. Her cognition and her wit remain intact. Sheâs lucky, although until she gets out of rehab she wonât believe that.
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HOME AGAIN, her biggest complaint, besides the rehab exercises, is how to manage her hair. Since her forties, she has worn it in a bun or French twist. Sometimes she attaches a little wiglet to the back of her head and does a comb-over to help maximize the volume of her hairdo. Her trick for thickening her hair is to dust it all over with cornstarch. Hers is thin, fragile, spiderweb hair, the luminous see-through color of white wine. She will not take that hair to a beauty salon, never has. She has always tended to it herself, babying the ornery stuff, her lifelong cosmetic bane, because she doesnât believe thereâs a hair stylist on Earth patient enough to wrestle the mess into some temporary compliance, spinning its straw into gold. She has taught herself how to spin its pale threads into foolâs gold, and thatâs good enough. People compliment her on her hair all the time, but if only they knew. But my mother has an entrenched sense of style. The upswept do, thickened by her remedy of cornstarch, gives her the look of having more hair. But it takes two hands to compose a French twist. Two hands to unfasten the container of cornstarch. Two hands to attach a wiglet if one wants a wiglet. It takes two hands to wrap up a bun and pin it into place on the nape of a neck, two hands to lasso a ponytail. My mother has one working hand.
The physical therapists cajole her; they tell her that vanity is an excellent motivator. If she wants to wear her hair in a distinctive style that only she can manage, then sheâs got to retrain her hand and arm to manage it. Her sons hover and check in, but they do not understand the necessity of getting the hair back on track. I try to coif it for her, but I bungle it. The hair, the hair. Once she is able to fix it to suit herself, that will mean as full a recovery as she might hope for.
By the time she leaves rehab, she is able, with exhausting effort, to wrangle her own little bun into a simple knotâwithout her favorite hair pins or combs, minus her treasured wigletâwith a clamp. She struggles to position the knot symmetrically on her head, and she succeeds where others have failed. Itâs a turning point. She can upsweep her own hair. Well enough. Not perfectly (and she has always been a fan of perfectly) but well enough.
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SIX YEARS LATER, although she walks with a cane and has limited motion in her left arm, at age seventy-nine Mother is doing well. She still lives alone at her townhouse, still walks outside in the little back garden every night to bolt the gate against burglarsâa task that requires her to go up and down the back porch steps. She stopped driving after her stroke, but occasionally she will accompany me to the grocery store to shop for her weekly groceries. Although she fusses about it, I make her push her own cart. All movement had gotten difficult for her, but sheâs still mobile and upright. I insist that exercise will keep her that way, but sheâs never been interested in exercise of any sort, except swimming. Two mornings a week she attends an elder class of water aerobics at the local YWCA. Her teacher is blind. The members of the class have assorted disabilitiesâfrom lameness to heart conditionsâand come from all walks of life. Mother makes her first black friends. She loves this group, its solidarity of feisty slowpokes facing down the culture of rush, hence her determination to tug on a bathing suit with only one handânot easy. After swimming, she wears the suit home because it will take her a good portion of the afternoon to remove it wet. It will have completely dried by the time she peels out of it.
Early spring 2004 I am introducing the writer Ellen Gilchrist, who has come to give a lecture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I teach. My mother is a devoted fan of Ellen Gilchristâs and has read everything Gilchrist ever wrote, so I strategize a way to transport her to campus from an hour away in Greensboro. A friend will drive her, but three problems remain. First, not only is her walking slow and uncertain, but she lacks stamina for maneuvering the considerable distance between parking facilities and the lecture hall. Second, the campus sidewalks are an obstacle course of uneven bricks, many of them humped up by tree roots or, occasionally, missing altogether. Hurrying to classes, I have fallen myself a time or two, tripping over bricks or the lack of bricks. The third problem has to do with motherâs tenacious vanity. When I suggest that the friend who brings her should probably use a wheelchair, Mother balks. She will not appear at a public event as a handicapped person. No....