Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things Read online

  Rachel left, and Jane and I were alone. She was asleep. I turned on the television. Turner Classic Movies had launched their “30 days of Oscar” programming. I kept the sound very low, sat in a chair next to her as she slept, and opened my laptop to work on my advice column. Citizen Kane. The Philadelphia Story. Sullivan’s Travels. It felt like a minor miracle that these movies my mother had taught me to love were running through her room on a glorious loop. And if Charles Foster Kane and C. K. Dexter Haven and Veronica Lake accompanied my mother wherever she was headed, then all the better.

  At six o’clock that evening, Bruno called me. He said he was sitting in his truck down in the parking lot with a cup of coffee for me. I left quietly and hurried down the stairs to see him. I ran out through the snow. I had just climbed into his truck when Dan, my mother’s favorite aide, came to the door and waved me back in. “She’s gone,” he said. He had been hovering outside the room and ducked in as soon as I had left. He told me later that people often wait until a loved one has left the room to die.

  We called Brad, the undertaker. I called my sisters. While we were waiting for Brad to arrive, Dan brought in a bottle of wine and we poured three glasses. Bruno, he, and I sipped it while we sat with my mother’s body. I felt a strange sense of exhilaration. An almost giddy sort of happiness. Heroic measures had been taken. I thought that through the years of accelerated caretaking and leave-taking that we had granted our mother a good and gentle death. I thought that because I had been so present with her and had accepted the reality of it, I had somehow pre-grieved my mother’s passing. But as it turned out, I was wrong about that.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Fallacy of Closure

  Immediately after my mother’s death, my primary feeling was one of relief. I felt genuine relief that she had died so peacefully and that I had been with her. Our good-bye to her was, I thought, beautiful and dignified—there in the little Freeville church, underneath the gauzy Methodist portrait of Jesus and alongside the stained glass window bearing my family’s name. In the crowded sanctuary, my cousin Roger officiated (as at my wedding, he traveled from his church to be with us) and we sang the old hymns my mother loved. The Gene Pool Choir, auxiliary chapter (made up of her grandchildren), sang. This was the place where my grandmother had once been the organist and where my sisters and I had learned to read music.

  My beloved aunt Lena had died five years before, and we buried her from this same sanctuary. It seemed like only yesterday that the family had gathered to say good-bye to her. When I was eulogizing my mother, I concentrated on trying to describe her life before she had gotten so ill. At so many funerals, grieving family members tell the story surrounding their loved one’s death. I wanted to remember Jane as a younger woman—how much fun she was, how remarkable and accomplished she was. I also described her need to wallpaper every room of the house, the way she knit tiny, scratchy black turtleneck sweaters for all the babies in the family, and her long and beautiful chestnut-brown hair.

  After the eulogy, Aunt Millie rose slowly and said, quietly, of her sisters: “We used to be four, and then we were three, and now we are two.”

  After the service, my mother’s pallbearers—her grandsons Jack and Sam, my old friend Kirk, and her three sons-in-law: Bruno, Tim, and Brian—carried her casket out of the church through the snow. It was February and bitter cold. The air itself seemed made of frost, and snowflakes were suspended in it. They seemed to be dancing but not falling. My sisters and I and our daughters and our elderly aunts and their daughters—a slow parade of women—followed the casket silently. The ladies of the church hosted a luncheon in the church hall, as they always did. As her body was taken away in the hearse, we ate casseroles and cold cuts. One after another, people spontaneously walked to a microphone and talked about my mother. Several read letters she had written to them. Kirk read a funny, wry letter she had sent to him twenty-five years before. It seemed that Jane was one of the coolest people any of us had ever met.

