I began to shove the dirt in the hole with my hands. I felt like crying, but I knew that would just be a mess, and anyway, it was like planting something, and I had planted things a million times. My sister, bless her heart, knelt down beside me, and with her beautiful slender hands, she shoved dirt as well, watching it fall and cover this man she had loved. This man whose toenails she had clipped, whose hair she had cut.
When it was finished and the last of the dirt was mounded over the box in which my father’s ashes would lie forever, I took my sister’s hand and we stood up. The people on the porch were still staring, and the minister waited patiently to say his blessing. So I turned and stamped down the dirt with my feet, and then I picked up the marble slab and the heavy statue and placed them over the freshly dug hole. Then the minister said the final blessing, the Lord bless us and keep us, the Lord make his face to shine upon us and be gracious unto us, the Lord lift up the light of his countenance and give us peace, both now and forever.
I always tell men who grieve for their fathers that it never turns out to be what you expected. I tell them that, no matter how much you think about it, no matter how deeply you’ve decided in advance that you know how you will feel when your father dies, the reality is far deeper and stranger than you can imagine.
I always tell people that if you want closure, as people say now, if you want some finality, you should get up at six o’clock in the morning and dig your father’s grave. You should shove the dirt over him with your own hands and stamp it down with your English shoes.
But it’s not true. It’s not true, the thing I tell people about digging the grave and stamping down the dirt.
I had thought the demons would be laid to rest. I had thought the rage and the hatred that Southern men can feel for their fathers, a rage and hatred so old and terrible they can’t be described, I had thought it would all be lifted from me and I would feel free.
It wasn’t. Not for a day. Not for a goddamned hour.
II
My mother had varices, which is what happens to you when you drink so much your liver can’t process the liquor anymore. The blood backs up and begins to seep through the tiny capillaries in your throat, and then down into your stomach, where it causes pernicious anemia. If you have it once, they can cure it, or stop it or whatever, but it means if you ever drink again, you’re pretty much going to die.
I carried her in my arms, against her will, out of the hospital, and laid her in the back of my father’s car, and took her to a drying out place, but they wouldn’t take her because she was too ill. When we sat in the office, she couldn’t even sign her own name. They sent her to the hospital at the University of Virginia, and she was there for six weeks before she was even well enough to go to rehab. She stayed for months in rehab, longer than anybody I’ve ever known, and when she got out she said to me one day, “My life will never be wonderful again.”
I understand what she meant. I still think of drinking with a light and a sweetness that in no way resemble the actual circumstances of those days. Except for a few occasions, it was just being rode hard and put away wet, and I wept at my own behavior almost every night. I lost a decade of my life, just lost it, the way you might lose an umbrella on the bus.
My mother tried to stay sober, I guess. I mean she knew her medical condition, even if she didn’t understand it, and she’d been in rehab three months and she had heard the lesson over and over and over, but she thought nice people didn’t go to AA meetings and my father kept drinking and it was a hopeless cause. She was an elegant and intelligent woman and she hated her life. I don’t know why. She was always unhappy, and nothing would mollify her. No amount of love or tenderness or extravagant gifts. Even getting things she’d always wanted, like the house she lived in, didn’t change anything. I’m the same way.
One night I was putting dishes away in a china cupboard, low to the floor, and she leaned over me and whispered, “I can smell liquor on your breath.” It was venomous.
Hopeless. She began drinking iced tea or Sprite with vodka in it. She began hiding liquor bottles in her sewing basket. She began hiding liquor bottles in her clothes drawers. She set fire to her mattress. I guess her life was wonderful again.
I took her out for a drive in the car. It was a summer evening, early summer, when it’s soft and not too hot and the mountains are still crisp and blue in the distance. I stopped the car on the side of a country road and I turned to her and spoke. “I know what you’re doing,” I said. “We all know what you’re doing. And I want you to know it’s going to be long and excruciating and I want you to know that none of us has done anything to deserve what you’re about to do.”
“I’ll stop drinking,” she said. “I’ll stop drinking for you.”
“Don’t stop for me,” I said. “Don’t make me responsible. Don’t make me the bad guy.” I started the car and we drove home.
One time that summer I was down there for a visit, and I was going out for drinks with some friends. I set the table in the kitchen, three mats and napkins and my grandmother’s silver. I told my parents I’d be home at seven, we’d always had dinner at seven-thirty, and we’d have dinner at seven-thirty, like always. I got home at five after seven and they’d already finished their supper.
It was the only time I ever exploded with rage at my parents. “I bought you a fucking house,” I yelled. “I come home to see you as often as I can. I never take a vacation, never go anywhere else but here. I bring you presents. And you can’t wait five fucking minutes to have supper?”
My mother got up and walked out of the room. My father sat there and said nothing, as though he’d been hit by a baseball bat. I served myself some food and ate in silence. Later, when the twilight was coming on and the light was turning blue, I found my mother in the house and asked her to go for a walk in the garden. To look at my aunt’s roses. My mother had long since given up on her own roses.
She said she didn’t want to go anywhere with me. I said, “Look. This is what happens in real families. They have fights. They make up. They go for a walk in the garden.” I lived in New York. That was what New York families did. My mother, who supposedly was not drinking, rose unsteadily to her feet and we headed for the door.
