Death Takes a Holiday

No I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day
But the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away
Oh little darling of mine.

I can't for the life of me
Remember a sadder day
I know they say let it be
But it just don't work out that way
And the course of the lifetime runs
Over and over again. 

                                      --Paul Simon

I attended mass the other day for probably the first time in 20 years. Catholic mass appears not to have changed much during that time, or even since my days as an altar boy.

***

As a young child, probably 4 or 5 years old, I stood with my mother in the kitchen of our house and told her I would want to die if she died. By the time I grew into adolescence, I wanted to kill her. I've straddled the line between those opposing forces ever since, though not at such extremes.
Those feelings tugged at each other as I made war with myself heading to the hospital a few weeks ago. She had suffered her second stroke, though I only knew as I ventured there that she had fallen and hit her head and lay comatose. Three years had passed since her first stroke, just before Thanksgiving. This time, she died, six days before Thanksgiving, and death took that holiday. Christmas will be different, too, as I don't think I've been apart from her on either Christmas Day or Christmas Eve my entire life.
So memories of past Christmases and Thanksgiving inevitably intrude. I recall a snowy Christmas Eve about 35 years ago when I sat and did my Miami Dolphins puzzle, a gift received early. And the Thanksgiving when I threw a fit and stormed away from the table, to which my mother coaxed me back by saying that Thanksgiving likely would be the last with grandfather. Cheer up and enjoy the holiday, son, Gramps is going to die soon. I never got much for Christmas, so it was a monumental occasion when I received the 12-inch black-and-white TV. Cable hadn't yet happened on the scene, so I got to watch the network news, I guess, fuzzy as it was. We once had a Christmas tree that shed so many needles we found them for years afterward, tucked contentedly in the crack between the baseboard-heat radiators--the kind through which hot water coursed and occasionally woke me in the night--and the wall. As a single parent with five kids and no spousal support, I guess she didn't have much to spread around.
With respect to stockings, the ones that we hung by the chimney with care, people apparently have different notions of their utility. I've since come to learn that stockings can contain an array of gifts, even wrapped ones, a veritable bounty. I always got a candy cane that was about a foot long and an inch and a half thick. But I also got such sundries as deodorant. Or a pair of underwear. Or a handkerchief. What kid doesn't covet a handkerchief? My grandfather always walked around with one of those snot-filled rags in his pocket.
The highlight of Christmas Eve arrived when Santa rode down the street atop a fire engine, complete with sirens piercing the night and a red light swirling across his bright-red suit and making his white hair and beard stand out in relief. The tradition continues today and momentarily transports me to those bittersweet days. A time of more innocence, but not much more.
I've often reflected on the nature of a parent's relationship with a child. I lived into my teen years hewing to my mother's worldview. Belief in God and church attendance stood out among her  priorities. For Catholics, the weekend offered a window in which you needed to go to mass. Allegedly, if you went earlier than 4 p.m. on a Saturday, that didn't count. At least that's what my mother said. And I believed it. The Catholic Church apparently stipulated that one must attend mass during a specified time frame or it didn't count. Does God tally up church attendance? Maybe the priests do. The priests were infallible to her, so maybe they did track us. Certainly they gauged the collection envelopes. And they were the people who had no relationship experience and no kids of their own yet somehow possessed the qualifications to provide family guidance.And to help shape young minds. But I digress.
I used to be terrified when I traveled for soccer trips that if I missed mass, God--or worse, my mother--would at least be disappointed or perhaps take more severe punitive measures. Not wanting to disappoint my mother hung over me like a pall. For I gave her a reason to live. She told me so. She asked God why he sent her this child, chronologically so far removed from her other children, and then it became clear: God sent me to her so that she would have a reason to live. That thinking appeared to guide her parenting of me. The objective never appeared to be for me to become self-sufficient and independent. When I angered her by reneging on my agreement to attend a particular college, she told me I was the one who would be disappointed because she "had big plans" for my girlfriend and me. She had it mapped out. Therein lay the source of some friction. I think she once characterized my kids as her "little playthings." Telling. "The Prophet," by Kahlil Gibran, ranked among the books she cited.  That book reads, in part:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.

