Years earlier, when we told people Mom was moving to Nashville, men would look at my husband incredulously: “You let your mother-in-law move in next door?” After my in-laws arrived, my friends said much the same thing to me. But clichés have no place in this story: my husband loved my parents, and I loved his.
My mother-in-law was in every way a divergence from the stereotype: preternaturally patient, radiant with love, alert for ways to support and approve of her children, including those who had joined her family by marriage. Soon after our wedding, I heard my husband griping in the next room about how much money I spent on toiletries. “I just don’t see how anyone can drop thirty dollars in a drugstore without buying a single drug,” he said. And I was astonished to hear my deeply traditional mother-in-law take my side: “Son, Margaret works hard. If she wants to take her money and stamp it into the mud, you can’t say a thing about it.”
So when my in-laws moved to Nashville, only my sister’s objection struck home with me: “But you know how all this will end.”
In fact, my father-in-law collapsed three days after arriving and had to be hospitalized, and the stress of the move dramatically worsened my mother-in-law’s Parkinson’s symptoms. One crisis followed another: infections, head injuries, broken bones, even a fire. And each disaster meant the need for more help from us, plus a constant stream of houseguests as my husband’s far-flung siblings put their own lives on hold to pitch in. Back on the caregiving roller coaster, I struggled to remember the lesson I had just learned so painfully with Mom: the end of caregiving isn’t freedom. The end of caregiving is grief.
Even as he recovered from open-heart surgery himself, my father-in-law continued to coordinate my mother-in-law’s care. Once, overwhelmed by those responsibilities, he reminded my husband that in the old days families took their elders in. My husband reminded his father that in the old days people with heart failure and Parkinson’s disease didn’t live long enough to need the kind of help they already needed, never mind the inevitable disasters the future would bring.
My own mother could not afford assisted living, and we always understood that one day she would move in with us. But Mom wanted to be independent for as long as possible, and I had my own reasons for keeping at least a lawn between us: I work from a home office, and it would be nearly impossible to conduct my professional life with a needy elder in the very next room. The dilemma never had to be resolved with Mom, but it came up again once my mother-in-law entered hospice care. It broke my heart to imagine my beloved father-in-law living alone in that assisted-living facility after sixty years of happy marriage.
“But your dad would be lonely here too,” I said to my husband. “If he moves in with us, I’d have to rent an apartment. Wouldn’t it be better if he stayed in assisted living, where there are people around all day, and came over here for supper every night the way Mom did?”
My husband looked at me. “You mean an office, right?” he finally said. “If Dad moves in, you’d need to rent an office?”
I laughed. I meant an office, but for a moment he wasn’t absolutely sure. And in the end, my father-in-law stayed put.
Of course, my father-in-law had a point: families once worked in a very different way. During the Depression, when my mother’s childhood house burned to the ground, her whole family moved in with my great-grandparents. A few years later, my other great-grandmother moved in too. I was in college myself before the last of that generation passed away. “I’ve been taking care of people my whole life,” my grandmother wondered. “What will I do with myself now?” As my mother-in-law entered the last stage of a savage disease, when just getting through the days was a dreadful challenge for her and for all of us who loved her, I constantly reminded myself of my grandmother’s plaintive question.
Then we lost my beautiful mother-in-law too. I think of her, and of my parents, every single day. They are an absence made palpably present, as though their most vivid traits—my father’s unshakable optimism, my mother’s irreverent wit, my mother-in-law’s profound gentleness—had formed a thin membrane between me and the world: because they are gone, I see everything differently.
No Such Thing as a Clean Getaway
One great-uncle fell from a third-floor window, possibly pushed by his wife. Another fell asleep before an unscreened fire and was burned to a black crisp, sitting in his armchair. Still another succumbed to a gas leak while sitting on the toilet. Amazingly, he was not the only uncle to meet his end in the bathroom, but circumstances are less clear with the other: Was his early death brought on by a heart condition, long known, or did he simply fall in a drunken haze and hit his head, the trouble with drink also being long known? No way to say: these are not family stories that get passed down in precise detail.
