actually: animated with willful malevolence. I was furious at his death, and inconsolable for weeks afterward. During this period, when I would sometimes stand cooking dinner or cleaning up with tears dripping off my face, Fiona said to me one night, “Well, it was his own fault, really, Mom.” And then, in response to my incredulity: “I mean, he could have stopped smoking and then he’d probably still be alive.” I stepped forward and slapped her then—I, who took pride in never hitting my kids.
In the picture, my father looks healthy and strong, and Rosalie, with her great mass of obviously dyed black hair, is in the midst of saying something to him animatedly.
They moved west when he retired, to be near me and Lawrence. I was glad later that he’d died before Joe and I divorced. He once said to me, “It’s good for me to see you so happily settled. I alwaysworried, after you got divorced, that your mother—you know, her illness—might have maybe damaged you in a way, for love.”
An assortment of others: many of Jeff giving the camera the finger, his favorite pose for years. Many of my garden in the backyard, taken to help me plan changes in it. A few of me, when someone wrested the camera from my hands. Here’s one in which I’m turning from the sink, talking, apparently—my mouth is open in an unattractive way. It was at a period when I had my hair short, a big mistake, and the apron I have on makes me look shapeless and thick. What you see in this picture is a woman whose husband might leave her, who might find herself at midlife casting about in her past for answers to her future. I tore it in two pieces, then in four, and threw it away.
The last time I went to my grandmother’s, the time I went to stay, I was fifteen. My mother had managed it finally, her own death, and she’d done it well, I came to think when I was older, in that none of us had had to find her.
In the months before it happened, she’d had an increasingly intense preoccupation with Egyptian hieroglyphics. As part of this, she found an educational conference she wanted to attend at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago: two days of scholarly papers. My father thought about it—she’d asked his permission, essentially—and then said yes. She’d been all right for a while, though I think my father was worried about her near obsession with this glyphic language, the notion of signs and symbols that spoke to her. Still, she arranged it all competently and seemingly calmly, and this reassured him. She booked a hotel for two nights, with a view of the lake, near the university—so she wouldn’t have to make the long commute back and forth each day, she said. That made perfect sense, too. Fine, then.
When she called him the first night, all was well, apparently. But she didn’t call the second night, and he couldn’t reach her. Still,she’d sounded so buoyant the night before that he didn’t worry. He hoped she was out with other people, people she’d met at the conference. He hoped—he always hoped this; it’s the disease that affects those who love people who are ill—that this would be a turning point for her, that things might be different from now on. She would make friends, she would have a life in the world that compelled and occupied her.
The hotel called him at work the next day. When they’d gone to her room after checkout time, they’d found her. She was a person with access to many pills, and this is what she’d used.
My father gave me my choice, my freedom. I could stay with him, which he recognized might be rather a lonely life with Lawrence off at college now and his own work as a lawyer so consuming; or I could go to my grandparents’ and live with them for the two and a half years until I too began college. I made my decision with a dazzling selfishness and speed it takes my breath away to recall—though it was useful to keep in mind when my own children reached that age. I chose my
In the picture, my father looks healthy and strong, and Rosalie, with her great mass of obviously dyed black hair, is in the midst of saying something to him animatedly.
They moved west when he retired, to be near me and Lawrence. I was glad later that he’d died before Joe and I divorced. He once said to me, “It’s good for me to see you so happily settled. I alwaysworried, after you got divorced, that your mother—you know, her illness—might have maybe damaged you in a way, for love.”
An assortment of others: many of Jeff giving the camera the finger, his favorite pose for years. Many of my garden in the backyard, taken to help me plan changes in it. A few of me, when someone wrested the camera from my hands. Here’s one in which I’m turning from the sink, talking, apparently—my mouth is open in an unattractive way. It was at a period when I had my hair short, a big mistake, and the apron I have on makes me look shapeless and thick. What you see in this picture is a woman whose husband might leave her, who might find herself at midlife casting about in her past for answers to her future. I tore it in two pieces, then in four, and threw it away.
The last time I went to my grandmother’s, the time I went to stay, I was fifteen. My mother had managed it finally, her own death, and she’d done it well, I came to think when I was older, in that none of us had had to find her.
In the months before it happened, she’d had an increasingly intense preoccupation with Egyptian hieroglyphics. As part of this, she found an educational conference she wanted to attend at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago: two days of scholarly papers. My father thought about it—she’d asked his permission, essentially—and then said yes. She’d been all right for a while, though I think my father was worried about her near obsession with this glyphic language, the notion of signs and symbols that spoke to her. Still, she arranged it all competently and seemingly calmly, and this reassured him. She booked a hotel for two nights, with a view of the lake, near the university—so she wouldn’t have to make the long commute back and forth each day, she said. That made perfect sense, too. Fine, then.
When she called him the first night, all was well, apparently. But she didn’t call the second night, and he couldn’t reach her. Still,she’d sounded so buoyant the night before that he didn’t worry. He hoped she was out with other people, people she’d met at the conference. He hoped—he always hoped this; it’s the disease that affects those who love people who are ill—that this would be a turning point for her, that things might be different from now on. She would make friends, she would have a life in the world that compelled and occupied her.
The hotel called him at work the next day. When they’d gone to her room after checkout time, they’d found her. She was a person with access to many pills, and this is what she’d used.
My father gave me my choice, my freedom. I could stay with him, which he recognized might be rather a lonely life with Lawrence off at college now and his own work as a lawyer so consuming; or I could go to my grandparents’ and live with them for the two and a half years until I too began college. I made my decision with a dazzling selfishness and speed it takes my breath away to recall—though it was useful to keep in mind when my own children reached that age. I chose my
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