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Authors: Claire Messud
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either.
What was fascinating to me, and instructive, because I was still learning, as I am still learning, how to live, was that she did not, upon her diagnosis, jump up and cry, “Let’s visit Burma! The Taj Mahal! The pyramids! The pampas!”—all the places she’d always longed to go. Nor did she proceed upon a sayonara tour to bid good-bye to the lakes in Maine, the winter beach at Wellfleet where my parents liked to mark their anniversary by walking in the white and fog, the room at the Pierre in New York where they’d spent the weekend of her fiftieth birthday and had—sin of luxury!—breakfast in bed. Nor did she turn her back on all of it, leave the dishes unwashed in the sink, the clothes piling up in the basket, the lawn unmowed. No, she kept living as though nothing had changed. No: she simply kept living. She knew everything had changed: she oversaw the cleaning and the packing and the sale of the Manchester house, a task for which my father (he could never have been any good at business, could he?) proved useless; and she pushed him until they found the place in Brookline, and she decorated it, as I’ve said, as though she would see her ninety-sixth birthday there. She kept reading mystery stories, and she kept buying the same Danish pastries from the Swiss bakery, for as long as she was able, and she took each blow—the cane, the wheelchair, the obscene rounds of medication, the Darth Vader breathing machine—as though they were so many gnats to be swatted at, and then ignored.
By all of this, I could only surmise that she loved her life. She loved it as it was. Like a Zen master, she reduced to the essences: I do not need to walk around the Museum of Fine Arts; I do not need to be pushed around the MFA in a chair; I do not need the MFA at all, because its treasures, as I love them, are imprinted in my memory; and if they are wrongly memorized—a lily where there are tulips, the boy’s torn hat rakish at the wrong angle—then this only makes the picturesthe more mine. They may offer the ancient Egyptian portrait of a young woman, her black almondine eyes a marvel, on extended loan, but to me she hangs always in the gallery behind the mummies, surrounded by shards of pottery and antique jewels, a secret for my own heart.
But can I say, now that she is dead, long dead, that I only half believed in her? I wanted—I needed—her to revolt. I know, revolutions take vast energy, like volcanic eruptions, I know. And the sick must husband their resources (even as they are resourceful for their husbands). But I couldn’t help wanting for her, couldn’t help the feeling that she’d given in, that she had measured out (with coffee spoons?) what it was that she might ask of life, and having found it lacking—tragically, gapingly lacking—had decided nevertheless to accept her modest share. I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life. And I never loved her more than the day I came to see her, bedridden, sallow, grandiose only in her wheezes, I with the whiff of autumn on me and the glow—I could feel it—of having run the miles from my apartment to theirs on a crisp late October afternoon—and she glared at me and set her jaw and said, “Get out. I can’t. Get out. But never for a second think I don’t remember what it’s like. Don’t think, either, that I can help hating you for it. Just right now.”
And I did get out—the overheating on top of the run had the sweat almost coursing down my back—and I ran all the way home again in the dusk, too cold, too tired, my feet aching on the pavement, my eyes and nose streaming from the wind and her meanness—how could she be so mean to me, of all people?—but by the time I got home I was, even in my self-pity, rejoicing: because for once she threatened not to go gently. For once, she threatened.
She called to apologize the same
What was fascinating to me, and instructive, because I was still learning, as I am still learning, how to live, was that she did not, upon her diagnosis, jump up and cry, “Let’s visit Burma! The Taj Mahal! The pyramids! The pampas!”—all the places she’d always longed to go. Nor did she proceed upon a sayonara tour to bid good-bye to the lakes in Maine, the winter beach at Wellfleet where my parents liked to mark their anniversary by walking in the white and fog, the room at the Pierre in New York where they’d spent the weekend of her fiftieth birthday and had—sin of luxury!—breakfast in bed. Nor did she turn her back on all of it, leave the dishes unwashed in the sink, the clothes piling up in the basket, the lawn unmowed. No, she kept living as though nothing had changed. No: she simply kept living. She knew everything had changed: she oversaw the cleaning and the packing and the sale of the Manchester house, a task for which my father (he could never have been any good at business, could he?) proved useless; and she pushed him until they found the place in Brookline, and she decorated it, as I’ve said, as though she would see her ninety-sixth birthday there. She kept reading mystery stories, and she kept buying the same Danish pastries from the Swiss bakery, for as long as she was able, and she took each blow—the cane, the wheelchair, the obscene rounds of medication, the Darth Vader breathing machine—as though they were so many gnats to be swatted at, and then ignored.
By all of this, I could only surmise that she loved her life. She loved it as it was. Like a Zen master, she reduced to the essences: I do not need to walk around the Museum of Fine Arts; I do not need to be pushed around the MFA in a chair; I do not need the MFA at all, because its treasures, as I love them, are imprinted in my memory; and if they are wrongly memorized—a lily where there are tulips, the boy’s torn hat rakish at the wrong angle—then this only makes the picturesthe more mine. They may offer the ancient Egyptian portrait of a young woman, her black almondine eyes a marvel, on extended loan, but to me she hangs always in the gallery behind the mummies, surrounded by shards of pottery and antique jewels, a secret for my own heart.
But can I say, now that she is dead, long dead, that I only half believed in her? I wanted—I needed—her to revolt. I know, revolutions take vast energy, like volcanic eruptions, I know. And the sick must husband their resources (even as they are resourceful for their husbands). But I couldn’t help wanting for her, couldn’t help the feeling that she’d given in, that she had measured out (with coffee spoons?) what it was that she might ask of life, and having found it lacking—tragically, gapingly lacking—had decided nevertheless to accept her modest share. I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life. And I never loved her more than the day I came to see her, bedridden, sallow, grandiose only in her wheezes, I with the whiff of autumn on me and the glow—I could feel it—of having run the miles from my apartment to theirs on a crisp late October afternoon—and she glared at me and set her jaw and said, “Get out. I can’t. Get out. But never for a second think I don’t remember what it’s like. Don’t think, either, that I can help hating you for it. Just right now.”
And I did get out—the overheating on top of the run had the sweat almost coursing down my back—and I ran all the way home again in the dusk, too cold, too tired, my feet aching on the pavement, my eyes and nose streaming from the wind and her meanness—how could she be so mean to me, of all people?—but by the time I got home I was, even in my self-pity, rejoicing: because for once she threatened not to go gently. For once, she threatened.
She called to apologize the same
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