Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  This isn’t to say I wasn’t in the States a lot. I was. Every two months or so I’d find myself on an Air France flight just like those Amtrak trains. Granted, the situation with Mom and Dad had to be a bit dire for me to go, but travel wasn’t out of the ordinary. And after each trip, I’d return to France content in knowing I’d defused yet another emergency, only to find out my mother would scuttle those plans within the week.

  “I let that nurse you hired go. We didn’t need her.”

  “No need for that staircase elevator you wanted installed. Too expensive. We’ll manage.”

  “We’re thinking of heading down to Florida next week. Don’t worry, I’ll drive.”

  Don’t worry. We’ll manage. All good. We’re fine. Words were one thing, their actions another. I know they didn’t mean to sabotage their life to keep me close, but that was the result. I could never fully commit to my life in France. Everything in America seemed pressing and life threatening, while things here felt trivial or dilettantish. Suddenly a meeting with a magazine editor for a small piece about a restaurant opening could be blown off, because, well, I was flying out the next day. Feeding Bibi with a spoon her first year should have been magical, but instead it only reminded me of my father wearing a bib at dinner. I lived in two homes an ocean apart, spread between two families.

  As the doctors predicted, Mom’s and Dad’s conditions worsened, and soon it became obvious they needed assisted care. We sold their house and held a giant yard sale a month before the signing, with friends and neighbors flocking to buy four floors of stuff. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Mom’s idea to invite everyone was her way of saying good-bye. It was as if all the trappings that had made up those famous cocktail parties were her small organ donations, things that would live on in others long after she was gone.

  People picked and schmoozed and many walked out of the house with paintings or sculptures under their arms, my mother waving and smiling, keeping up appearances despite the obvious bittersweet pain. Many of these buyers had been her subjects. There was a painting of two boys constructing a fort in the alley and one of Mr. Longfellow in a dentist chair. There was even an eight-foot canvas of a construction site down the block, a wrecking ball tearing through mortar. Mom had a long, prolific career as a painter, starting in Paris, of course, and ending on that day she said good-bye to those works and to her friends. Some of her pieces are in permanent collections in D.C., but most are with the people she knew. And she liked it that way. “Art is food you share,” she told me as she counted the money she’d made that day. Mom liked to sell, too.

  Much of how my mother and father met and what they’d built together hit me as I met with the sales agent that month to discuss price and if I needed to be there at closing, since I had the power of attorney, but lived in France. It was brutal selling my childhood home, but I told myself it was necessary. Mom and Dad were facing facts and downsizing their life, and that was a good thing. They might even blossom in their new surroundings, I thought. And perhaps I could finally commit to living in Paris, apart and far from them.

  Mom didn’t last a year.

  We’d organized a trip to Washington that Easter so my parents could meet four-month-old Otto and we could see their new home. Mom, however, developed a nagging cough a week before our departure and by the time our plane touched down in D.C., she was in the hospital with pneumonia.

  “Johnnie peaches!” she coughed when she saw me coming through the double doors. I’d rushed from the hotel to the hospital to find her on a stretcher in a hallway. She looked relieved more than happy to see me, as if she had a plan in place, but needed an accomplice to make it work. In minutes, they’d be moving her to the ER.

  “Sweetie, take my rings quick.” She handed me everything, even the one with the large sapphire my grandmother had given her. “I’m dying, you see.”

  “Oh, stop. You’re not,” I scolded. Everyone had settled in at the hotel room, I told her. And I was still holding the reservation for Easter brunch at the club just in case. “Oh, and here, Bibi made a drawing for you.” Mom tapped me on the wrist to shoo me for being silly.

  “That’s great. Now make sure you have my POA and make sure you sign that DNR. No machine for me. Okay?” I didn’t like the gallows humor, I told her. It wasn’t funny. But within hours she was hooked up to oxygen, and as the days passed and she didn’t improve and the doctors told me the antibiotics weren’t working, I realized Mom hadn’t been bluffing. She was dying.