I remember well the difficult great-aunt whose stroke left her with a scrambled vocabulary but no fewer demands. Unsure what might come out of her mouth, she compensated, attaching every attempt to communicate with a declarative prefix. Her order at the diner: “It’s true I want crayons.” Her request to go home: “It’s true I got to pee.”
And what to tell the children about their ancestor, tiny but severe, who entered her dotage so sublimely unaware of social constraints that she was banned from community meals for masturbating in the dining room? Or the beloved elders who pulled back at the very end, no longer loving in their last hours, no longer concerned in the least for those they would leave behind? “Stop it,” said my mostly unconscious father when I adjusted the pillows that left his neck crooked at an awkward angle. “Don’t do that,” said my mother-in-law as I stroked her hand.
Oh, the lives we grieve in their going. Oh, the lives we grieve in their going on.
Ashes, Part Two
NASHVILLE, 2015
My father-in-law is poring over an image of the marker he has ordered for my mother-in-law’s grave. It will be set over the shoebox-sized plot where her ashes were put to ground a month ago, her parents and her grandparents beside her. My father-in-law is not sure the spacing between the letters looks quite even. He is not sure the carved lettering is quite deep enough. He is not sure each word appears on the correct line—perhaps the dates should come last? My grieving father-in-law sits at our table and studies the image for a long time. He asks us each in turn to look at the photocopied page that came in the mail from a mortuary more than five hundred miles away. Do we think the lettering is right? It must be perfect. It is his job to see that it’s perfect. In time, his own marker will stand beside hers, and he will not be here to set it right.
He looks at me: “Where are Bill and Olivia buried?” He has never thought to ask before, though my mother has been gone for more than two years, my father for more than a decade.
My husband coughs and turns away. Our sons look at me.
“We haven’t buried them yet,” I say.
My father-in-law looks startled: “Where are they then?”
A sound that isn’t strictly a cough erupts from my husband. I look at the boys.
“They’re in Dad’s closet,” one of them tells his grandfather.
Nevermore
NASHVILLE, 2016
The rains we’ve been waiting for, yearning for, have finally arrived in our part of Tennessee, and the maple leaves are falling now in great clots. Rain is falling and leaves are falling and my youngest son, like his brothers, has received his selective service card in the mail, and today I have returned to my house to find a lone black vulture standing in my front yard.
I am always grateful to vultures, that indefatigable cleanup crew doing such necessary work along the roadsides. Nevertheless, a vulture adopting an attitude of possession toward my own home does not exactly constitute a welcome autumn tableau, especially not during a melancholy week of rain in the window and inescapable images of war licking at the edges of a mother’s mind.
We live on an unkempt lot in a neighborhood where most of the lawns are pristine, and vultures are not common visitors. Yet here is one standing a
few feet from my front door. I idle in the driveway to watch. It is eating nothing. It is only standing there, looking at my house. Occasionally it dips its head and hunches, mantling its wings, but there appears to be nothing at its feet, no prey to protect from encroachers. Nor any encroachers, for that matter.
I drive around back, walk through the house, open the front door. The vulture turns its bald, black face to look at me in that peculiar side-eyed way of birds, and then it flaps heavily off, low across the yard and up and over the house where my mother lived. When I let our old dog out, he sniffs again and again at the spot where the vulture was standing but comes to no discernible conclusions.
There is a newly dead chipmunk in the street, seemingly unnoticed by the vulture. I think it must surely have registered the dead chipmunk’s existence at some visceral level; surely the dead chipmunk is what has summoned this bird to my yard. The chipmunk has been a sort of housemate of mine, living in an elaborate tunnel system under our foundation, and I don’t like to think of it lying unmourned in the rain-soaked street. I step back from the doorway and wait, hoping the vulture will come and claim its prize.
