by Joan Wheelis
but thought it a treasure
It doesn’t matter
I lost it
The west wind is cold
I’m disillusioned
III
He thought
The real illusion
(if that makes any sense)
is to believe in treasure at all
The leaves fall
I’m cynical
IV
He thought
I have lost everything
the stoicism to stand unmoving
in the blistering desert
The hope to stumble on
after the glimmering blue water
The trees are bare
I’m desolate
V
He thought
what is this thing?
slipping through my fingers
glittering in the moonlight
beckoning dancing
teasing entrancing
quicksilvering through my fingers
so fast so fast
I’ll cup my hands to hold it
In the dark wood the trillium is blooming
I’m happy
fire 3
WHEN I WAS NINE YEARS OLD, THE HOUSE TO THE EAST OF ours in San Francisco caught fire. Unlike most of the houses in my neighborhood, this one was not contiguous with ours but perhaps twenty feet away, and because we were on a hill sloping downward, it sat lower than ours. I can’t remember what day or time this occurred, but I was home, and my father was in his office. My mother called into the elevator shaft for my father to come. There was something urgent in her voice. An unfamiliar siren of danger in her tone. I ran downstairs. I heard the elevator coming up. The front door was open, and I saw the flames next door. I heard and saw the glass of the windows shattering and smoke billowing out. There was a terrible smell. My mother was standing outside holding full-sized pillows from her bed. I was more frightened by the sight of my mother with the pillows than by the fire.
“What are you doing with the pillows, Mummy?”
Her expression was one I had never seen before. I was relieved to hear the elevator door open. My father came out as my mother answered my question: “We might have to sleep on the street tonight.”
I didn’t know how to understand that; it was such a foreign and unfathomable notion. My father put his arm around my mother. “Ilse, we won’t be on the street.”
“The house could explode.”
“No. It will be okay. The fire trucks are just around the corner.”
We all stood there. My mother a foot shorter than my father, nestled in his arm, still holding the pillows. I don’t know for how long. I remember asking my mother why she thought we would have to sleep on the street. She was cross with me as though I was poking fun at her.
“You don’t know what I went through. What it was like to go through the war.”
“And you still haven’t told me what happened to your parents!” I retorted in my defense.
“You are still too young.”
When my father died, his body was managed by the Neptune Society. His wishes were for the simplest inexpensive disposal of his remains. No embalming, no wake, no funeral. A cardboard box and cremation. Perhaps because there were not the typical events to organize the acceptance of the deceased, attending the cremation became important. But we weren’t prepared for what this would entail.
The crematorium was in Emeryville in the East Bay. Industrial neighborhood. A long flat-roofed metal building with a blue door and no windows. Three short, wide smokestacks were billowing smoke. A small sign to the right of the door with the words “Families Ring Bell.” Inside was a small waiting area with pale green walls, artificial flowers and a few uncomfortable chairs. We were then escorted to an inner room where the cremation occurred. Very clean, sterile machine room. Metal and concrete. Nowhere to sit. Two or three ovens with temperature gauges and signs “Danger Hot.” My father’s body lay in a covered cardboard box. The attendant asked if we wanted to see the body. My mother, always slightly suspicious of the nefarious motives of others, wanted to make sure it was my father in the box and I felt the need to accompany my father all the way to ash. The table at the height of the oven was lowered so that my mother could see in and the cardboard top pulled back. There were droplets on my father’s face. Like sweat. Like there was still life. It made me feel cold and breathless. Except for that fluid lysing out of the skin cells, his face looked more sunken and lifeless, his features distorted by the ravage of decay from within. It seemed clear that most families probably did not opt to be present in this room for the cremation. Conversation with the attendant was awkward. He spoke of the temperature at which the body is burned, between 1400 and 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, and how important it is to sweep everything out of the chamber. He showed us the special brush to reach into the corners. And then he asked if we wanted the bone fragments left with the ashes or taken out. I wondered why one would want them out. My mother said to keep everything. He added that sometimes families didn’t want anything that wasn’t ash because it was disturbing.
The lid of the box was repositioned and the table was raised again to the height of the topmost oven. The box was slid into the oven on mechanical rollers. A vertical metal door then lowered, blocking the box from our view. The attendant told us we could go to the other side and watch though the small round window. Fiery orange flames, corrugated innards of the cardboard box, a glimpse of my father’s skull stripped of hair and skin. When I stepped back from the little window, I saw my mother sink into the protective arm of my tall half-brother. It reminded me of the day when the house caught fire in San Francisco. She had the same look in her face from forty-four years before when I still did not understand. Shattering glass, Kristallnacht, my mother’s parents being burned by the Nazis. And now the love of her life on fire before her eyes.
the last letter
IN THE LISTENER (1999) MY FATHER WROTE:
. . . All marriages are unhappy. None of my friends and none of my patients has a happy marriage. An unhappy marriage is the normal state, not a deviation. The unfortunate reaction, therefore, is to feel bitter about it, to nurture grievance, to imagine that married to someone else one would be happy; for this reaction leads one into actions and attitudes that make an unhappy marriage more unhappy, rather than into those responses which would tend to make an unhappy marriage less unhappy.
