We know people much better after they die. In life, we have their voices, the way they touched us, the clothes they wore, a long list of habits and traits. In death there are letters and photographs to widen our understanding of who someone was—often the person they were without us, or without us in their personal picture. Then there is the distance we travel in ourselves that bends light toward, or away, from everything we thought we knew about someone. I think it’s this last that has the most power to shape understanding.
My mother was an angry woman who lost some or her rancor as she aged, but even that bent, white-haired lady could roar over some ancient grievance that wasn’t right in front of her. My mother was good at stuffing things down inside, pretending she didn’t feel anything, and then erupting with accusations and a list of heinous crimes I may or may not have committed.
She didn’t want to be a wife or mother and felt forced to be both.
My mother was so angry she breathed fire. I bear the singe marks to this day. Also, the scars of her her emotional detachment caused by her falling madly in love with a colleague in her department at Cornell. This man was unhappily married but did not return my mother’s affection. I was four at the time. The next year I fell desperately ill with a strep infection antibiotics should have been able to clear—if I had been given all my doses on time, which I doubt happened, given my mother’s constant distraction. I spent a week in the hospital.
Decades later, as she lay dying, she confessed that she had been a serial adulteress. Those simple words explained so much of the abandonment I felt in my early life; the times she couldn’t be found at the end of a telephone; the sudden disappearances and returns with no explanation of where she’d been. I didn’t care about her infidelity, what mattered was that she’d raised me on a lie, one which said her divorce was entirely my father’s fault. A former student got her hooks into him, she said, turned his head, lured him away. My first published short story, “A Painful Shade of Blue,” explored this time in my life, and when my father read it, felt he had to set the record straight. He flew across the country to see me and say my mother’s version was false. I believed him.
They’re both gone now, as is my father’s second wife. I’m left with memories of them, most of which are unhappy, a few anodyne, almost none pleasant. The people they were live on the pages of my poetry and prose where I try to render them fairly, from the vantage point of being an older adult, no longer their vulnerable child.
I’m not sure I succeed.
The past has much still to reveal, so I’ll keep looking and trying to make sense of it. Then I’ll write about it, and with some hard work and a keen editorial eye, my words will be worth sharing.