But these are willed thoughts, a hedge against an atavistic instinct to read omens and signs into a giant black vulture that has staked out my home on a day when the federal government has announced its intention to claim my child. I think of myself as a rational person. I am not a reader of portents or horoscopes. I greet the promises of fortune cookies with wry hope at best, but there was a time, more than two decades ago, when I hand-delivered twenty copies of a chain letter on the last day before bad luck was supposed to descend on anyone who dared to break the chain. I was not in my right mind: I had recently suffered two devastating miscarriages and was precariously pregnant again with a child that no one expected to live. I stuck a bunch of chain letters in the mailboxes of people I did not know, just to be safe.
That child registered for the selective service two years ago, and now it is his younger brother’s turn. If a simple card in the mail can cast me back into the ancient reach of augury, I can only imagine the dread that claws at the heart of a mother whose child is serving in a part of the world where dangers are real and not merely imagined—where fear is of a piece with sacrifice and not of superstition.
I know a vulture is only a bird, only a bird and not an omen, no matter the temptation to turn it into the equivalent of Poe’s raven. Arriving shrouded in widow’s weeds and standing in solitary magnificence to stare at me with one unblinking eye, it is still only a bird, a big, black bird entirely indifferent to the workings of the human realm. Unaware of the workings of the human heart.
When I leave to walk the old dog after dark, the unlucky chipmunk is still lying in the road where it met its end. The next morning I wake up late. When I finally sit down at my desk and look out the window, there’s not one trace of the former chipmunk clinging to the asphalt, not one glossy black feather resting on the grass.
History
NASHVILLE, 2017
“Your hand feels just like your mother’s hand,” my father tells me as we walk hand in hand. I am twelve. I pull my hand back, hold it out before me: dirty fingernails, torn cuticles, no ring. It is not my mother’s hand. It is nothing like my mother’s hand. It is only my hand.
Mom finishes hemming the confirmation dress while I’m at school. The dress has two hems, really—one for the yellow foundation, and one for the gauzy filament of see-through daisies that floats on top. When I try it on, it is just barely too long. It touches the floor, and the daisies are too fragile to be dragged across the asphalt parking lot—the gauze will be rags by the time I’m called to the altar. There’s no time to rip out the hems, pin them up again, and make all those tiny stitches, so close together they can’t be kicked out by an eighth-grader walking in a floor-length dress. “Wear these,” Mom says. My first heels, all of one inch high. My feet settle into the slight indentations my mother’s heels have made, where the balls of my mother’s feet bend, where my mother’s toes spread out. The shoes fit perfectly.
The wedding gown has spent twenty-eight years in an Alabama attic. “There’s bound to be nothing left of it,” I say. What dry rot hasn’t ruined, the moths have surely long since eaten. “We’ll see,” my mother says, kneeling beside the bathroom tub, squeezing baby shampoo through the stained Chantilly lace she sewed seed pearls into so many years before, through the shot silk she ordered from England for the gown she’d designed herself. Half a dozen soakings in the tub, half a dozen mornings spread out on a sheet in a sunny backyard, and the dress is white again. Days more with the finest-gauge thread, a magnifying glass hanging from a chain above patient fingers, and the torn bits are whole once more, the scallops at the collarbone perfectly rounded, the points at the wrists exactly centered. I step into its white tumult, slip my hands through a filigree of sleeves, and hold my breath while she zips. Not a single seam needs adjustment.
My mother had three children between thirty and thirty-six, and I had three children between thirty and thirty-six. Now my body is an exact replica of her own. I see her in my own thickening waist. I watch as her feet propel me through the world. I feel her in the folds of my neck and the set of my brow and the slight curve of the finger where I wear the ring my father gave her. The ring she never took off but had to leave behind.
Ashes, Part Three
LOWER ALABAMA, 2017
After her own death, I suddenly understood Mom’s reluctance to consign Dad to the ground. At first it was just impossible; there was no way to drive so far, from Nashville to Lower Alabama, through streaming tears. Later, the logistics were daunting: How would we get permission to open the family plot by even a posthole digger’s width when it was already accommodating as many of our dead as it could officially hold? We all agreed that driving in at midnight was out of the question: this was the deepest part of rural Alabama, where everyone is armed. Permission from the preacher would be required.
