Dragonwriter

by Dragonwriter- A Tribute to Anne McCaffrey

  When Mum started having children, like so many other women of her generation she took the advice of the revolutionary parenting guru of the day, the good Doctor Benjamin Spock, who encouraged parents to see their children as individuals and trust their own common sense and instincts. I guess Mum thought of kids as somewhat akin to water: we’d eventually find our own level. By the time I came along, my mother had already had a teen aged Hungarian foster son to knock the edges off the newness of motherhood, followed by her own two boys—who may have been the only kids on Earth who actively sought, and found, every bit of trouble ever devised. I think that most parents offer the least interference to their final offspring. After you’ve had a few kids, you tend to let nature take its course. I wasn’t any less loved than my brothers (in fact, as the only girl I was highly favored, as I’m sure my brothers will avow), but I do know that my upbringing wasn’t “managed,” nor was I mollycoddled. I know now, although it was just “normal” for me, that my mother gave me a huge amount of freedom to find my way and do “my own thing” compared to other girls.

  I admit, though with a certain degree of chagrin, that I was a burgeoning adolescent before I realized my mother was no longer the person I should run to when every little disaster and minor trauma lurched across my path. I have a clear recollection of the day I cut my knee, and even though it didn’t really hurt too badly, and I could have easily tended it myself, I ran to find Mum so she could kiss the hurt better and show me how important my pain still was to her. I knew that Mum was busy writing, and as I approached her office door I squeezed out a few crocodile tears, made the usual wailing sound that had always brought her to me in the past, and entered her office, calling her name in my best whiny voice.

  “Ma! I hurt myself!”

  With the briefest of movements, my mother took her eyes from her work and noted that my leg was still firmly attached to my torso and the blood loss was minimal. She immediately returned her attention to her typewriter as she quietly and firmly told me, “Go away. I’m writing.”

  I knew then, in a rare preadolescent moment of insight, that my time as the “child” was done and that Mum would no longer entertain every little whim and worry I deemed important. So, as a whining moan began to rise in my throat, I quickly quashed it, dipped my head in apology, and silently backed out of the room, leaving my mother to far more important matters.

  When I was a young woman in my twenties and living in the family home, Mum was in the unenviable position of having to “kill” a favorite character that had to die. She was very nearly finished writing Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, but kept putting off the day when she had to write the final passage, Moreta’s death scene. I knew that Mum was under pressure to complete the novel before embarking on an impending business trip, so as the days passed, each evening after I’d finished work, I’d ask Mum if she’d finally completed the book. Her answer was consistently no. After the first week passed and the scene remained unwritten, being a pragmatist, I made a flippant remark, hoping to jolt her out of her reticence. My comment went something like this: “She has to die, Mum. It’s not like you can un-write what’s already been written. So just go ahead and kill her!”

  My exasperation was all too evident, and Mum’s reaction was uncharacteristically extreme.

  “Georgeanne Johnson! I didn’t know you could be so heartless!”

  Of course, I had to walk away at that point and leave my mother to procrastinate as all good authors must. A week passed, and one day, in between exercising horses, I was having a tea break in the kitchen at old Dragonhold when my mother sought me out, tears streaming down her face, remorse contorting her features, and her arms spread out wide.

  “I did it,” she wailed. “I killed Moreta!”

  There comes a time in our lives when our relationship with our parent shifts onto a different path; the child becomes the nurturer as the parent becomes more like a child. As Mum’s physical health began to fail and her capabilities diminished, I became increasingly frustrated by how little was left of the woman who had been my strong, decisive mother. I can only imagine how she felt about such changes! Aging chips away insidiously at a person’s self-confidence, and as she saw little bits of “her” slipping away, Mum was fond of quoting a phrase she’d heard from my late aunt Sara: “Old age ain’t for the timid.”

  Although quite hard of hearing, Mum was mentally sharp up to the day she died. But the frailty that had settled in her body had also chipped away at her self-confidence, diluting the essence of her. As time passed and our relationship continued that subtle transition, Mum relied on me to “fix” all things of importance in her diminishing world. It was only fitting that I give back to my mother a small portion of the love and devotion she had given to me. Caring for her was an honor and not, by any means, an arduous task; she was an easygoing and undemanding person, even in old age. I am human, though, and there were times when I wasn’t happy with how our roles had evolved; changes of that sort aren’t easy to embrace. In hindsight, I wish that I’d borne those moments of frustration with less impatience, greater grace, and a much finer grade of tolerance, as I’m sure my mother would have done. Those are my regrets—bumps along the road I wish I could’ve retraced my steps to and smoothed out.

  The grief I’ve felt over my mother’s death lays close around me, and it blankets all the other memories I have of her, making it difficult to recall happier times when life wasn’t all about hearing aids, hospitals, and heart tablets. I’ll be relieved when time has done its work and I can easily recall the memories that will make me smile, memories that are older but nonetheless dear.

  In the early autumn of 2011, my husband, Geoff, and our son, Owen, piled into the back of our little car, leaving Mum the more comfortable front seat while I manned the wheel; we were treating ourselves to a Sunday lunch at a favorite restaurant. As we drove along the road on the half-hour journey to our destination, Mum started to hum a popular piece of music, singing the lyrics as memory allowed. I added my voice to her song, filling in the missing gaps in her memory just as she filled in the gaps in mine. Soon we were happily crooning away in the front of the car as my husband and son listened in bemused silence. Back in the 1970s, when we first moved to Ireland, Mum and I, along with my brother Todd, were fond of singing together while driving. We thought we were quite good as a singing trio, but, if the truth were told, we never had an audience to inform us otherwise. The impromptu sing-along that Mum and I were enjoying was a lovely reliving of the past but was somewhat of an unusual experience for Geoff and Owen. When Mum and I finished our little sing-along, in full operatic throttle no less, Owen exclaimed, in his quiet voice, that he belonged to the oddest family on Earth.

  Amazingly, Mum’s poor hearing didn’t fail her on this occasion; her reply was quick and definitive.

  “We aren’t strange, dear, we’re perfectly normal. And if there were more people like us, we wouldn’t feel quite so alone.”

  A huge silence filled the car for a heartbeat, and then all four of us erupted into laughter. We all knew that what Mum had said was true, but her delivery was pure magic and made us laugh nonetheless.

  Another little moment of joy hit me the other day while I was driving. The weather, a perpetual obsession of the Irish nation, had been dull and gray all morning long, but as the day progressed, the weather was absolutely beautiful: the temperature was mild, winds were light and gentle, and the sky was chockablock full of sunshine. It was the type of day that we all love to see, and while I drove along the road, I thought how much my mother would’ve loved to see that day, too. But before regret and sadness had the chance to dash my buoyant mood, a smile lit my face because some part of me instinctively knew that Mum could “see” it. I wouldn’t call myself religious or spiritual, even though I devoutly believe in a Parking God, but perhaps at that moment I needed to believe that there’s more for us than just this life, needed to feel that I still had some contact with my mother apart from genes and memories. But as I
was driving that day, it was with absolute certainty that I knew Mum was appreciating the glorious weather just as much as I, even though we weren’t in the same space.

  I don’t know where the energy that powered my brilliant, lovely mother has gone to—whether she’s out there, somewhere in the universe, existing as a wisp of a spirit, watching the stars whoosh by with long gone friends and family, or if she lives on now as a cat, or a honey bee, or a leaf on an apple tree. But I do know that she had a very worthwhile and full life and that she gave as much as she got. Above all else, I hope that she’s safe out there, somewhere in the cosmos, looking forward to the journey ahead.