  Over the three years before my mother’s death, I had been sucked into what felt like an increasingly surreal lifestyle where my days were bookended by the presence of babies in our crowded household and the constant and changing needs of someone nearing the end of her life. After her death, I was relieved that I could finally stop commuting to her nursing home in Ithaca, creeping along the snowy roads, eating dinner with her at 5:00 p.m., and then worrying my way home in the winter dark to stop at the store and then eat dinner again with everyone else. Trying to be on my best behavior—to be a great mother, grandmother, and daughter—left me exhausted and on edge. My best behavior, it turned out, wasn’t so great. Even my readers noticed it. I received more than one “Amy, what’s your problem?” query, wondering why I was ill tempered in response to a letter. “I’m writing my column from the ICU,” or “I was up half the night with an infant,” I wanted to whimper.

  But I didn’t. I simply tried harder to be the wiser, nicer, less complicated version of myself—the version of me that smiled from the headshot that appeared over my newspaper column. Over time, I could hardly remember, let alone maintain, that version of myself.

  During this period of intensive caregiving, my trips to Chicago were my only respite. Up until then, I had always hated to fly, but now I relished the experience of being taken away, gazing down on the landscape from 30,000 feet. I looked forward to spending time alone in my quiet Chicago apartment, even though the minute I arrived I started to worry about the situation at home. I would spend the day of a Wait Wait taping exhaustedly trying to arrive at anything—anything at all—that I thought I could be funny about. Before the show started, I would duck into the ladies’ room, heave a quick sob or two, look into the mirror, and hate my haircut. Then I’d walk onstage, smiling and waving to the crowd.

  Bruno was kind and supportive, but I barely noticed. His own mother’s health was failing, too, and he raced back and forth to his mother’s farm or the hospital, just as I did. He coped with stress by working harder and extending himself even further, and aside from occasional skirmishes with the kids or his siblings, I never saw him crack. But then again, he didn’t do the vacuuming. He didn’t do the Christmas shopping, or talk to his daughters about their outfits, or change his granddaughter’s diapers, or read to his mother before tucking her in at night, the way I did with mine. Also, honestly, Bruno has bigger and broader shoulders than I do. His ability to carry the world upon them was simply greater than mine, and while I benefitted from it and appreciated his capacities, sometimes it also just… pissed me off. I wanted Bruno to be more flawed and frail, like me. I wanted him to be angry, or teary, or so distracted that he paid for the groceries and then drove off, leaving them sitting in the cart at the store, the way I kept doing. I thought that if Bruno had been more like me, then I wouldn’t feel quite so alone.

  Jane’s death was of a kind that people claim is really a blessing. When people do that, I suppose they’re trying to acknowledge that it was simply and inevitably time for that person to die. But for the grieving person, the alternative to death is not a static state of suffering, but life. Selfishly, I wanted my mother back. Her death didn’t feel like a blessing; it felt like a shame. But still, it happened.

  Initially, I was convinced that I had already grieved Jane’s passing. I had seen pre-grieving before, with friends who buried their aged parents and seemed to move on. I assumed they had done their grief work ahead of time. One colleague whose father died flew home, buried his dad, put the family home on the market, and returned to work the following week. Back at the office, I expressed my condolences, and he replied, “Well, what are you going to do? It’s not like it was a surprise. He was old.” I don’t assume that my colleague didn’t grieve for his father, but he definitely seemed able to move on.

  The good news for me, I believed, was that I had been so present with my mother. My sisters and I had done everything we could think to do. I had few regrets about my own choices concerning her. I’d always thoug
ht that regret, guilt, and shame fueled grief. Jane was old and then she died, and now she was gone, and it was over.

  I had a dim memory of those early months of being with Bruno when we first fell in love—of me leaping over snowbanks to jump into his truck. Singing softly into his ear. Ice-skating and skiing and reveling in the antic joy I found in simply being alive on the planet and in his presence. I wanted to be that person again, and not the empty shell that I seemed to have become during the final year of my mother’s life.

  Unfortunately, the lifting sense of relief that I felt just after her death turned out to be temporary. For weeks after her funeral, I kept driving back to the nursing home. It was like my car knew the route, and every day in the late afternoon it simply took me there. Sometimes I would sit alone in the driveway. Some days I would go in and have a cup of coffee with the staff. There in the presence of old people at twilight, I felt at home.