On the fifth anniversary of Mom’s death, it came.
I am dreaming when the alarm goes off the morning my siblings and I leave to take our mother’s ashes home. In the dream, some children and I are singing: “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” One child stops the game and says severely, “We aren’t supposed to have ashes in our pockets.”
On I-65, just past Prattville, kudzu smothers every fencerow, and I strain to see the famous mill wheel, no longer turning, through the tangle of vines, but the GO TO CHURCH OR THE DEVIL WILL GET YOU sign is gone now. We turn off the interstate after Montgomery onto the blue highway that will take us home, to the place I still think of as home though I have not been there in years, not since my grandmother’s death. The mimosas are in bloom. In the pastures that spread back from the road, egrets stand upon the dozing cows and pick at the edges of the ponds near the road.
We pass the last house our grandparents lived in—the one they built from cinder blocks when the big house became too much for them to keep up—and head straight for the church. In its cemetery, a mockingbird sings in a tree by the gate, competing with another mockingbird in the pines across the yard. Birdsong and wind are the only sounds in this corner of the universe.
My brother takes out the posthole digger, which I packed primarily as a symbol, a nod to the specificity of Mom’s plan. I did not expect it to be useful, at least not compared to the long-blade shovel I also packed. But the posthole digger, it turns out, is the perfect tool. Decades after she left her birthplace for good, our mother still remembered the exact texture of its soil, a mixture made mostly of red sand and dust that yields to the blades with no resistance at all. Within only a minute or two, my brother has dug a hole large enough to hold our parents’ ashes.
He opens the boxes, and then the boxes within the boxes, and then the plastic bags within those, and he shakes the ashes into the hole. It would be easy to scrape the leftover soil into the hole with only our feet, but we all seem to have a vague, unspoken sense that kicking dirt into a grave would be disresp
ectful, though neither of our parents had been the sort to stand on ceremony. My brother and sister and I each take up a handful of dirt to drop into the hole on top of the ashes. We look at each other. Should we sing? Say a few words of prayer? No one steps forward to lead, and so my brother finishes up with the shovel. The mockingbirds sing their own hymns, and we all step on the mounded dirt to pack the soil tight.
They are buried now in the graveyard between the church where Mom was baptized and the schoolhouse where she learned to read. They are buried now deep in the soil she sprang from, deep in the soil her parents sprang from, deep in the soil their parents sprang from. They are buried near all those who came before them, too far back for anyone to remember.
Masked
When they first appeared in the neighborhood, I assumed they were starlings. A flock of starlings is the bane of the bird feeder—a vast, clamoring mob of unmusical birds soiling the windshields and lawn furniture, muscling one another aside so violently that no other birds dare draw near the suet.
But this flock stayed high in the treetops, far from my feeders, too far away to recognize. Then a cold snap kept all the puddles frozen for days, and every bird in the zip code showed up at my heated birdbath to drink. That’s how I finally got close enough to know them for what they were: cedar waxwings, the most exotic of all the backyard birds. They are here in Middle Tennessee only during late fall and winter, when the hollies and hackberries and Japanese honeysuckle are bearing fruit. Seeing the entire flock at my birdbath seemed like a miracle.
But there’s a new slant of light in winter, and the trees surrounding the house are bare now, casting no shade. For birds, this combination can be deadly. Our windows have turned into mirrors, giving back the sky and making a solid plane look like an opening. I’ve made every adjustment I can—installed screens, put stickers on the glass door, hung icicle lights from the rafters—but migratory birds can be especially vulnerable to disorientation near unfamiliar buildings. The day after the waxwings appeared at my birdbath, I found one of them, its flock long gone, panting on the driveway below a corner of the house where two windows meet and form a mirage of trees and distances. When I stooped to look at the bird, it lay there quietly.
Late Migrations Page 13