The main reason for misery in your marriage (I’m still talking to myself) is your tendency to think that you’re entitled to a happy marriage, that with a little luck you would have had it. You must accept the given unhappiness as normal, and proceed immediately to do whatever you can to diminish that unhappiness. What you have is the human lot. (p. 164)
No doubt these lines were a source of many conversations between my parents, conversations I didn’t hear. Yet I witnessed the ravages of strain in their faces and the retreat to their respective offices. Among their papers I found this letter, written in the blue-black ink of my father’s Montblanc fountain pen on the occasion of my mother’s birthday.
October 11, 2000
Dear Ilse,
Eighty-five and a summing up. Now or perhaps never.
But first, one last effort to clear away the dense thicket of misunderstanding that has grown up about my now infamous leitmotiv: All marriages are unhappy.
For anyone haunted by the image of a union that is perfect because the love is unconditional, all intimate relationships are unhappy simply by falling short of that ideal; and the vision of life issuing from that discrepancy is dark. Such is the case perhaps only for a few; I choose, as a literary device, to say all because that irrational extension of the personal becomes an outcry, suggests a failure so grave as to be disorienting, and thereby conveys the drama and the pain of a doomed quest.
But why, you might ask, do I honor an unattainable yearning? Is that not the elevation of neurosis into a guiding principle? Yes exactly. And why might I want to do that? Because, at a tim
e when I was still entitled to a little, I was not permitted to ask for anything.
(“Why did you come in the house, son?”
“Mama said dinner was ready.”
“Did you ask her if dinner was ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You trifling, no account scoundrel! Get yourself back out in that yard and cut grass till she calls you to dinner. You understand?”
“Yes, sir.”)
And long after the forbidding voice was silenced, its prohibition sounded within, preventing me from all asking—from standing before an audience, for example, thereby asking for recognition.
But as I surrendered my right to ask, I found a fierce privacy within which I defended my right to want. From the ensuing battle for my soul, neurosis, the sick defender, emerged as the tattered victor. If I am not allowed to ask for anything then I will seize the right secretly to want everything, including the unattainable ideal.
That was the wanting that enabled me to find you, and to recognize in you that which I sought, and the marriage we created is an ongoing celebration, a perpetual feast; for in you I found someone who gave without being asked, gave prodigally—lavish, exotic, glittering emotional gifts such as I would never have known how to even ask for. Our conflicts generated profound joys—as, indeed from the beginning, you assured me they would: “That you were once unkind befriends me now.”
The vast polarity of our natures, making for so much contention, has yielded enormous benefits. I, an American, because of you, have become a world citizen. Our goyem are better, but their art is richer, their thought more complex, challenging. Within European culture I found my intellectual and literary home. Even among the Americans it is the expatriates like Eliot rather than the homebodies like Whitman with whom I feel the greater affinity. Because of you I have relocated my origins.
And I, so averse to travel, because of your pushing and pulling and persistence, have entered into airplanes, and have deplaned from them in strange lands, and so have actually seen those places whence my spiritual legacy has come. What I live by has thereby acquired a reality not otherwise obtainable. I can, in San Francisco, read that “Nietzsche spent summers in the Swiss Alps,” but to walk through his cramped ascetic rooms in Sils yields an importantly different kind of knowing.
And I have found in you a nobility that derives from your disposition to love others, not for what they may then offer you, but for their own sakes; and this trait in you has become for me a faith that sustains a high secret self that otherwise would long ago have been lost to cynicism.
And this greatness of soul appeals not only to me but also to everyone who has the tact and patience and sensibility to find it in you—for you don’t wear it on your sleeve!—and these people then value you, become your friends, gather around you, and since I’m with you they become my friends too, and by them too my life is enhanced.
And I found in you a playfulness and passion potential in me but throttled by an ascetic renunciatory solemnity, whereas in you this quality, at the first notes of a waltz, bursts forth in a gay, sensuous, sexy dance. So you become the probate court to deliver to me my belated legacy of passionate life.
And now I see that what began as an accounting, a balance sheet of profit and loss and intimacy, has become a love letter. So be it. I admit it. I affirm it. I declare it. I love you.
Allen
My father died seven years later and my mother carried on for another four years, stoically taking care of his estate in probate, continuing her psychiatric practice, surviving a bad fall with a hip and wrist fracture at the age of ninety-four. With reluctance she stopped her psychiatric practice at age ninety-five. When I asked her, “Why now, Mummy?” she replied, “I don’t want to become one of those dwindling clinicians. I want to go out when I am strong!” I went to see her for Christmas 2011. She knew she didn’t have much time left. Parkinson’s and a couple of old indolent cancers were ultimately getting the better of her, slowly sapping energy and strength. She ate little and spoke slowly. My last conversation with her was at the kitchen table. We sat across from one another. She asked about my life. I encouraged her to eat. After she had been quiet for a long time, I asked, “What are you thinking about, Mummy?” She looked up at me but was silent. I felt dread that the opportunity to speak to my mother had receded out of reach. But finally she responded, “I was thinking about making love with your father.”