To get to the roses, you had to cross the gravel driveway and, in the middle, my mother fell down and scraped her elbow very badly on the rocks. She tried to get up, but she couldn’t, so I picked her up in my arms, she was light as a leaf, and carried her back into the house, up the stairs, and laid her on her bed. She and my father didn’t sleep in the same bedroom anymore. My father snored. Maybe that was the reason.
No, the real reason was that my mother would go to sleep around nine and then she’d wake up at midnight and the liquor would be too far away and she couldn’t get back to sleep so she’d lie in bed and play solitaire for hours, sometimes all night. Many, many nights, both drunk and sober, I’d lie in bed and listen to the slap of the cards as she tried and tried to get a perfect run.
Her elbow was raw and bleeding. She had changed into her nightgown and her arms were so thin, the front hanging limply on one side where she’d lost a breast some years before. She was hunched over with the pain. I went into the bathroom, looking for some Neosporin and some gauze, but there wasn’t any gauze and, because I had had some drinks and I was in a rush to go out to a party, I pulled some Icy Hot out of the medicine cabinet by mistake and went back to her bedroom and rubbed it all over my mother’s wound.
She gave a small distant cry. “Oh. That hurts so much. It hurts.” The tears were rolling down her cheeks. I ran to the bathroom and wet a washrag and went back and tried to wipe away the burning Icy Hot, but of course it was deep in the wound by then, and it wouldn’t come out, and I was late for the party, and I finally said, “There. It’ll be all right now.” And I left her, I left her in burning pain, and I’ve never forgiven myself.
When my mother began really to die because the varices had come back, I was in a recording session in Ne
w York, making some fool commercial, some jingle. My sister called and told me about the anemia and the blood and I hung up the phone and said to everybody, “My mother’s dying,” and I got up and went home and called my friend Rocco, who was a doctor in Nashville. I described her symptoms, and asked him what was going to happen.
“Your mother will weaken because they won’t be able to stop the blood. She won’t get the best care because doctors don’t try very hard with alcoholics because they know they’ll just do it again. She’ll start to lose her mind and dementia will set in, so if you want to have a rational conversation with her, you better go fast. And she’ll be dead in ten days.” I went down the next afternoon.
It was hot late August, almost Labor Day, and my mother was moved to a hospital in Roanoke, fifty miles away. Every morning I’d get up and drive my father to see her, and every afternoon I’d drive back and see her again about five o’clock. I don’t remember what we talked about. They were giving her blood transfusions and she had come to look forward to them. “I hope they give me another one soon, because they make me feel so good.” She was dying in a dream. Sometimes my sister would go with me and sometimes not.
I somehow thought there would be a moment of clarity, that she would open her eyes and say to me that all that had happened with her and me and my father was not my fault. I longed with all my heart for her to say that thing, but she never did.
I tried to prepare my family for what was going to happen, but my sister couldn’t accept it out of her deep affection, and my father wouldn’t accept it because it wouldn’t cut through the haze and because I guess he really did love her; they were obsessed with each other, in a way. “No, no,” he would say. “She’ll have this little cancer episode and then she’ll be home and we’ll have another year.”
The doctors had discovered that her breast cancer had returned, but they weren’t going to give her chemo because it wasn’t cancer that was killing her, but my family all pretended that was what was going on. My aunt, my mother’s sister, whose heart was filled with grace and affection beyond reason, couldn’t bear the thought of her sister in pain, or dying, especially dying of alcoholism. I called my brother every day and told him to come from Atlanta immediately, but he kept putting it off another day. Scenes of pain, and hospitals, made him anxious.
My mother’s mind began to go. She became vague and unfocused; sometimes she didn’t know who we were. Still, I drove an hour each way every morning and every night. On the morning of the ninth day, I drove my father down and let them sit for awhile and talk by themselves. She seemed fairly alert. She seemed better. She had gained some weight. As I took him out of the room, I promised her I would come back that afternoon to see her.
I lay by my sister’s pool, and then it was time for me to go. “Don’t go,” she said. “You’re so tired. It’s a long way and you’re tired.” But I got up and got in the car and went home and changed my clothes to go to the hospital. I could hardly see for exhaustion.
I drove two miles out of town and pulled the car over to the side of the road. It was on a wooded incline near Buffalo Creek and you could feel the first cool breeze of the afternoon. I put my head on the steering wheel and decided to turn around, to go tomorrow when I took my father. But I knew there were some promises you don’t break, so I picked my head up and drove on.
When I got to the hospital it was clear she was dying. She had this delusion that she was rehearsing a play in London with Bruce Willis and she was late for rehearsal. She leaned forward, and her nightgown opened, and I could see the hollow where her breast had been, and a series of small nodules, a constellation, across her chest.
She had lost her mind, and her breathing came in shallow gasps, and I knew she was dying. I sat with her and held her hand and told her I would miss her; then I went to find the nurse and told her to call the doctor right away because my mother’s condition was so grave. I used the word grave. And then I went back and kissed her and told her I loved her and I left. I don’t know why I left her to die alone, but I did.