  At night I would lie awake and think about Jane’s body and the homespun flour-sack quilt I had brought to the funeral home to wrap her in. I worried about the beautiful coffin Bruno had made. The funeral home had stored her body in its coffin in a vault at the cemetery until the ground thawed for burial in the spring. Awake at night, I thought of her there, in some weird limbo storage state before her final rest. Irrationally, I wondered if the quilt she was wrapped in would keep her warm enough.

  I stopped attending services at the Freeville United Methodist Church because I felt overwhelmed by memories of my mother’s funeral and of her pallbearers carrying her casket through the snow. I stopped singing altogether, but I also couldn’t bear to even listen to music—especially music I associated with her. Jane went through phases of compulsive listening to artists such as the Beatles, Aretha Franklin, and Stevie Wonder, and even spent several months during my teen years playing Jethro Tull’s Aqualung over and over on her stereo. Because her taste was extremely broad, the music I now couldn’t bear to hear included just about everything from Brahms to Beyoncé. I couldn’t drive past her house on Mill Street, now dark, depressing, and padlocked tight. Because of the financial support I had provided during the last years of her life, my siblings generously turned our mutual inheritance of her house and property over to me. I had inherited the house, but I didn’t want it. Nor could I face the idea of parting with it.

  During one blizzard-blown night, I stood, paralyzed and weeping in the middle of the bedroom Bruno and I shared. My mother’s funeral had been the month before.

  The windows in our old house rattled with the force of the wind. Bruno, a mighty oak who nevertheless also seemed able to bend with the blizzards, tenderly asked me what was wrong.

  I looked at him. “What’s wrong? It’s like the universe said to the advice columnist, ‘Advice this, bitch,’” I replied bitterly.

  I told millions of people each day how to respond to the challenges in their own lives. And yet, I was out of answers. I had no words left. I had outrun my own ability to fake it. My husband embraced me. I was like a bundle of twigs. “Please, Amy, be gentle with yourself,” he said.

  That sounds awesome. But I don’t know how to do that. I don’t even know what that means.

  I withdrew from friends. I only wanted to talk to my friend Gay, whose mother was dead; my friend Nancy, whose mother was dead; my friend Jean, whose mother was dead; or my friend Kirk, whose mother was also dead. Stopping for food at Clark’s, I fell into my high school friend Kim’s arms because her mother, too, was dead. I did not want to talk to Bruno about my grief. His mother was still alive. My sisters each withdrew into their own orbits. They didn’t seem to want to talk about it either.

  One night, I called my aunt Millie. I think of Millie as the family’s philosopher. Her thoughts are not fixed in any particular direction, but she sees things from multiple perspectives, sometimes all at once. I was standing outside Pemberley, delaying my entrance into our usual dinnertime circus.

  I asked my aunt, “Where do you think we go when we die?”

  She said, “I’m not sure, Amy, but I know that the universe is made of matter, and we are made of matter. When I look up at the stars, I think we somehow end up there among them, as dust—or whatever.” I panned my gaze up to the spectacular star-struck sky. Oh. Yes.

  In my family (on my father’s side), depression is our special malady. Our clan boasts ties to both Meriwether Lewis and Emily Dickinson, and while I’m not saying that either the great explorer who killed himself or the wonderful poet who stayed in her room was depressed, the amateur diagnostician in me says it’s a distinct possibility. Regardless of the fates of our more notable ancestors, depression seems to snake down through the Dickinson family tree like a DNA strand, skipping over this person but landing on that. There’s the ancestor who took his life, the one who spent decades drinking in his room, and the one who as a child simply stopped speaking. Or my father, who drank in roadside taverns, cheated on his wives, and then abandoned his various families. (Was he depressed or just a jerk? I’m not sure.) Add to that a cultural and familial reluctance to disclose negative feelings, coupled with an expectation that we all have a responsibility to take care of ourselves, and we were each left to cope privately with what ailed us.

