"But if our unhappiness is due to the loss of someone dear to us, our suffering consists merely in an unusually vivid comparison of the present with the past."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 654
My mother passed away last weekend so I've been even more reflective this week than usual. As is always the case, especially when you are not present with the person at the time of their passing (I live up here in wintry Vermont and my mom was living down in Savannah, Georgia with my sister Lisa), it doesn't seem quite real yet. I'm still a little emotionally bruised, so I'm even less likely to stumble into a profound thought than usual. Truthfully, I've been much more concerned about my son, who was remarkably close to his grandmother. I told him the other night that I sincerely believed that he was a much better grandson to her than I was a son to her. At the end of Swann's Way Proust proposed that memory is intricately linked to regret, and I certainly have enough regrets on that front. We clearly loved each other but I also wish I had spent more time with her and tried to get an even clearer sense of who she was and what she believed. A couple weeks ago I asked the questions of what, if anything, I had in common with my mom (since people always tried to turn me into a little version of my father). My mother always seemed removed from the crowd and a bit out of focus, which is one of the reasons why I always felt that I didn't know her as well as I might. And that is when it hit me; that's one of the things we have in common. It might be the single most clearly defined aspect of my own personality. My father always commented on the fact that I never joined in, and I can only relate this to all the time that my mother would sit by herself in the kitchen, not joining in but also probably reveling in her own privacy.
All the kids, well, mainly Lisa, Eric and Beth, are busily planning the funeral, such as it is (my mother had very strong opinions on things and didn't want any ceremonies in a church or in a funeral home). I've been charged with heading up the graveside ceremony, so I've been thinking about what I might say, which led me back to digging deep into my own memory in search of memories of my mother. Oddly, I think my favorite memory of her relates to sitting at a Waffle House restaurant late at night. As horrible as divorce is, there are some people who come out of it as better people. I suspect this might because you're free of an unhappy relationship or you've just been tempered by the fire of the experience or you're just not living a more honest existence. In the case of my mother I think the experience of the divorce humbled her, but also reminded her of what really mattered in the world. In the days when she was queen of Lawrenceburg, Indiana her days were filled with the perceived responsibilities of that exulted position, and that included constantly feeding the monster that was the Big House on Kirby Road. After the divorce she bought a house down in Atlanta next to us and got a job at Kroger's. Often when I got out of my night class at GPC I would meet her after she left work and we would grab a late egg sandwich at Waffle House. It was great to have the time alone together, but in some ways we were both getting back to our roots. Plus, we were both putting aside our tendency toward solitude and devoting time to each other. I don't think I was ever her favorite child (because, come on, every parent has a favorite, even if they won't admit it), but I was her first, which means that for a while it was just the two of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment