Homesick

by Ward, Sela

  “Look at this,” Brock said. Two feet down, he showed us the remains of an old campfire. It had to have been kindled by Indians; there are lots of arrowheads along the creek that runs through the farm. With Jenna sitting at the foot of the grave writing in her journal, I stood below her in the bottom of the hole, shovel in hand. I breathed in deep the rich, heady aroma of that Mississippi earth. My Mississippi earth.

  On Wednesday afternoon we held a private family viewing at the funeral home, before the casket was closed for good. The four of us kids were there, but Daddy didn’t want to come. He didn’t want to see her like that. But she looked so much better there, at rest, than she had at the end of her struggle in the hospital, and I found myself wishing he’d come to see her, so that his last memory of her face would be one of serenity and beauty.

  Still, when I arrived I saw at once that one thing was missing. And so, before I would let anyone else approach the casket, I pulled out Mama’s favorite Revlon Love That Red and did her lips one last time. She would never have let anyone see her without it and there was no reason this should be any different. Now, with red roses in her hands to match her lipstick, Mama was ready.

  Then my dear assistant, Jackie, drove up, came in quietly, and told us that Daddy was on his way in from the car. He walked in behind her, joined his children, and we all stood there holding each other, praying for her one by one, and took our turns saying goodbye.

  That night we had visitation at the church. We arranged a centerpiece of framed photos of Mama at stages throughout her life, surrounded by candles. She had always hated dreary funeral music, so we had her favorites, Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, playing. For two hours people filed by in the receiving line to pay their respects. At one point, I looked up and the director of Hope Village had come by with the six orphan girls from the Village. Two of them broke down in sobs. I remember holding one and saying, “It’s okay, honey, it’s okay. We’re going to take care of you. You’re safe.”

  “Death in a small town is a different proposition from death in a large city,” writes Willie Morris. “Death in a small town deeply affected the whole community. For weeks or even years the physical presence of the dead person would be missed in specific places; his funeral itself would touch closely upon the life of the town.”

  It seemed as though the whole town turned out to pay its respects, either at the visitation or at the funeral the next day. This is how it is in a small town: in a place where families lead their entire lives in close proximity, simple shared history is enough to bring people together in times of need. “Ask not for whom the bell tolls/It tolls for thee”—John Donne’s words are felt keenly by small-town people, who cannot pretend not to notice when someone has passed away.

  In the days immediately surrounding my mother’s death, I really saw that we were not alone in the world. People who were more or less strangers to us came out to help because we were their neighbors, and we were part of the town. That’s all. As I was getting into the car to leave the funeral for the burial, I saw the mother of a high school friend run over to me. She had lost a daughter my age to cancer. She looked at me through the car window, and said, “Sela, I’m just so sorry.” She went out of her way to connect, to let me know she shared my suffering. That I was not alone.

  Not long ago, I heard Tom preach a sermon on why you should go to church. Besides worshiping God, he said, you should go because it is there that you’ll find people who love you. He ended up preaching four funerals that month—and I know he and the congregation ministered to those grieving families every bit as well as they ministered to mine.

  He eulogized Mama well at her funeral. “She fought the good fight,” he said. God was there to receive her, to help her overcome disease and despair. He would offer her a new body, a new set of lungs. “And she is dancing in heaven as we gather!”

  Only family and close friends were invited to the graveside service. We followed the hearse down the gravel road, through the gate to the farm, and down the hill, past the picnic tree, around the lakes, and finally up that last hill behind the Rose Cottage. We had arranged for a gospel choir to sing at the burial. Mama would have hated it; she despised anything remotely sentimental. The choir was for the rest of us. And I know the sight and sound of that group, their white robes with green collars flowing out behind them, their faces open with welcome as we arrived, brought comfort to us all.

  I had one of my favorite poems, by Henry van Dyke, read aloud for Mama:

  I am standing upon the seashore.

  A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze

  and starts for the blue ocean.

  She is an object of beauty and strength.

  I stand and watch her until at length

  she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea

  and sky come to mingle with each other.

  Then someone at my side says

  “There she is gone!”

  “Gone where?”

  Gone from my sight. That is all.

  She is just as large in mast and hull and spar

  as she was when she left my side and she is just

  as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.

  Her diminished size is in me and not in her.

  And just at the moment when someone at my side says,

  “There she is gone!”