  Eventually she was moved off the ER to her own room, which I took to be progress, but which in reality meant it was all over. They move you so you can die in private with a window and a door, so you don’t demoralize all the other patients on the block fighting for their lives. There she was attached to an IV drip with fluids and morphine and I was told I had 36 hours to say good-bye to a mother who for all intents and purposes was a healthy, lucid, cancer-free, unsick, not-very-old seventy-five-year-old who’d had a cold last week and was now dying in a bed in front of me.

  Weirdly I thought about the New York Times and its series of “36 Hours in . . .” pieces, which I read religiously in the Sunday editions—“36 Hours in Flagstaff”; “36 Hours in Milan.” Why hadn’t anyone written “36 Hours with Your Dying Parent”? It could have helped, I thought—a handy bullet-pointed, must-do listicle with insightful numbers and tips that I could have referenced. Instead, I found myself winging it. I brought in my father to say good-bye, which would feel a bit tacky if she ended up surviving. A minister from the church came over to pray. Uncle Charlie was brought in, friends as well. The room had a shower, so I didn’t leave the hospital, and I slept on a chair next to Mom’s bed, waking up every hour to roam the room, watching her breathe. And as the red digital oxygen count on the machine next to her dropped, I’d pick up my pace and talk to Mom faster, realizing seventeen, no, sixteen hours were left, give or take. Sometimes I’d go to her left ear and mutter nonsense, then sprint around to the other side of the bed and work the right ear, burrowing into her neck as I’d done as a child when she read me those French books at night in her bed, telling her things I probably shouldn’t have shared, but fuck it. Thirteen hours. Twelve hours. I recounted the long road trips we would take down to Cape Hatteras along Route 12, where the sound and the ocean almost touch. The drives where she told me about her old horse Scissors and her red Alpha Romeo, which she drove around Pittsburgh after Vassar, and how Paris meant so much to her. How it had offered her a chance to leave home, as it had for me.

  I told Mom how every time I smell turpentine I think of her and those days we spent in her studio, me watching her paint. I brought up all our past dogs: Teddy and Pal and Dr Pepper and Baron. Then there was the raw turkey she cooked on a car engine over Thanksgiving as a way to prep it for the oven in Hatteras. Or the time we found starfish in the thousands on the beach and she made Christmas ornaments out of all of them and how she hosted a sleepover party for thirty kids on my ninth birthday, then booked us for the Bozo’s Circus TV show the next day. For a nine-year-old to watch himself and his birthday on TV with so many friends made me feel famous. I told her I was sorry for staying in Paris, and when her health improved, we’d take her and Dad back with us and they could get a small one-bedroom on the Île Saint-Louis maybe. I could be a son and a husband and a dad now, and she hadn’t seen this new me yet. There was still so much time, so much time, and this didn’t have to be the end.

  I brought Otto into the room, and her eyes brightened and she whispered through her mask that he looked beautiful, which I took to be a sign she was getting better. “Otto’s magic!” I thought, “Otto’s saved her!” But the oxygen level continued to drop, and the hours soon became minutes, and her breaths became more separated and sparse. And soon a cold realization hit me: The time for giving up hope and letting go was now. It would be my parting gift to her. And as I cried into Mom’s ear and held her hand, and told her it was okay to let go
, that I’d be fine, I felt her chest rise one last time. There was no long continuous beep like you see in the movies. Just a deafening silence and my echo of good-bye skipping down the side of her ear like a coin down a deep well.

  * * *

  There’s a part of me that thinks Mom saw her pneumonia as a way to thread the needle; to die on her own terms without going through the painful and debilitating next phase that would have surely seen her even more dependent on me. Maybe she felt I was old enough now to handle her death, but young enough still to launch a life without her presence dominating it.

  Ironically, it’s me now who sees friends still locked into perpetual childhoods, unable to escape their parents’ judgment or shadow, unable still to chart their own course. In a way, Mom’s gift is that, the matriarchal tree dying, so the small poplar behind it could finally grow out from under the shade.