  In my family, talking about your health smacks of “complaining.” My mother declared all of her health problems to be too boring to discuss. My aunt Jean has coped with heart disease, requiring two balloon angioplasties. Well into her eighties, she drove herself to and from the hospital, watched the surgeon perform the procedure on a monitor, and described it as “no big deal.” My mother also drove herself to the local clinic after having a heart attack. After she was airlifted from the clinic to a hospital for surgery, she said that aside from the inability to catch her breath or use her left hand to steer the car during the ten-mile trip, she was fine. Plus, she didn’t want to bother anyone.

  Considering such stoicism, concern about one’s feelings seems neurotic. And admitting to having serious problems is risky because your emotions will be argued over and either validated lovingly, dismissed entirely, or joked about until your feelings flee the scene.

  Since about the age of twenty, much of my conscious life has been devoted to trying to answer the two essential questions of anyone’s life: “Who am I?” and “What do I want?” Whenever the consequential flow of my life seems challenged—or interrupted by change, hardship, triumph, or storms within or without—I return to these questions and struggle to answer them. Although the questions stay the same, the answers are elusive and ever-changing.

  Several months after my mother’s death, I asked the therapist I see about six times a year in Chicago why I still felt so sad. As usual, I was looking for a complicated answer—one I felt might match the magnitude of my emptiness. She briefly reviewed my particular challenges in childhood: poverty, instability, abandonment. She explained that coping with these challenges might have made others harder to bear. “And… your mother died and you miss her. You are grieving.” Oh. Yes.

  The answer to “Who am I?” was now “sad person.” “What do I want?” Less of that, please. I asked my therapist if she thought I was depressed, and she answered, “Well, why wouldn’t you be?” I wondered if I should take medication, and she said that was an option and we could talk about it. She suggested that for now I try breathing and meditation exercises, and she walked me through them. I’ve never taken medication for any reason (except for self-medicating, of course, with food, occasional cigarettes, and wine). I decided to wait to have that conversation, but I did stop at the donut shop on the ground floor of her building after I left.

  Given this wise validation, I stopped trying so hard to suppress my sadness and paper over my depression. Instead I decided to admit it, name it, and see if I could learn to live within it. It turns out that grief isn’t something that can be hurried. You can’t move through it faster than it moves through you.

  I learned to stop trying to feel better. I think this is the gentleness that my husband was tryi
ng to urge me toward. I finally allowed myself to give in to my own grief, cloaking myself in it and walking around with it, while still finding ways to be in the world, do my job, and relate to people. The world is full of people in trouble. I have only to dive into my “Ask Amy” mailbox to realize that. I had always thought that one of my strengths was that I never judged people’s problems—with their tricky wedding dynamics, uncooperative kids, or rude in-laws—as being somehow less consequential than my own. But now I found myself struggling to stay open to the reality of the human condition, even in its pettiness. Our troubles might be different, but we all wanted to feel better.

  During this period, I realized that, for me, the whole “closure” concept was useless. I don’t know who started the closure movement, but many people mentioned to me that the funeral, the eventual burial, the setting of the grave marker, the six-month anniversary, the year anniversary were turning points that would bring acceptance and closure. However, the ticket for a grieving person isn’t to try to close the book on something, but to find ways to cope with the way you feel about it.

  Things I’ve tried in order to feel better include, but are not limited to, donuts, yoga, ukulele, walking, meditation, prayer, therapy, drinking, denial, talking, solitude, knitting, poetry, spiritualism, singing, romance, jogging, journaling, Netflix, and church.

  Every single thing I’ve tried has worked, although sometimes only briefly. But in order for me to coexist with my own grief, I had to strip it down to the simple fact that I loved my mother, and now she was gone and I missed her. It was what it was. I didn’t know where she went, but I missed having her in this world.

  Over time, I learned to manage my sadness by simply accepting it as being an unavoidable aspect of who I was in that moment. I stopped comparing my sadness to that of other people. I found myself more able to face hard things that I had avoided—not by stuffing things down or sucking it up and getting on with it but by knowing and accepting that these things would be hard. I learned to ask myself, “Can I do this today?”