A Death in the Family

This will always be a summer like no other, a shift in the generational progression of things----a threshold that no flowers or welcoming porch can soften. This rundown old farmhouse in which we live has seen over two hundred years of beating hearts pass through it’s kitchen doors, a few still ones exiting, and certainly the roil of family passions aplenty. Yet, for it’s age it seems clear of shadows and lingering business. Its only ghosts might be those dust motes which dance all seasons in the generous golden light pouring through its large windows. This is a much loved and lived-in house; it’s home qualities far more substantial than its off-plumb antique charms.

Some families may be that way. However, experience over the years shows me that those that are, are rare in the gears of human interaction. Few families remain comprehensively nurturing in sui generis. Those that are deserve the quality of rarity and seem airbrushed of bodily functions. Most of us, in need and compromise, place our love and devotion where it can best flower, welcome, and bring peace. The selective mesh of complicated choices can be finely focused over time and probably in its  effect at the end,  is in greater accord with truth than common reality has led us to believe.

Your embrace of Dad in his last days and darkest hours, his despair, illness, and the perceived spoilage of his life with our mother, Reese, was such an act of love. One for which, your brother here remains eternally grateful. No matter all else, the greater love of our parents was always the most important truth in family matters.

The instruments of that realization, which once brought deep anger and some bitterness over feelings of exclusion are gone----even Reese’s orchestration of it. You did an extraordinary job of care and in the odd complications of that which is called fate found a perfect match with a father, who needed exactly you---especially then. There is nothing like the death of a parent to dissolve the stasis of a long established diplomacy, honed and balanced over decades of compromise, to dispel a family's constructed reality. In the light of a profound absence truth rushes in like an avenging angel . Asteroid pieces of the old order are all that fill the void left by the undoing of an intricate life.

God forbid that we should end our days like dreadful old people hauling our bags of grievances around like moth eaten hunting trophies. Forgiveness is a grace beyond the call of will and Dad knew that its greatest expression was compassion. Like love and death it is a perfect expression, rare for some of us. But at least some of us know its healing depths and wish it so. 

Only once did Reese ask me to forgive her and it amazed me, because I knew instantly that my unconditional love for her had no need of forgiveness. It was one of the very rare times I understood what is meant by the presence of perfect grace. The easiest reflex of love is ‘yes.‘ It told me then that her freedom and choices were more precious than my attachments. Letting go of a mother letting go of me was an extraordinary experience  unlike any I have ever known and very similar to joy.  She gave me a lesson in freedom.

I’ll probably never know your part in coming to terms with the formidable side of Reese or the quality of your understanding of her fragilities. One of your observable strengths is to see much, remain patient for the most part, observant, and disengaged from  overt drama ----like those entanglements which are such suppressed sporting events in our clan. Your handling of matters always reflects a worldly bluntness, moving in the greater course of efficiency at the expense of subterfuge. If subterfuge, your diplomacy seems the quality of sensible gentlemen, hard to detect. At least so it seems to me, who does not know you as well as I might wish.

But, I believe you, being your father’s son, feel passionately. The loss of our parents must somehow reflect that transcendent shock that all orphans, no matter our age, must feel, when finally alone in the world. It’s a unique ‘alone;’ one that exists even when embraced by the families we finally choose and create as our own. Even more so is the understanding when lost to the families into which we were born.

My mind gravitates to plumb the serendipity of flaws in human behavior----understanding the complexity of our humanity. Training as a monk, I suppose, is responsible for that penchant, which seeks and knows that imperfections are the path to freedom, the essence of the exquisite, and that no mere perfection is truly interesting----only costly. Kant was so prescient in his observation: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."

It is always a juggling act to understand what is narcissistic masochism and which is hardy fodder for transcendence. Sometimes it’s both and it often astounds me how anyone can keep even a simulacra of sanity in life. It is for that reason  the lives of ordinary people are far more intriguing than the theater of fantasized celebrities. Of the few saints and heroes I have had occasion to know, not one was holy, concerned with perfection, nor a celebrity.

I suspect Reese had a similar disposition and I know that her friends, the few I met, were people of complexity clothed like she, in an envelope of convention. She was a superb mentor and her peers richly developed. Few were her equal, but I doubt she gave it much thought. Hers was the reflex of practical and worldly judgment----the essence of experienced women. I suspect that if I had endured as a monk I would probably be wise now and know more fully what I suppose. I will never suppose her mysteries, only carry them as silent poems of my own----the traces of her motherhood.

I always found it odd that Reese could not befriend her sons as adults. Maybe she did with you or our brother. I don’t know, but do know that such an extra bond would have been a rare gift. Dad and I were able to do that and it was immeasurably and mutually rewarding. One of his most wonderful qualities was that ability to connect as an adult and of course his passion and keen intellect seemed so at home in both the worlds of the senses and the abstractions of ideas.