  Mom had been giving us signs for a while that her time here was limited. When I told her Anaïs was pregnant with Bibi, her first reaction was “Oh. That’s wonderful! Now I can die!” I think in a way she’d fought hard the past few years to get me to a point where I could live without her, and once she saw this was possible, the last thing she did as a mother was to show her son how to die with grace.

  It was only when I opened up her address book that it hit me she was gone. It was a thick snakeskin thing with professional cards falling out and shopping lists rubber-banded to the back and Post-its on the front jacket. What hurt me wasn’t having to call all her old friends and cousins to let them know the news. Instead it was Mom’s bad handwriting—not knowing if the 4s were 9s, or who this Mrs. Fletcher person was, and realizing suddenly, she’d never be able to tell me. The address book was a relic now. Nothing could be added to it.

  I find it amazing that you’re asked to immediately organize things the instant you lose a loved one, things that you have no energy for but that need to be done. Perhaps it’s part of the Western culture’s mourning process—sandbag someone with immense sorrow and fatigue, then ask them to throw together a funeral, deal with estate issues, and make on-the-dime decisions about cremation, songs, and whom to invite. Make it snappy because Easter vacation’s about to end.

  Although my suitcase hadn’t been opened yet, I was meeting with lawyers, many of whom had questions as to what was left in a trust and what was outside the trust. Who’d be the executor of her estate? Who’d take care of Charlie? Who’d look after Dad? Who, John? Who? I would, I told them. There was nobody else. Of course it would be me. And it’s not like I had that much to do in Paris anyway, I thought. It’s not like I had a real career or anything. It’s just one long Peace Corps stint, right? Nothing that demanding.

  Before heading back to Paris, I ate with Dad in the cafeteria of the nursing home, and during our dinner, I told him I’d call and that I’d hired a nurse to look after him. An elderly man joined us for coffee. His name was Joe, and just like Dad now, he, too, was a widower. They’d become friends because both were Washington Senators fans. Joe could see I was pained when I received the text that my cab had arrived. “We’ll be all right, John.” He winked. “I’ll keep this guy on ice.”

  I kissed Dad and scrunched his shoulders, then turned to leave to hide my tears, feeling guilty for having expected him to die first. That had been the plan all along. Dad had been the sicker of the two, and it was Mom who’d been taking care of him, dividing his medication in those weekly dispensers, wiping his mouth, keeping his appointments. Every time she’d complain, I’d sympathize and secretly fantasize about life after Dad, where it was just Mom and me and the kids and Anaïs, all of us living in Paris. It would be a way for Mom to reconnect with the life she’d had as a student at Les Beaux Arts, I told myself, and a chance for me, obviously, to have her back with me. Instead I was in a cab. Mom was gone. And Dad was sitting in a cafeteria with a stranger.

  When school reconvened in late April, I dropped the kids off only to bump into my friend Emily, a fellow parent and neighbor. “So?” she asked innocently. “How was vacances? How were les States?” (The French often call the United States “les States” now. It’s annoying.) I told her what had happened, and regret immediately flashed on her face. But how could she have known? How could anyone know these things?

  Following our return, I drifted through Paris in form only, constantly checking in with staff at the facility and planning next steps for Dad’s care, considering he’d eventually need more of it. Everything that should have made me like Paris: the way the platane trees come into leaf in spring or seeing people sitting outside cafés following a winter hibernation now filled me with resentment. For this? I left Mom and Dad for this bullshit? Paris hadn’t caused my mother’s death, but it played a role, I felt. And now my punishment was to live here, my purgatory for only-child guilt.

  Then, in August, while on vacation, I was told Dad couldn’t swallow and had pneumonia, and within a few days, I found myself back in the States at the same hospital, on the same floor, two doors down from Mom’s room, this time with Dad. The doctors gave a similar prognosis, citing again the magical thirty-six hours. And I chuckled, only because it felt as if I was cramming for another test in this condensed course on dying I’d taken this semester.

  As with Mom, I found myself at the foot of Dad’s bed. And again, I ran around it watching the oxygen drop, hoping the kids and Anaïs would arrive in time to see him. As with Mom, I rehashed old memories: how the first time I ever saw him cry was when he packed my U-Haul for college or how he’d replay my peewee football games back to me in the car like the announcers did on Sundays, his grainy voice popping off the dashboard. “Three minutes to play, the Bulldogs are driving. There’s a handoff to von Sothen, who cuts to the outside, he’s got one man to beat . . .” I apologized for hooking him in the foot when we were surf casting. I did my best imitation of Mr. Langford. I rehashed old lines from Blazing Saddles and Caddyshack, films we’d watched countless times upstairs in the back bedroom. I reminded him he was the only one I’d swim to in the ocean as a child, the only one I ever trusted to breach the waves and not go under. And there in the hospital, as the sea of people in the ER rose up around us, I clung to Dad one last time as I had as a child. The oxygen, like the tide, soon dropped. He stopped breathing, and as the nurses came in to disconnect him, I stood there at his bed, alone now, an orphan.

  I walked out dazed into the sticky Washington August heat, made only worse by being inside a hospital for three days. What shocked me was how people were buying stuff from food trucks and sitting on the lawn looking at their phones. Life, I assumed, had been put on pause this whole time, and I’d come out of the hospital to a giant “mannequin challenge,” everyone stiff and looking off into oblivion, waiting for me to give the sign that the film of life could start back up again.

  * * *

  When you have another funeral for your other parent ninety days after the first, it’s a lot easier. You call the same people, same church, same funeral home. You go with a cheaper casket this time. You make a better speech and you buy a summer suit from the same tailor who can’t believe you’re back again under similar circumstances. The estate lawyers know your name by now, and you understand what you’re signing. The only thing that’s different now is that with both gone, it’s clear there’s no reason to call this place your home anymore. Because it’s not.

  We returned to Paris a few days after the funeral, because school was starting up again. And again, like clockwork, my poor neighbor Emily asked about vacation. When I told her what happened, she laughed out loud, because I had to be joking, right?

  “No, I’m not kidding. He really died.” I, too, laughed because it did sound nuts and also because Emily’s face, realizing it was true, looked hilarious. Emily remains a good friend, but she’s never asked me about vacation again.

  My uncle Charlie would soon pass away, and just like that, my America was amputated. Sure, there were cousins and godparents and
summer camps and weddings and work, but after each trip, America faded more into a place to visit than a place to live. Expats are the biggest jihadists for single-payer health care. Once you have it, you’re intolerant toward any other form of coverage or medical care. Anytime we vacation in the States, I take out an extra policy, as if we’re traveling to some Third World country where one slip-up could cost you your house. I haven’t paid one dollar for child care or health care or school, and yet still we struggle. How do Americans pull it off? I ask myself. How would I if we moved to the United States?

  When we go to Washington, we make it a point to visit Mom’s and Dad’s graves, and we’ll stay at the club where they were once members. We’ll swim and see the old staff and sit in the Adirondack chairs where Mom and Dad drank their Pinot Grigios before dinner. But each year we do this, the memories of those experiences become fuzzier and things don’t feel nostalgic so much as exotic.

  Those parents and kids I see at the kiddie pool resemble my mother and me, sure. But I don’t think she drank vodka and tonics in a sippy cup like the mothers there now. Nor did she drive those massive Cadillac Suburbans or Yukons. Was the TV always on in the restaurant? Were the waiters this eager and present? Did the supermarket fruit look this plastic? I can’t remember. And these new names: Connor, Everett, Richmond, and Hailey. Did I have friends with these names? Did everybody do aerobics at 6:45 a.m.? Was there a mass shooting at a school each month? When did it become okay for leaf blowers to exist?

  What also seemed foreign was how suddenly I understood everything so clearly. Conversations I didn’t want to overhear came pouring over the booth as I sat in silence eating my childhood grilled cheese and sipping my Shirley Temple. I’m sure these conversations are just as insipid in France, but I don’t have to listen to them there. I can block them and keep them muffled, because it’s not my language. Not my people.