  GEORGEANNE KENNEDY, Gigi to family and friends, lives on the edge of the Devil’s Glen in Ireland with her husband, Geoff, and their teenage son, Owen. Originally trained in equine sciences, Gigi backed and broke horses until other life pursuits demanded her attention. In the mid-1990s she published three collaborative short stories with her mother. Gigi’s proud to have been claimed as “favoured person” by Anne’s beloved cat, Razzmatazz, who delights in daily chases—and trouncings—of the newest member of the Kennedy household, Sidney P. Q. Kennedy, a vertically challenged canine of uncertain pedigree and dubious moral principles.

  Afterword

  TODD MCCAFFREY

  I GOT THE call at 5 P.M., LA time. My brother-in-law, Geoffrey, voice choked, gave me the news. I was numb. The waiting was over. Mum was gone. About half an hour later, I got another call from Ireland: my sister, Gigi, saying that she wanted me to get over as quickly as possible. I could use the Amex—the American Express card that Mum had provided for “emergencies” so many years before.

  There wasn’t enough money to bring my kid with me; I needed to go solo. I checked online, and only Virgin Atlantic had flights available. I called them, but their computer systems—based in London—already thought it was the next day and wouldn’t let the reservation be made. So I had to rush to the airport, not knowing if I would get there in time to pick up one of the few remaining seats. I threw clothes—and a suit—into my handy red gym bag and was off. I called my ex and let her know what was up; Jenna was completely supportive and told me not to worry about the kid, that she’d check up.

  I raced to LAX, got to the terminal, and in a hoarse voice explained my circumstances. They were very kind. I got on the plane, a flight to London Heathrow.

  The flight to London, the first leg of my trip, took five hours. Five hours by myself to recollect a lifetime of memories. To recall my mother from when I was just little, still clinging to her knee, all the way up to the point when she was an old woman, her face seamed with smile lines.

  And the first thought that came to me was, “No regrets.”

  Mum had a good life. She was ready to go, finding the indignities of old age growing in number and the rewards shrinking. Her books had flown on the space shuttle and floated in orbit on the International Space Station! She had won every award imaginable, had fired the imaginations of millions of people, had raised an extended family to middle age and beyond, had met all her grandchildren, and more.

  Mum had been feeling “puny” several days before. She’d had a mini-stroke that had required her to cancel her last trip to Dragon*Con, and I was certain that depressed her mightily. She was desperate to get her boys over because she was afraid that she would pass on before she saw them one final time. My older brother, Alec, was due over for Thanksgiving. I would come on another trip two weeks before Christmas. The flight was booked.

  Gigi and I had convinced Mum to go to the hospital and get checked out. The doctors discovered that she had a blockage in the heart, and they inserted two stents. She emailed me later to say that she got to watch it on the monitor (I had a feeling she was working out how to write it in a story). In her last email to me, she pronounced herself “all repaired.”

  But something wasn’t right, and Gigi convinced her to go back. They were just getting Mum into her wheelchair when she collapsed.

  Her last words were, “I’ll try.” She was answering Geoff, when he’d said, “Now, Anne, we’ll just lift you up into the wheelchair and then you’ll be on your way. Do you think you can do that?”

  “I’ll try.” No better epitaph could be found for her—it was practically the mantra of her entire life.

  “If it’s all right with you, I think I’m gonna wake you,” Gigi had said to Mum on my last visit to Dragonhold-Underhill more than two years before. “A proper Irish wake,” Gigi added in her very special tones.

  A wake is when the coffin is open in a special room at the house and everyone comes by to pay their last respects. I thought it quite a ghastly notion.

  It turns out, however, that it was perfect. We had Mum in the living room—the huge room in Dragonhold that was often the scene of her huge birthday bashes (she’d taken to having a big bash every five years). The rule of the wake, it seems, is that the children and relatives of the deceased greet each guest and ensure that they have drink—wine for some, tea for most—and food.

