Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

by Anna Quindlen

  The world shrinks. Someone once told me the answer is to make young friends, but that’s not the answer. The thing about old friends is not that they love you but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year’s Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment, and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don’t really think you look older, because they’ve grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they’re used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you’ve lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake, always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.

  Everyone knows this is coming, especially someone with a history like mine. I was old enough neither to rent a car nor to score a college diploma when I was made to understand, indelibly and unequivocally, as my mother dwindled away and then went out like a pale candle, that without much warning, good people die, losing what was left of their span, leaving those who love them to soldier on with unending pain and loss.

  That is ultimately the point of all this, isn’t it? When we talk about aging, we talk about flagging libido, increasing infirmities, being passed over at work, being bored at home. But the elephant in the room is mortality. It’s death, but no one likes to speak his name, as though to acknowledge is to conjure, and to conjure is to invite him into the house. We speak of mammograms and cholesterol and calorie counts and we pretend what we are discussing is health, diet, appearance, vigor. But under it all is the shadow that never goes away.

  I met mortality up close and personal on January 18, 1972, when I was nineteen years old and my mother, whose birth name was Prudence Marguerite Pantano, had barely entered her forties. Although she had done everything possible to avoid the hospital, she died there. For the wake they had to fill in with tissue paper the bodice of the black-and-white print dress that she liked so much because it had belonged to her when she was a more robust woman, plumper, more zaftig. In one of the cruel ironies of these episodes, she had dwindled to a narrow reed of a person with a round, hard, protuberant belly. It was her belief that she was pregnant that took her to the doctor in the first place, and during the last months of her illness that was exactly how she appeared. A woman who had spent the best years of her life in maternity clothes, she sickened and died in them as well. I made her dresses on the Singer sewing machine I had been given as a gift for my sixteenth birthday. The one made of navy dotted swiss was the one she liked best. It was cheery.

  In the same fashion that she asked for wall-to-wall carpeting for Christmas while my father preferred to buy her jewelry or cashmere, her wishes for those final months were humdrum and domestic. She liked the two of us to go to lunch at some small restaurant where they served salads and soups. She wanted to stay up and watch movies on the Late Late Show: Wuthering Heights, Waterloo Bridge, All About Eve, A Place in the Sun. (For years I was the only person I knew who was conversant with Carole Lombard’s plane crash while she was on a war-bonds tour and the long friendship between Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.) She sat in the kitchen in her wheelchair and taught me to cook, mostly things I still make for my family today, tomato sauce and meatballs, meatloaf with a latticework of bacon on top, chicken Parmigiano.

  I would like to portray myself as the little heroine of this story, but it would be a lie so terrible that, even no longer believing in heaven or hell—though I wish I did, at least the former—I feel as though I would be struck down for it. I did not want to be there. I felt powerless, trapped, enfeebled. This had less to do with my mother, whom I loved, than with the life she and her cohort had lived, which terrified me. I was afraid of the briars of housewifery turning me into a Sleeping Beauty, taking away Doris Lessing and Simone de Beauvoir and leaving me with Joy of Cooking, Jacqueline Susann, and slipcovers.

  When my daughter was nineteen she wrote to me that she could scarcely believe she was the age at which I had taken over the house and the children, the pain management and the hospital visits. But I didn’t take them over so much as live through them. And above all I didn’t open the door into the dark spiritual tunnel in which my mother must have been living much of the time. Perhaps if I had she would have politely shut it in my face. We do what we can to protect our children from pain, even if it means we shoulder it ourselves. “If you want help, you shouldn’t act like a person who never needs any,” my daughter muttered to me one night when I was angry, and for once I was at a loss for words because she had so completely nailed my modus operandi.

  My mother was a variation on this theme of the sacrificial mother. She always took the smallest and most sinewy piece of chicken, the burnt edge of the baked ziti. My husband’s family had a dinner table code I’d never heard before: FHB, or Family Hold Back. My mother always made so much food that the issue didn’t arise among us, but if it had, the code would have been MHB, and she would have. There’s a line in the classic Jean Shepherd movie A Christmas Story in which the narrator says of his own family, “My mother had not had a hot meal for herself in fifteen years.” I never found it funny, simply true. The habit of self-sacrifice was so deeply ingrained in my mother’s character that she even protected strangers from discomfort. Once, waiting for chemo, she told another woman that she was at the hospital because she’d broken her arm.

  “Now you’ll have something to write about,” she said one afternoon in the kitchen, apropos of nothing, talking without talking at all about the terrible thing that was happening to her as, instead, a terrible thing that was happening to me. I knew her, although not as well as I wish I had, or as I’ve known her in retrospect, as the freelance archaeologist of her past, and I can tell you that there was nothing malicious in that comment, that all she wanted to say was that something good could come out of bad. But in the years afterward it echoed within me because of the appalling suggestion that I could only be generous if there was something in it for me, if I came out of the experience with some material, something I could use.