Two weeks later, on January 9, 2012, on a sunny day in bed, my mother was listening to Schubert. She was smiling, clapping her hands together and then just slipped away. There was no food in the refrigerator. There were no patients to cancel. She left everything in order.
last rites
MY PARENTS CAME TO CAMBRIDGE TO VISIT ME EACH SPRING and fall—two seasons, dramatic in their intensity, that were different from what they knew in San Francisco and reminded them of their beginnings together in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. They especially loved walking in the Mount Auburn Cemetery. It was an occasion for my mother to celebrate life captivated by the spectacular shows of spring blossoms or fall color and an opportunity for my father to contemplate death (or “our shabby end” as he often called it) and the ultimate gloomy meaninglessness of life. These walks allowed for the predictable and charming intersection of their differences.
“Allen, it’s so beautiful here. I think we should consider being buried here. What do you think?”
“If that’s what you want, that’s fine with me.”
“But Allen, what do you want?”
“Well, I don’t really care.”
“Well, you have to care! You need to have an opinion!”
“I want to be with you so wherever you want to be will be fine with me.”
“But what do you want as an individual?”
“I don’t care.”
“How can you not care?”
“Because it doesn’t matter.”
“Well, it matters to me.”
“Well, if it were left up to me I would want to be buried in the orchard in Puget Sound.”
“But it’s so isolated there. No one will come visit us.”
“I like that.”
“And furthermore, you are so silent and brooding. I will feel lonely.”
“Well, like I said, whatever you want will be fine with me.”
“At least if we are buried here there will be a lot of interesting people for me to talk to.”
“Okay, that’s fine.”
IN THE END my father did lay claim to his wishes. In The Life and Death of My Mother, published in 1992, he wrote:
When I die I want my body to be cremated, the ashes buried in the orchard on the island in Puget Sound, the site marked by a flat stone of green marble bearing my name and dates, and, a small distance below, my paradox.
How to live?
Who knows the question knows not how,
Who knows not the question cannot tell.
Those three lines sum me up: the inquiry that has driven me, and the impasse into which it has invariably delivered me.
I choose the orchard because there, among those gnarled and broken apple trees, blossoming unseen on the empty air, dropping their wormy and unwanted fruit for the deer and the crows, the loamy land sloping down to the slough, the blue heron standing motionless on one long spindly leg, mirrored in the still water, the steely blue Sound beyond, and far away on the horizon with jagged Olympic Mountains, icy, snow-covered, distant—there, at times, I’ve had a sense of home.
Actually I would prefer to be buried there, my body intact, in a plain cedar box. But that’s hard to arrange; and, as between lying intact among strangers in the cemetery or lying in ashes and bone fragments in that magical place, I choose the latter.
And I can see it coming about. Soon. I shall not have long to wait. And when it’s done, my wishes all exactly met by a loving and respectful family, it will gratify me not at all; for the consciousness that now wills it and is capable of gratification by it shall have
vanished. Indeed, it would matter not to me, at that time, were my body thrown into the garbage. I am carefully arranging something that cannot possibly become a reality until its purpose and fulfillment have become unknowable to me. So any brooding on that site, any ghostly gratification, must be claimed in advance. Now.
So . . . this is the future scene to which I suppose I am now laying claim. A late summer afternoon, the sun disappearing behind the Olympics, the sawtooth ridge knifelike against a pale green sky, clouds red and gold, becoming pink turning to gray turning to black. Far far overhead, silently, the plane passes, leaving a glittering silver trail. A sloop with a blue sail glides past the beach. The heron rises ponderously from the slough, the great wings beating slowly, heavily, uttering his hoarse and protesting cry. From the table at the edge of the cliff near the house come voices, the sounds of dinner—my children and grandchildren, friends, dogs. Joan wanders alone down to the twilit orchard, glances at the green stone, reads again the pithy anguish of my life. I always wanted to write in stone: now I will have done so. She directs towards me a current of melancholy affection, reexperiences the quite special bond between us. This stone is partly covered by the long dry grass of autumn. I must clear that away, she thinks . . . plant some flowers. Perhaps tomorrow. She glances . . . and passes on . . . and that’s all. (pp. 24–26)
When my father died, I did find a piece of flat green marble and had his name and dates and his paradox carved into it. We placed the stone in the orchard and my mother read the lines above. But my mother didn’t put his ashes in the ground. They stayed with her in San Francisco in a wooden box in a blue bag on a dresser in my parents’ bedroom. After my mother died, I took both boxes of ashes to Puget Sound. And yet I couldn’t put them in the ground either. It felt uncomfortably permanent and inaccessible. And I had too many questions. Do I mix the ashes and bury them in one hole? Do I leave the ashes in the plastic bags? How deep shall I dig the hole? What do I do with the wooden boxes with their names engraved after I remove the bags of ashes?