  As usual in Dragonhold-Underhill, everyone congregated in the kitchen. People would filter through the hallway, to the dining room, and into the living room to sit beside Mum, stand with heads bowed, and pay their respects. She looked so peaceful and lifelike that I finally decided to leave a glass of wine on a table near her head just in case—in some macabre display of humor—she was “having us on.” (She wasn’t: the glass was still full in the morning.)

  When most everyone had taken their leave and all that was left were the people who we knew were family—even though most had no blood relation with us at all—we started telling jokes. Bad ones.

  “What do you call a one-legged Irishwoman?” “Eileen.”

  “What’s the name of an Irishman covered in rabbits?” “Warren.”

  “What’s the name of an Irishman hanging from the ceiling?” “Sean D’Olier.”

  “What’s the name of an Irishman with a shovel?” “Doug.”

  “What’s the name of an Irishman without a shovel?” “Doug-less.”

  I recounted some of Mum’s favorite jokes, including “Rockefeller’s Balls” and the Pope’s lunch joke (it was originally Gigi’s, but Mum appropriated it). Our more devout friends, who might have thought our carrying on disrespectful, were no longer present, so I—with much encouragement—made an impromptu performance of Tom Lehrer’s “The Vatican Rag”—which had been an old favorite of once-Catholic Mum. On the morning of the service, alone in the silent living room, I read Mum a story that I’d written and she’d not had the chance to read: “The One Tree of Luna,” which was the sequel to “Tree”—her favorite of all my stories.

  As they came to take her in the hearse, Jennifer Anne Diamond—practically Mum’s granddaughter—and Mum’s decades-long housekeeper (the only reason Dragonhold-Underhill was ever tidy), Cyra O’Connor, decided that Mum had to have a dragon so they picked a small glass dragon, which they put in the casket with her. Gigi had already put in a quart of Baileys Irish Cream and several bars of chocolate, so Mum was in all respects ready for the final rest.

  Somewhere between my reading and getting ready, I went over to Mum’s computer—it being directly cabled to Ethernet—and just for curiosity’s sake, looked at her horoscope. What I read so floored me that I printed it out and showed it to everyone. When Mum’s literary agent, Diana Tyler, heard it, she asked me if it was a joke. It wasn’t, but it was amazingly accurate.

  On the day of Anne McCaffrey’s funeral service and burial, her horoscope—from Holiday Mathis—read

  ARIES (March 21-April 19). You will maintain your solid stance at the calm center of a swirl of activity. You’ll love the show. It’s like there’s a parade going by just for your entertainment.

  And it was.

  No regrets.

  Acknowledgments

  FIRSTLY, I WOULD like to thank everyone at Smart Pop and BenBella Books. They have done an exceptional job bringing this work to life: their attention to detail, dedicatio
n, and love show on every page. This project was their idea from beginning to end. I’m honored that they asked me to be editor and thrilled that they wanted to produce this tribute to Anne McCaffrey. I’m certain that Mum would say, “You done me proud!”

  Leah Wilson deserves special mention for her unflagging efforts in coordinating all aspects of this book, particularly in acquiring and editing. I’m glad to say that the title page properly shows this as being “Edited by Todd McCaffrey with Leah Wilson” (although I might argue that it could just as easily be the other way around).

  Heather Butterfield provided us with beautiful flyers to help promote this book and went out of her way to get them to me in time for the first of many science fiction conventions. She’s been instrumental in the design of the cover and the marketing, too.

  Brittany Dowdle was steadfast in her copyediting, which was essential in producing this book in time and in readable format. The whole production team, from department head Leigh Camp to Monica Lowry to Jessika Rieck, displayed not just amazing professionalism but a real love of the project.

  I’d like to give special thanks to Michael Whelan for providing Anne McCaffrey with her last Whelan cover.

  Finally, I’d like to thank every contributor to this collection of essays. I thank you for your time, your dedication, and your love. These contributions make clear the impact Anne McCaffrey has made on the world.