The gold dagger letter-opener in the red leather sheath.
The stacks of Agatha Christie novels, every page thumbed over.
The broken orange umbrella with the chiffon ruffled edges.
The framed mirror on the mantle. The back door with the coarsened edges that never got a paint job after 1974. The CD player that no longer opened, positioned over the sink. The dusty Pimm’s Cup bottle in the dark of the cupboard in the pantry. The grooves in the floorboards in the front hall. The old spoons and forks mingled with the newer spoons and forks in the sticky crusted-over top drawer next to the oven. The beer glasses and the tablecloths and the polished banister and the sheer curtains falling over the gold-painted radiator. And every other household object and endlessly treaded pathway and felt texture and micro-climate and cobwebbed corner, all knit into a theatre of life over thousands of days, kingdoms and universes and infinities and black holes conjured into being and memorized, footstep by footstep and echo by echo.
And the day my son and I drove through a blinding snowstorm, the day we met my mother at the first of the three “places” where she would spend the last four years of her life, it all unraveled. The house where I grew up was no longer a home. The back door was now so much carpentered wood, the tablecloths were mounds of folded linen and the Agatha Christie novels were so many columns of words and numbers printed on so many sheets of machine-bound paper. Everything had been in its place. Soon enough, everything would be handled, assessed, rearranged, boxed or consigned to disposal.
A year later, I was doing the dispensing, selling off furniture, paintings, giving away china and silverware, and boxing up the Agatha Christies. I’d been brought up by my father to treat books with reverence. The junkman suggested that the paperbacks be sold off for “rag weight.”
During the three previous years, when I made the drive up and down the Taconic Parkway over and over again, as my mother went from forgetful to confused to frightened to paranoid to peacefully and happily lost to just plain lost, I longed for an end to the television blaring day and night, and to the constant openings and closings of doors and intrusions and confused queries to me or to her grandsons as we tried to sleep—“I thought you were with the other ones” … “I didn’t know you were here”… “I hope the mix of little… joys has… kept it with… her…pattern.”
Now it was over. The silence was absolute. Everything was smothered by so much insistent quiet. A wall of quiet. I wanted quiet. But not this quiet.
My father had died suddenly. A successful operation followed by a heart attack followed by two weeks of lingering followed by a throat slashing motion with his finger to say “Enough!” followed by a last meeting the morning he died, followed by the call. My grief for him came all at once, hovered with me for many months, came loose and then dissolved into the movement of life.
Two years later, emerging from her bedroom in her Lanz nightgown, my mother asked me where Dazzle was. “I can’t find her,” she said. “Do you mean Basil?” I asked—Basil was her old high-school classmate and her newfound savior, her “beau” of six months. “Basil’s a man.”
“Ohh,” she said. “I think there’s something wrong with me.” At that instant, I started grieving for my mother.
The appointment at the memory clinic. Her inability to remember her students’ names at the start of her last semester in the classroom. She had to ask for directions to simple routes she’d traveled all her life. At Christmas, she proudly showed me how she had filled out a gift tag, as if she’d passed a test: To: Joy From: Heaven
Then came paranoia. She told me a story about a disturbing encounter with a friend, then retold the same story again, then a third and fourth time—each time, a little different. It finally dawned on me that it was actually a nightmare she’d had. She’d opened the newspaper and read a story about her impending death, she told me. I asked her to sign some papers, which made her murderously suspicious.
With every new step, a little more of her was lost. At first, we both grabbed at straws. She called me one day and excitedly proclaimed that she had visited a friend and it had all come back to her. “I remembered places, I remembered names… I just needed to relax and talk to someone I trust.” I chimed in with warmly supportive words—“See? That’s so great!” At a later stage, when she became belligerent, she chided me—“Stop treating me like a child.” My response? “Stop acting like one.” Snap out of it. Get it together. Come back to yourself. How many of us are clear-eyed when we’re face to face with the gradual disappearance of one who had been such a constant?
When she totaled the car, I found myself suddenly performing actions that I hadn’t even envisioned or prepared for. “Give me all the bills… I need the checkbook… where’s the key to the safe deposit box?” And so on. Before that day, I had been thinking: she can still do this and she’s still able to manage that. After the accident, everything shifted to the future, for which there was no timetable. What would be the next phase? How much longer would she remember our names?
