Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(32)

My mother was a lah-dee-dah-dee-dah kind of person. She would go about her day humming “Lah-dee-dah-dee-dah-dee-dah.” She wasn’t unintelligent; she was just the kind of person who was interested in having a pleasant, ho-hum kind of day. She would never insert herself into anything adjacent to conflict. She wasn’t really very good at follow-through, so she had lots of different half-completed projects at home that would usually involve some sort of jury-rigged, repurposed household item that didn’t quite cut it, like a bedsheet that was converted into a window shade and embellished with a makeshift border she’d knitted that afternoon. When the project was interrupted by a nap, it was likely to be abandoned.

    Our house looked a lot like Sesame Street—the main distinction being it was unsafe for children. She always wanted change. She wanted newness. She got it mostly by experimenting with casseroles and rearranging furniture. I’d come home one day only to stub my toe on a bunch of cinder blocks that had been placed under my bed as my new “bed frame,” because my mom had decided my actual metal bed frame looked better in the backyard as an enclosure for our dog, Mutley. She would have knit something for that too—crafting it to look like a questionable art installation. She wasn’t crazy. She didn’t drink or take drugs. She was a homemaker, and sometimes her ideas were out of left field…or in left field…many just belonged somewhere in a field.

My mother could sew, knit, plant a garden, and cook. She made the thickest, creamiest macaroni and cheese and the richest, gooiest brownies—both of which were out of a box. But she always made home and food feel better. She could cook pretty much anything, but if you ever asked her for a recipe, she’d just say, “Put a little of this, and a little of that…lah-dee-dah-dee-dah-dee-dah.” There was nothing exacting about her, ever. Everything with her was always very vague.

    She could build pretty much anything too—a deck, a doghouse; she even once built a stone retaining wall in our backyard. She could probably have built a car. It would have broken down eventually, but she definitely could have gotten something going.

The women in our family are on the masculine side, to say the least. We are not girly, we are not wearing dresses, and most of us are not getting laid. My mom had two sisters, and between the three of them they had nine daughters, and somehow, my mom was the most feminine of us all. Her name was Rita, but I called her Chunk.

When I think of her, the first image that comes to mind is of her standing upstairs, leaning over the balcony that looked down over our living room on Martha’s Vineyard, eating whatever sandwich she had made to lull her to sleep that night, watching us play board games at the kitchen table. She liked hearing us before she went to sleep. She wanted to listen to us eating and drinking and laughing and playing Balderdash, but she never played, even though my dad always did. She was never a participant. She was always in the background—but always front and center.

My mom knew that her kids needed her after Chet died, and she came back to us way sooner than my dad did. Whereas my dad was incapable of grieving and finding joy at the same time, my mother instinctively managed to do both.



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    I was thirty-one years old and in London for my very first book tour, when my cellphone rang in the middle of the night. It was my sister Simone.

“You should come home. Mom isn’t doing well.”

I knew this call was coming. I knew when I flew to London that my mother was going to interrupt things.

Two months earlier, I was sitting in my parents’ living room when Simone came down the stairs from their bedroom, slumped down on the sofa, put her head in her hands, and sobbed. It was eerily reminiscent of when my dad had lost his composure after Chet died. I had never seen Simone be weak. If I had, I didn’t remember it. She wouldn’t have been weak in front of me, since she had always been a mother figure to me.

My sister gets along with every person she meets. Everyone loves Simone. She’s a conflict avoider, a passive, popular, easygoing sorority president—she’s eminently reasonable.

Is she really surprised by this outcome? I thought, sitting next to her on the couch. This was my mother’s third bout of cancer…What did Simone think was going to happen? I didn’t say those things to my sister. I felt bad for her. I also felt guilty that I wasn’t dreading my mother’s death as she was—I just wanted to get it over with. My mom had been fighting cancer for so many years—in and out of chemo and radiation, bald, not bald, always a little sick. She never complained, and when she started sleeping more hours a day than she was awake, and could eat only applesauce for weeks at a time, it seemed the writing was on the wall.

After all, everything had been leading up to this—the glue of the family was becoming unglued because she was tired of the chaos. She was tired of living through my father’s never-ending lawsuits—his financial unevenness. Being married to my father would have given anyone cancer. My mom was tired of fighting, and she was enervated. Her idea of heaven was dreaming about life while she slept, so in her mind, I’m sure, she was actually looking forward to being able to watch all of us without having to participate. In the afterlife, she would have a front-row seat to all of our lives, but from a higher perch and without the need to get dressed in something other than a housedress. She was worn-out.