Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [3]
“Come here,” she said. “You’ve got a tag hanging off of your handbag.”
I looked at my mother and thought, Wow. You are good at this.
Now that there is a period at the end of her sentence, it occurs to me that the only time I ever saw my mother happy was a few years before she died, when she went back to school and got her master’s degree in librarianship. For a while, she rode around on a bookmobile, but by her mid-fifties, she’d found a job at Stanford University, helping to catalogue their library inventory on computer. For those few years, I noticed a positive shift in her demeanor—a certain lightheartedness had seeped in that had been missing before. And it lasted right up until my father, who was nearing retirement and wanted to do a lot of traveling, demanded that my mother quit her job in the interest of keeping him happy.
By sixty-five she was dead.
During one of her last medical emergencies my mother was encouraged to join a wellness group, where she reluctantly took part in an activity she had always belittled: group therapy. I had tried on and off for years to get her to consider talking to someone, maybe even begin taking an antidepressant. But she was as firmly against therapy as she was against exercise and, as always, once she had a final thought on the matter, there was no more room for discussion.
“How can a complete stranger claim to know anything about me? Am I not a unique individual?” she used to argue, in one fell swoop discounting the entire legacy of literature and psychology.
Now, after a particularly serious hospitalization, and a virtual intervention by the medical staff in charge of her recovery, she had been unable to turn the suggestion down. Thus she was playing along, however reluctantly.
“We were each asked to pick a stuffed animal that represents our inner child,” she explained to me when I visited her in the hospital, holding up a medium-sized plush stuffed monkey with very long arms and a scowling expression. “This is Little Ronny.” Then she looked at me, rolled her eyes, and threw the monkey across the room. “Fuck Little Ronny,” she said.
But something must have shaken loose in those sessions, because not too long afterward, when she was finally back home, she and I talked intimately for the very first time. Unprompted by me, and totally unexpectedly, we had a long, rambling, two-way conversation that felt to me like a breakthrough in our relationship. For the first time we sounded like two friends.
“Mom,” I said to her as the conversation was winding down, “I just want to say that I loved talking to you like this. I’m really glad we can talk to each other this way.”
“Well, just because I’m talking to you like this now doesn’t mean I always have to talk to you like this,” she replied.
We never talked like that again.
At my mother’s funeral the woman who ran her wellness group got up to give a speech. She was one of those down-to-earth, well-intentioned, sensible-looking women I associate with the San Francisco Bay Area—resplendent in woven materials, ethnic jewelry, and Birkenstocks. I was happy to see that she and the other people who had attended the wellness group, as well as the Stanford library people, seemed to feel genuine fondness for my mother. In a lovely impromptu speech, she talked about my mother’s intelligence and her sense of humor. I found myself wishing there was video of the sessions so I could have a look at that for myself.
When I glanced over at my father, he was choking back tears, his face rigid with the sorrow he was restraining himself from showing.
Then the wellness lady decided to lead the assembled mourners in a visualization exercise to say goodbye.
“Imagine that you are someplace very beautiful,” she said. “Pick a place you like. A place that makes you comfortable.”
I imagined a beautiful grassy clearing in Tuolumne Meadows, above Yosemite Valley, where I used to go camping.
“Now find a place to sit down and wait