He was able to hear from his grown son an appreciative understanding of his life and the gratitude with which it was cherished. Reese and I came close in recent years to a denouement found in the territory of care giving, but in the years after Dad’s death she left me behind, although it has been only recently that realization came to surface.

I guess, it became evident during a conversation with Reese last year. Inquiring about family, I learned about the deaths of favorite aunts and uncles, who had passed some time ago. I learned Dad's brother died several years ago. He was a significant influence on my young life and oversaw my stay and studies in New Haven all those years ago. It struck me as odd she wouldn’t consider that as of interest to me. When I asked about it she said, “ I’m sorry honey, but I’m too tired to think about those people anymore.”

Her withdrawal was striking. Her former connections were severed in a certain surrender. Her decisions as before, were clear and acute in finality----understandable if only I had better understood. I'd visualize she was the incarnation of an old Tibetan lama on the way out.  I suspect the ability to untangle her complex web of history, fears, bitterness's, compromises, regrets and love became too exhausting and by the act of denial, found a peace that could not be resolved any other way. She could always reduce complexity to simplicity-----an art I always seem to get exactly backwards.

Though, I must say that for me, the complexities of irony and sardonic reflection are the substance of tragedy, humor and the release of grief. Their simple reduction is laughter. I secretly thought in a moment of absurdity that it was good that she didn’t have to pass that old rodent Jesse Helms in the transitional portals of conservative karmic accountability. She missed him by a day.

Satire is the enlightenment of oppression for me. I could never tell if Reese was ever amused by folly although she delighted in an occasional joke, such as the time she told me that the Lone Ranger and Tonto had a falling out because The Lone Ranger learned that keemosabi meant ‘chicken shit‘. For such a sophisticated woman, her humor was oddly child-like and never even a trace of guile marred her directness. Part of the upset I feel now is not being able to envision her once lovely laughter and hear its music through the white noise din of these last painful years.

Lately, getting her to talk about ’things’ was so difficult, that eventually, her famous two-minute phone calls replaced communication altogether . I always found the formality of “Michael. this is your mother calling,” to be hilariously existential---as if formality would replace the weight of personal history and the specters  it raised. But then, like many in her generation she was a lady of considerable quality and manners whose etiquette sufficed to refashion each encounter as new. The only problem with that was the surfaces of things never adequately reflected the incredible richness of her human depth. It had to be inferred, intuited, guessed at----all too exhausting; until even the references faded and all the secrets were lost; until the efforts finally ceased.

Reese’s spiritual path always interested me. Her considerable intellect and rebel-woman spirit, seemed always at war in the mine fields of conservative and traditionalist conditioning. She seemed to battle incessantly with that which she could not tame----the unknown. She was of a generation of successful women whose achievements defined the ’glass ceiling’ and helped her protégés move beyond the rigid feminine prototypes that have always thwarted talented achievers of her class. In that knowledge it is no wonder that our sister-in-law Ana became her ultimate companion. Both did it all, and did it with excellence.

Ultimately, in the matter of the great unknown, where she always feared control would not suffice for survival, I suspect you and I were the ones that fulfilled a spirit of exploration and adventure for her. Often disturbed, if not horrified at our excessive passions and adventures , I think she, never-the-less, rode on our wings to the far ends of the earth .

She once made a painting for me that consisted of a symbolist portrait of her spirit: a head filled with exotic symbols and surrounded by a grid of squares in brilliant colors. In there among the symbols, mythic animals and fantastic flowers she could show me those flights and explorations otherwise taboo to her security. When she knew she was in the final stages she asked for it back----after thirty years! How like her----how delightfully like her. I suspect it now belongs to the grandchild most likely to find her in the next generation. Does anyone alive , save us, remember her dancing and extraordinary piano playing?  Which future grandchild will be the new Reese?

Among the great gifts of character I received from her was the recognition that fear was not an invincible enemy, but a tool, a powerful one used to advance in wisdom. For those born into species differentiation that gift alone assured survival. All teachers I’ve known since have echoed that same understanding. I’m still around. It worked. I have much to thank her for---courage is the transmutation of fear.

If only she had been more forthcoming about her experimentation  and deviations from the armatures of security. If only I had been wise enough to understand her more fully.  A week before she died I had a day dream of picking her up in my arms, holding her carefully and tightly, resting her head on my shoulder and protecting from the storms of fear----as she did for me as a child.

In  my immense relief on hearing that she was at last free I felt she chose exactly the right moment on her last wedding anniversary to leave. The ease and grace with which all her orchestrations appeared belied their steely disciplined effort. Her last moments were in harmony with self.

You were the first to let me know that Reese had died-----straight forward, thankfully it was you---so clear and direct. Ana called later in the day, going down her list no doubt, and as customary, doing the heavy lifting of emotional contact, which is one of her particular gifts and duties in our brother’s family. She was a bit nervous I felt, but in a chirpy, nurse’y way conveyed a picture of Reese’s final hours as a pastel Hallmark sketched by that which gave her great comfort----a normal family, with album pictures of the old days in Colorado, especially the Fourth of July, and tales of the spectacular accomplishments of her quite ordinary grandchildren and so on.