I guess this was good in theory, because practice was a different matter. So God sent me for her. For her to shape to her specifications. For her to control. For her to make all the decisions for. For her to turn the cold shoulder to when she disapproved of something I did. For her to make threats in her exasperation that she was going to run away. Her favorite. The baby. He sent the wrong guy.
Frugality also occupied a space in her hierarchy of ideas. Shaped by the Depression, she seemed to wear frugality like a badge of honor. Like the notion that bread bags and cardboard boxes were perfectly suitable repositories for the leaves I raked.We had hedges, but no hedge trimmer. Likewise with trees. So I always had to borrow for such maintenance. She wanted to keep that house at all costs and even became offended at the manner in which subsequent residents decorated it. A woman who gave a eulogy of sorts at the funeral home--which upon entering, by the way, would sadden anyone, even in the absence of a death, with its water-stained drop ceiling and other signs of disrepair--said entering my mother's home was like "walking into a big hug." For me that house became an albatross, its demands weighing upon me as I tried to keep up with school and sports and just not being a disappointment. I would have burned it down, but, of course, not wanting to disappoint, I didn't. The hospital in which she lay near death provided a "comfort cart" for our family, with bananas, water, coffee, fig newtons and mini pretzels. Nothing takes the sting out of imminent death like pretzels. At any rate, upon leaving the room one day, I stocked up on water and pretzels and told her not to worry, I was making her proud.
My mother and parents of her ilk hailed from a different generation. She and a close friend with whom we spent a lot of time, my "aunt," used to tell us kids to "go play in traffic" when we bothered them. She similarly dismissed other concerns if they didn't fit in with her interests. Sort of a hands-on, hands-off approach. Coupled with the desire for control was the disinterest in entertaining anything with her children that could be unsettling. People stopped visiting my mother the last few years because of one of my brothers. Because she would turn the subject to him and ask people to be responsible for him after her death. She wanted to exert her influence from beyond the grave and ensure that another enabler would emerge for my alcoholic brother, he who apparently called his siblings idiots because they hold jobs. Not only did she alienate people and make it difficult to get her settled over the last three years, but she failed to persuade anyone to take care of my brother. The control has vanished. My mother idolized her parents to such unnatural lengths that it made me wonder, if I could have peeled back the layers, what I would have found lurking in the dark. She said on more than one occasion that she would have given up part of her life to spend a day with her mother. She often said that her mother never refused a beggar during the Depression, because you never know who's at that door. The implication being that God could be there incognito to test you out, and He could be wrathful. Now she's a pile of ashes in a box buried on top of them. So they are reunited, in a manner of speaking.

* * *

My mother and brother and our former house have lately been populating my dreams, which at any rate never have been a source of peace. I had more exposure to their interactions than anyone, and her death and his presence have sparked something that has made the brain form involuntary connections. After having spent decades trying to find some resolution to my ambivalence concerning my upbringing and time with them, I believe I've made scant progress. And sleep provides no respite. They come to me, these people, and haunt my waking and sleeping hours.
A letter from my mother arrived in a package in the mail recently. In it, she addresses her children and acknowledges that she made mistakes and hurt us, though she also strikes a somewhat-defiant tone. I guess she figured there would be no reprisals. A certain candor also comes through, the likes of which I would have preferred to see while she was alive. But I think my mother feared candor, because when you strip away the facade, you become more vulnerable to whatever lies under the veneer.  Perhaps honesty isn't always the best policy, because honesty can bring pain, and maybe creating your own reality has merit. But it can also bring pain to others, and there's a certain selfish aspect to it. I think my mother and I would both have benefited had she recognized and accepted my flaws, since maybe then I wouldn't have taken as long as I did to accept them myself. That would have eased the pressure of not wanting to disappoint.
I do believe my mother could have gotten more out of life and relationships had she not been scared. She had conviction, or at least feigned conviction, that she knew the right approach, and that created conflict and worked to her detriment. She stubbornly continued to enable my brother to drink and to go through life without a job and, in so doing, deprived herself of what she claimed to enjoy. Aside from the people who stopped coming around because of him, she didn't see her grandchildren as much as she might have. So what was more important? I don't know that she ever really considered that she might have been alienating anyone by the way of life to which she clung. It was her life, though, and she wouldn't be told how to live. There's a certain nobility in that, but the heartbreak arises when others suffer.
The drug dealing, violence and all-night indulgences to which I received exposure as a preadolescent child created my reality, one that I've since come to learn differed greatly from people with whom I've come in contact. Wondering what might have been different offers nothing constructive, though I at least have been able to ensure that my kids haven't been exposed to a life quite so ludicrous. I don't know that it matters, though. Maybe we are just wired how we're wired, nature triumphs over nurture. I don't like to look at pictures of myself as a child, because I see someone whose innocence didn't have to evaporate as quickly as it did. I wanted to please but always felt like the elusive brass ring remained out of reach.
In one of my dreams, my mother and I conversed. We didn't discuss anything monumental, just likes and dislikes with respect to ordinary subjects, like TV shows. And I thought to myself that the conversation amounted to a pleasant exchange. My mother and I never had such a conversation while she was alive. Maybe some things really can only happen in our dreams.