Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [4]
I visualized a redwood picnic table in the middle of that meadow, surrounded by tall green grass and wildflowers. I walked over to it and sat down on the wooden plank bench.
“Now imagine seeing Ronny. She comes toward you for the final time,” said the wellness lady, and magically there she was: I actually saw my mother appear at the edge of the green, grassy area where the woods stopped and the meadow began. She was looking sharp in one of her matching knit pantsuits. Her short hair was light reddish blond and, as always, she was perfectly made-up. She looked immaculate, elegant, and sophisticated. She began to walk toward me.
This was not just another ephemeral visualization. This was so uncannily realistic, I began to feel apprehensive, jittery, as I anticipated that something moving was about to occur. As my mother got closer, I could see the rouge on her cheeks and smell her cologne. I braced myself for a potentially embarrassing emotional explosion: loud noises, choking sobs, bottomless grief.
“Now she is with you, right beside you,” the wellness lady said. “It is time to say your final farewell.” And there she was in front of me: time to say goodbye to my mother. But before I could say a word, she spoke first.
“You’ve got to be joking,” she said. “You don’t mean to tell me that you expect me to sit down on this filthy picnic bench and get dirt all over my suit, do you? You must be kidding. And I hope you don’t think I’m going to sit down on the grass. Those grass stains never come out.”
Then I remembered, as someone who has earned a living as a scriptwriter, that a carefully drawn character always knows what it wants to say. A good writer respects that truth. Even at her mother’s funeral.
There was only one more goodbye left.
A few days after the funeral, my father asked me to come home and help him sort through my mother’s stuff. It was time to decide what to do with it all. So I put my sixty-pound, yellow German shepherd–mix mutt, Stan, into my old Honda Accord and drove up the coast to my parents’ home near Palo Alto.
The house looked the same when I first entered, but the air was a lot more still. A giant presence was missing.
Walking into the bedroom my father and mother shared, I found it disturbing to be allowed full access to her private domain. But on my father’s instructions, I began to look through her jewelry box and chest of drawers for the first time. Every garment she owned was carefully ironed and in tip-top condition. The aggregate stuff, pushed together in several crowded closets, stood as a collective monument to the thousands of arguments my mother and I had had over the years about my taste in clothes. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a way to want to add any of her double-knit pantsuits or polyester floral print blouses to my existing wardrobe of T-shirts and jeans.
As I was creating a pile of clothing to give to the Salvation Army and Goodwill, I spotted something that provoked such a dramatic reaction in me it was almost as though it came with its own soundtrack by John Adams. There they were: a stack of diaries that my mother kept piled on the highest shelf of her closet. I had been looking at that tower of four-by-eight-inch diaries for years, watching it grow like some kind of mineral deposit or tiny condo complex; by the time my mother died, there were at least fifteen of them. Some had flower-patterned fabric covers and lined pages; some were black pebble board with unlined pages. Each one was labeled by year and countries visited, usually with a piece of paper my mother had cut out and taped to the spine. As an inveterate diary keeper myself, I’d always wondered about the contents of these books. Did my mother let her frustrations and true feelings show on these pages the way I had always done in mine? It felt a little bit indecent even picking the books up and holding them. Should I burn them and preserve her privacy forever?
But now that she was gone, they beckoned to me loudly. Perhaps I was meant to read them and uncover things she