Ana droned on in that beautifully modulated voice of hers to share that one of her sons was engaged to a Nebraska girl (just like Mother!)---- wasn’t that something? It was almost irritating, then funny, and my hidden reaction strangely inappropriate considering the news, to picture that scene in Auntie Mame, when suburban Ayran Darin meets Manhattan liberal. But then I realized how serious she was about all that banality, as if those morsels of family life were comforting to me, and felt a wave of compassion for her, who over these longs years had become, in fact, Reese’s daughter.

I felt I was conversing with a totally sincere alien. Even then, while creating my own comforting satire, I felt that Ana’s quality of presence reminded me so much of Reese’s. I do hope they were close. Reese’s friendships were treasures she seldom brought into the reality of my life. Ana’s grief must be considerable. Its quality I will never know. As she spoke, it could not enlighten my shadows.

Inadvertently, Ana’s narration brought up one of Reese’s idiosyncrasies that I found touchingly familiar: the purging of things. It’s so Protestant, and probably a secret reaction to burden, and the weight of guilt. Its equivalent in New England is the incessant burning of leaves and bleaching of clothes----a sort of Puritan sport. More positively, it is also a reflex of those clearing a path to freedom. In Reese’s case, I can think of few spirits less materialistic than she, nor one gifted with such great physical beauty so devoid of vanity.

If only those virtues were hereditary! It’s enormously satisfying for those of us weighed by collection  to now refer to tradition and go the purge route, even when our desires are addicted by the definition of things in the world. I live in New England, and constantly burn leaves and bleach, but am no Puritan, so undoubtedly Reese was in the grip of a spiritual path----karma-yoga-purge-wise. Clearly in this, I remain my mother’s son.

During one of our last visits with Reese, it was hard to find her alone without Duenna Ana silently guarding the scene. Her presence had a Victorian,  lady’s companion quality about it. But whatever caring reasons for Ana’s discreet hovering, it did not prevent Reese from stuffing our poor old Mustang with lamps, doodads, books, childhood plaster casts, a school workshop doorstop, art work, this and that, which she insisted we must have. Clutter drove her nuts, and her natural habitat was more Cistercian, than not. Even as a boy, I found it odd that  cut flowers, decoration, and dissonent music disturbed her calm. It was a classic scene of Reese's clearing out  the past.

I think Ana has always been the forbearing special-ops soldier, who conducted these purge missions on Reese’s behalf.  I trust what debris remains, will find its way to family, distributed to grandkids, or artifacts of Salvation Army finds to reappear in future glory on 'The Antiques Road Show'.

Reese’s environment was so indicative of her desire to leave no trace,  nothing behind, no things of contention. I suspect her horror of the Zorba scene in the family seat at the death of her own mother predicated a revulsion for life’s debris. What a Spartan room she last retreated to; it’s greatest beauty---- it’s occupant and her distant view of the ocean.

In her apartment a frieze of collection masks in all the passions of humanity and divinity were lined at eye level viewed from her bed. They weren't decoration for her, so I always paid close attention to their arrangement and new additions. I never saw a photo of me in her room and often wondered which of those masks sufficed to remind her of the diversity in a son’s psyche. Did she still carry forth her Jungian training? Did it still color her understanding of complexities? Did even the beauty of symbols as explanation vanish before freedom?

Although I must admit that now, I’m growing senile, nostalgia and all its annoying baggage occupies the spaces where memory is deficient. One of the disadvantages of wisdom and age is the realization that memories are mostly lies and interpretations to begin with, and it is maddening to be called on our delusions. Thus, I will always think kindly of Ana and her sentimental sculpting of those last hours.

I know Ana will never see  freedom as I do, and understand fully that her soft myth of Reese will endure through her sons and their children. Still, the trickster god, one of Reese's favorites, will out itself somewhere down the line and echo her deepest humor, her extraordinary strength, and express the adventures she so often denied and desired.

Poking fun at Ana disguises my dithyrambic admiration for her devotion. On a deeper and more mature level, I am grateful beyond measure for the decades of care with which she enveloped Reese, in what was perhaps her greatest happiness----the cadences of conventional family life and grandkids. Ana devoted years to our mother, and I suspect sacrificed part of herself in the doing----although love would not frame it that way. Reese’s happy fate was to find her daughter.

I will probably never know your own journey, the complexities and conflicts in establishing relationship with Reese. Some things lie still, rather than resolved, until the energy dissolves. If we live long enough for that to happen, we are known to peace and that is probably what we most crave when the deepest love is disturbed by ghosts of betrayal, loss, and want. I think Reese found her peace, not in resolution, but letting go----a wisdom that human history teaches us is, quiet frankly, the whole point of being.

Peace,

Your Brother 

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'Reese 1924~2008'

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