Yes. I went home to tell my father that my mother was going to die that night, and call my sister and call my brother, who finally said he would fly up the next day. My father went up to bed, and I slept on a foldout sofa in the dining room with the telephone by me on a little table, so I could answer it on the first ring and not wake my father. I lay awake all night and the phone rang at seven in the morning, a nurse calling to say that my mother had died. I told my father when he came downstairs and he went back up to bed and rarely left it for the next three days.
She was sixty-six years old.
My brother arrived and my sister and I picked him up as we were on the way to collect my mother’s few things, a shabby, cheap overnight case, some pictures of her grandchildren. Her room so empty, the sheets already made up crisp and white. My brother was angry he had missed seeing her, although we all knew he would never have come, he would never have seen her in pain, never have visited her in a hospital to watch her die.
That afternoon, I took everybody’s clothes to the dry cleaners so we would all look spruce, like we were the Kennedys or something. At least my father would look presentable.
We had to sit and talk with all the people who came. My father wouldn’t come downstairs. The flowers and the roses and the bouquets were amazing. Many people wept as they sat with us, mostly her women friends. There was a blue slipper chair in the sitting room where my mother had always sat, and nobody would sit there.
It was in that chair that my mother said the most extraordinary thing. Years before. We were sitting with a couple, some friends of my parents, a doctor and his wife, when suddenly the wife, who was a wit, asked this question: If you were a character in literature, who would you be? Not who would you want to be, but who is it in literature you most closely resemble?
The doctor’s wife said she was Elizabeth Bennet. And she really was. I don’t remember what the doctor said. I said I was Rawdon Crawley, a lie in every way. My father said with remarkable self-awareness that he was Mr. Micawber. And then my mother spoke. “I’m the Lady Brett Ashley,” she said.
“Why?” the doctor’s wife asked.
“Because I believe in living the way she lived. You wreck your own life and then, very gently, you wreck the lives of those around you.” Nobody knew what to say. She was sitting in the blue chair when she said this, and I never looked at it without remembering what she said. Now people wiped away tears when they imagined her sitting there again, so witty and pretty and chic, the way she had been before it all, or not before it all, but before it all got out of hand.
Her funeral was straightforward, after some trauma about the old prayer book versus the new prayer book, and my aunt and I went and took communion at three in the afternoon, before the service, just the two of us. It was lovely and comforting, in a small kind of way. At the funeral, we sang “For all the saints who from their labors rest” and “Come, labor on.” Ora Labora. I still cry when I hear it. I hope they sing the same hymns at my funeral, and the Allegri Miserere.
People loved my mother very much. They surrounded her with affection and regard and it was never enough. People were so gentle with her, and waited for her bons mots. And she was kind and thoughtful and wrote a beautiful thank-you note.
In private, she was both vicious and adoring. She told me that, when I was born, I was such a beautiful baby that she wouldn’t pick me up for a year. I’m not sure into which category that falls.
And I rubbed Icy Hot on her open wound.
The night after her funeral, my mother unburied, after everybody had left, we went over to my sister’s for a swim and I got so drunk I had to be driven home and I fell down on the sidewalk. The next day my aunt, who wasn’t there, said to me sadly, “Don’t ever do that again.”
But that night, after I went to bed, I woke up at two o’clock in the morning. I had not shed one tear for my mother the whole time she was sick or since her death. I went down to the kitchen and p
oured a glass of iced tea, and I started to cry. Not just cry, bawl. I cried so hard I was embarrassed, even alone, and I somehow thought that maybe it was the kitchen, so I took my iced tea into the next room and sat down exhausted in a chair and I started crying again. I moved through every room downstairs, drinking iced tea and crying for my mother. I sat in her blue slipper chair and felt the velvet and smelled her and cried. It was almost light when I went to bed.
I spent every night for the next six months in New York getting fucked up in every conceivable way. I would come home at one or two in the morning, so drunk and high on cocaine and fresh from some anonymous sexual encounter with somebody I wouldn’t recognize on the street the next morning that I hardly knew where I was. Sometimes I couldn’t pronounce my address for the cab driver. I got mugged five times on my own block. I did weird things like decide to make potato chips in the middle of the night, slicing the potatoes razor thin and dropping them one by one in sizzling oil in my disgusting kitchen in my disgusting apartment.
And one night I picked up a pack of cards and sat down on the floor with a bottle of Heineken and started playing solitaire. I played for hours. I finally crawled to my bed and passed out, but the next night, when I came home drunk, the cards were still there, and I played again. I played every night for weeks and I couldn’t figure out why. It was just what I did. Then I remembered lying awake in my room at home in Virginia, before things got so out of control for me that I would sweat through my shirt walking five blocks to work, lying awake and listening to my mother playing solitaire. The Lady Brett whose work was done.
I played for months, until one night, I played a perfect game. All the cards fell into place, one after another. I didn’t cheat. I just turned over the cards one by one, and one by one they turned out to be the right card, like a pitcher throwing a perfect game. And when it was done, when the cards were lying in four neat piles, every suit in order ace to king, I picked up the cards and put them in a drawer.