Basil was with her that day. He was with her every day. When it became obvious that she would no longer be able to live on her own, he called me. “I want your mother to come live with me,” he said. I was moved and grateful, and I marveled at my good fortune and my mother’s. This fell under the heading of “Everything will work out in the end.” Is that a story we tell ourselves? Or a self-regulating “mechanism?” For those among us who have never found ourselves living by the law of bad luck, we return so easily to this scenario—even when we know in our heart of hearts that, finally, it won’t work. As I knew from the start, deep down. But Basil offered and he meant it, and I thought of his offer many times over this past weekend as my son and I drove north for his funeral. He was diabetic, he was severely overweight, he outlasted my mother by ten years… and he was a saint.
The Taconic Parkway. You go up the West Side Highway of Manhattan, pick up the Saw Mill, exit onto the Taconic and drive it all the way to East Chatham, turn off on 41 to Massachusetts, cut through Richmond and arrive in downtown Pittsfield. An acquaintance of mine from Argentina described the Taconic as the most beautiful road in the world. I’ve driven it regularly for forty years. From 2007 to 2014, from the time of those first signs of confusion to the last breaths my mother took, I got to know that road as intimately as I know the veins of my hand. There was the drive back to New York and then back up to Pittsfield in the same day, when she wandered away and was picked up by the police. There were the weekend trips with my sons and a playlist we got to know by heart, starting with Spanky and Our Gang and ending with the theme from Midnight Cowboy. There was the time we took my friend Arnaud with us, and he freely shared in my mother’s good cheer and fellow feeling—the fact that she no longer made verbal sense only intensified the mood. There was the time I drove in a blizzard and spun 360 degrees on the ice-caked road, went off the side, gently landed nose up, stayed still for a short interval, opened the door and walked out without a scratch—my mother had called from the hospital, where she was sent with a flu, and said she might kill herself if someone didn’t come and get her. “Oh hi! How are you?” she said in a cheerful voice when I called later to tell her what had happened—the suicidal threat was long forgotten. There was the last visit when she was still somewhat related, and the first visit after she was no longer there. To quote a postcard that Beckett wrote to his friend from the home where he spent his last days, “Dead but not gone.” The difference was that my mother could no longer write, or read or speak in any coherent fashion, or relate to us or to anyone else. Soon, she could no longer eat. Then the end came. But the end is a different matter. It has nothing to do with grief.
In December 2014, I certainly felt the truth of being “just another orphan,” as Melville wrote. A shift. A “realignment,” to use the ridiculously utilitarian metaphorical language of the moment. But the warm phantom field that descended over me after my father’s death, somehow marking me off and protecting me—I felt like I was living alongside others in my own dream—was not there.
I went back to work, finishing a documentary I’d been making, and I decided to start a real draft of a film I’d had in mind for many years. I’d met the actress I’d wanted to work with, and I’d promised to send her a script as soon as I could. I started the writing in May of 2015. The story was about a woman in her 60s who spends her life taking care of others and has carried a burden of guilt for so long that it feels like it’s a part of her. The story took place in western Massachusetts, where I grew up, and many of the characters were based on my great-aunts and -uncles, my cousins, my friends. As I was writing, there was a detail in a story I’d been told that I’d forgotten. “I’ll ask mom,” I thought. And then I realized that I couldn’t. And then, again, however many days or weeks later – “Mom will remember.” And again, and again. I still feel it. And, come to think of it, I started to feel it with every new development in the relentless destruction of her memory.
Grief? Was the phantom call to ask mom part of my “grieving process?” Another ridiculously utilitarian metaphor. Grief is not a process. It is nothing but itself, and to live it is to know the breakdown and deterioration of absolutely everything under the sun, from shared beliefs to the relative popularity of Frank Sinatra or feathered haircuts to the memory of one single person. Here today, evaporated into thin air tomorrow. Do I miss my mother and my father? Or Basil? Or the others I’ve known who are gone? Sometimes yes. Oftentimes, it’s more that I recollect them. But what I do miss is the interrelationships built from love—love for the sanctity of the house made into a home, for our town and our landscape, love for each other. To live the unraveling, person by person, object by object, is to know impermanence. A word that hardly scratches the surface, but will do for now.
Long after I made the film and discussed it in different settings for months on end, it dawned on me that I couldn’t have written it before my mother passed away. And months after that, I realized that I had made a film about my mother, a portrait refracted through the lens of fiction. And later than that, my wife pointed out to me that it was also a kind of self-portrait.
After writing these words, I realize that all this was what someone else would probably, inevitably, refer to as… my process. ◆
This piece is excerpted from the Winter 2024-2025 issue of Parabola, GRIEF & GRATITUDE. You can find the full issue on our online store.