  She left me her engagement ring. When I was twenty-three someone broke into my apartment and stole it along with all my other jewelry. “Do you know how big it was?” the police officer said. “Not big,” I said.

  She wanted to live. That was the lesson I learned from her. She wanted to live until she decided she didn’t. It’s true of us all. We put fences around that property: I wouldn’t want to live if I were in pain. I wouldn’t want to live if I had that disease, this cancer. And then, miraculously, we’re in pain, with that disease, this cancer, and we want to live still. There’s always another threshold.

  I don’t know how we’re expected to think of this. Sometimes I power walk along the Hudson, the park to my left, the river to my right, the smoggy absence in the skyline where the World Trade Center towers once stood, then smoked, burned, fell, and I think that someday the river will run, the trees leaf out, the blue sky vibrate overhead, the runners pound out the miles on the path, the dog walkers throw their balls, the nannies push the strollers, but I will not be there. I will be gone. It reminds me of the truculent way in which, when small, my daughter used to look at photographs of her two brothers at the beach or at their birthday parties before her arrival. The idea of a time before she was born, before she existed, before we knew her and were required to have her in our daily lives for our happiness and sense of completion, a time when Quin and Chris were alive without her—it did not strike her as strange or even unimaginable but as an outrage, an insult. She couldn’t wrap her mind around it. Why should she?

  Once my mother was gone, I was left trying to wrap my mind around the fact that death was always lurking. It was difficult, returning to college, going about the ordinary life of a twenty-year-old, which is as removed from mortality as it is from the kind of
domestic responsibility that had become second nature to me. There was suddenly an unseen barrier between me and nearly everyone else. I knew the secret that was not a secret, that the molecules of the living world are always rearranging themselves so that something is lost, something is lost every day.

  My friends discovered it little by little, over the years. The conversations over the phone in a low register began, one by one: Oh, did you hear about so-and-so? So tragic, so unexpected, so young. But I never felt that it was unexpected, or that anyone was young. I felt the weight of knowledge. For years I felt that my mother had lived to a fairly substantial age, until the passage of time and my own maturity taught me first that she had died very young indeed and then that she had been robbed of fully half her existence.

  There was a period when I became less alone in this knowledge of mortality, the sad period during the 1980s when many of us began to watch our gay friends waste away, when we first learned about AIDS and its fine points, T cell counts, antivirals. Every few months there was a name to add to the list, and then medical advances and the activism of the gay community beat back death. Safe sex became commonplace and AIDS became a chronic condition instead of a black flag, and the deaths of young men began to slow. And then the breast cancer began, and the early heart attacks. Yet for many the denial continued. How often have I attended memorial services for men about whom their friends said that they really began to understand what mattered when they got the diagnosis? There’s simply no excuse for that, no matter what the average life expectancy, no matter how good modern medicine. The simple exigencies and experiences of life should teach us what life is all about. To not get the message without a cancer diagnosis, a hand tremor, a pain in the left side of the chest, is just foolishness.

  Generations before us were not taken aback by death, early or otherwise. Epidemics, infant mortality, incurable illnesses, wars, disasters: survival was a gift. The heart stopped. The breathing ceased. And it did so often. Flu and smallpox and measles, illnesses we scarcely register, sent millions to early graves. And the wars started, and the soldiers left and never came back. Existence was often short and brutish. Without antibiotics or reliable surgery, prayer was their only solace.

  But with the development of the respirator, the feeding tube, in vitro fertilization, frozen embryos, the question of what actually constitutes life became not only germane but infinitely complex. Because of all that we’ve learned and all that we can do, we may be the first generation of human beings who try to deny our own mortality. The great Catholic writer Thomas Merton wrote in his journal, “Never has man’s helplessness in the face of death been more pitiable than in this age when he can do everything except escape death.” There is a story about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, maybe apocryphal, although I hope not. It is said that when she was diagnosed, in her early sixties, with lymphoma, she responded, “If I had known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have done all those sit-ups.”

  It is going to happen. The light at the end of the tunnel, as the poet Robert Lowell once wrote, is the light of an oncoming train. We know this and yet, like the little girl who refuses to acknowledge the possibility of a world without her skipping through it, our minds cannot accept it fully. But the gift that some of us have been given, in exchange for terrible loss, is the gift of that knowledge. My mother thought her death would enrich my writing, and I’m ashamed to say that she was correct in that.

  One day my son and I were talking about an interview with his college writing professor in which she had said that she believed most writers had only one subject. “Well, Mom, if you only have one subject, yours is motherhood,” he said offhandedly. I found his insight reassuring, and cheering, yet I couldn’t help editing it mentally: motherhood, and loss. That’s what I write about most often.

  But it actually was on my character that my mother’s death made the most indelible mark. It made me certain that life was short, and therefore it made me both driven and joyful. I couldn’t waste time and I couldn’t take anything for granted, couldn’t be jaded or bored. Call it a cliché, but one of my favorite moments in theater is Emily Webb’s monologue from beyond the grave in Our Town. She looks around at the living and cries, “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”

  Those of us who have lost a parent young are a particular breed. My friend David was one, too, his doctor father dead at fifty-three of a heart attack, which is why he took such good care of himself, exercising, eating well. The morning he was walking his dog toward Central Park and felt a weight in his chest, he took a cab to the hospital and was in surgery within hours. With me it was the annual pelvic sonograms and, finally, the ovariectomy. We knew exactly where to look for bad news. But of course while you’re looking to the right, something can sneak up on your left, which is what happened when David died in a car accident.

  Once we were talking, I remember, about what we called the magic number. It is the age to which your parent lived. When I had outlived my mother I looked at every year, every passage, every event, the way the early explorers must have looked at the islands of the new world. “I felt like every year was a gift,” David said, and we both nodded. And for all of those years his refrain was this: “Aren’t we lucky?”

  It is inevitable that watching your mother die at a young age will make you feel like the last of your line. Your mother is, quite literally, where you come from. It never escaped even my dim-witted nineteen-year-old notice that the place in her pelvis that killed Prudence Quindlen was the place where I’d lived for nine months before I arrived, large and covered with lanugo hair, so that the poor woman cried at how strange I looked. I wonder who thought to tell me about those tears? It wasn’t her. She hated when I mentioned it. She was afraid it would reinforce the faint unspoken schism between us, the quiet and gentle mother, the extroverted and ebullient daughter.

  But I’m not the last of the line. I am the mother of my mother’s grandchildren. That made the hard lesson I’d learned early on easier, and more distressing, too. It meant that she lived on in those three children, with their dark dark eyes, brown-black like hers, not green like my own. But it meant, too, that I knew I might not live on with them. My sister was nine years old when our mother died, and she remembers nothing. Nothing. Sometimes I mention something, about a dress our mother wore, about a dish she made, about how she brushed and braided our thick brown hair. And Theresa says, “Really?” and it breaks my heart.

  Sometimes when Quin was five and Chris was three, when Quin was eight and Chris six and Maria three, when they were all the world to me, I would look at them and think of my sister, of how she couldn’t remember how our mother sounded or looked, and say to myself, I don’t even really count for these children yet. If I die tomorrow they will have nothing but other people’s stories where a mother ought to be.

  This is why I sometimes haven’t felt about aging the way my friends have, why I was thrilled to be forty, happy at fifty, why I don’t dread sixty or even seventy. I’m elated to have what the actress Laura Linney called “the privilege of aging.” I’m living for two, for all the years, the decades, my mother never got. I’m storing up memories, not for me but for my kids, so that they will have a cache greater than my own.

  Not long ago I trawled the basement and the bookshelves and pulled together for each of them a complete set of my books. When they asked, I said I just wanted to be certain that there was a copy of each book for each of them. Maybe they were fooled, but I wasn’t fooling myself. Life everlasting, in hardcover.

  It would be a great solace to believe in life after death, but I no longer do. Perhaps it is because of having seen a person die, that shocking moment when an individual becomes essentially an object. The bird has flown. Only the cage remains.

  I once had a nun who posited that the afterlife might consist largely of electrical impulses, free-floating personalities, that since matter could neither be
created nor destroyed, brain waves would endure. “What kind of nuns taught you?” my husband asked, incredulous, when I told him that. But it made more sense than the heaven we’d been raised on. When I was six I took my first airplane flight and I looked for any sign of something above the clouds. Even then it seemed like a chancy proposition: if we would all be reunited, would that mean the great-uncle who unrelentingly mocked my thumb-sucking would be there, too?

  When life on earth was hell, in the time of plagues, of starvation and slavery, the idea of another life, a better life, must have seemed both irresistible and necessary. And for the bereaved it provided solace. “She’s at peace now,” someone told me at my mother’s wake. It’s one of the only things I remember, that and the black dress with white polka dots I wore. Years later I was always surprised when this friend or that would say they had been there that day. I was in a fugue state, insensible, poised between the girl I had been and the woman I would become.

  “She’s in a better place,” that same person said. I remember the dress, and the rage. There is no better place. This is the best place, here, now, alive, a chipmunk scampering across the stones, a cloud scudding across the sky, the dogs barking at nothing on the road, the road running empty into an unseen distance and beyond, my husband busy at the office, my children busy in the world. The better place is along the Hudson River, where the loon bobs on the swell from the ferry and dives for unseen fish until it seems he must drown, then pops up glistening twenty feet from where he went down. The better place is that spot on the highway when you can suddenly see New York City strung like a necklace of jagged diamonds, and that corner of the porch where the house wrens build their nest and then disassemble it and build it again, and the table at Thanksgiving and the tree at Christmas. My father persuaded my mother that she had to stay alive through Christmas, and after it was over, he said, “Easter comes early this year.” And she said, “To hell with Easter,” and was dead by mid-January.