  There are other eyes watching her coming,

  And other voices take up the glad shout

  “Here she comes!”

  And that is dying.

  Tom mentioned the breeze, and the beautiful day. He told us about the Resurrection, and why it was good to sing in a cemetery. Brock and I had elected to offer some final words. When it was his turn, Brock had one hand on the casket, and the other on his heart. He wept as he talked about how much he loved Mama. Yet it was not somber on top of that hill. I knew, just knew, that Mama would be ticked if we all sat there helplessly wailing. I stood up and said, “You all know Mama would be furious at us for standing around crying. We need to all think of her hitting the jackpot in heaven’s casino, of being able to dance again because her legs are healed.” Something came over me, I found the right words to say, and I felt the joy in my heart coming forth. After we had taken our turns speaking, we watched as our mother was lowered into the ground, and shared the task of shoveling the sweet-smelling soil onto her casket. And then we left.

  I took Howard’s hand, and walked with him down the hill to gather the kids. I was so tired and emptied out I didn’t know what to say. We drove up together to Berry’s house to eat and visit with friends and mourners. When we arrived, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  Berry’s friends had come in droves and set up tables laden with food. They had decided that we didn’t have enough, so they went out and bought some more. Some other pals of his showed up with aprons on, and started barbecuing. They just took over, because they knew we wouldn’t have the strength to. Some of them weren’t particularly close friends, just folks who had grown up in our neighborhood. Once a neighbor in this small town, always a neighbor. Becky and Liz drove over from Birmingham to offer support. My college roommates Ginger and Connie drove in from Alabama. My girlfriend Martee even flew in, all the way from Philadelphia, because she thought I needed to know how much she loved me. And our pastor, Tom Sikes, was a bridge across a stormy canal that none of us could have crossed unguided.

  I have never been more in touch with true love than in those days, and I shall never forget it. In those weeks before and after Mama’s death, I discovered anew the miraculous strength of my friends—no matter where they lived. Whether they were there for us in Meridian—like Manny and Melanie, Jeanne and Sally—or in Los Angeles, like Ann and Ron, Carrie and Pam—they offered good, strong shoulders and welcome advice in equal measure. And my assistant, Jackie, who seemed to love my mother as if she were her own, put much of her own life on hold to keep me going through it all. In a time when America was discovering it
s own heroes in the wake of September 11, I found myself blessed with heroes of my own.

  Weeks later, Jenna and I were talking, and I mentioned how much it meant to me for Aunt Nancy to hold me tight in the hospital as I fell apart. Jenna nodded.

  “I’ll always remember the day before Mama died,” Jenna said, tears brimming. “Walking into her room, and watching Aunt Celeste holding Mama’s hand as she said, ‘Help me, help me.’ Sela, they were all there. It wasn’t just us. We lost Mama, but look what we gained.”

  9

  ......................

  If I’d been able, I would have stayed in Mississippi for weeks after Mama died. But I had a show to do. We buried Mama on Valentine’s Day, a Thursday, and I had to be on the set ready for work Tuesday morning, five days after I cradled my mother’s head in my arms for the last time.

  Friends of mine would later tell me they’re astonished that I managed to finish the last episodes of Once & Again with my wits about me. My grief for Mama was still raw. The cast was waiting any day for the network to axe us. And to make matters worse, in these final episodes Lily, my character, was losing her mother to Alzheimer’s disease, and trying to figure out how to say goodbye. I have no idea how I made it through those scenes; my memory of those last weeks is a blur. I once read that the emotion of grief can exact a real physical toll on a body, racking it with fatigue and exhaustion, and now I know that to be true. On my first day back, I had to grab hold of a washer and dryer on the set and hold on to it to keep from collapsing. Eventually my nerves simply got the better of me, and collapse I did.

  The official word came down on March 28: the series would be history by mid-April. I was too worn out to be sad. There was a time when I would have thought having your show yanked out from under you was pretty much the end of the world. Watching your mother die puts things in perspective.

  After we filmed the final episode, I said goodbye to my dear friends in the cast and left town. I needed to think about everything that had happened: The end of my time on Once & Again. Those images we’d seen over and over on television, of the people of New York running for their lives or mourning their loved ones. That image of my own mother, taking her last breath, despite all her children’s efforts to keep her alive.

  I reflected back upon those moments, and I thought, We all could be dead in the twinkling of an eye.

  Just as they had after Austin was born, questions flooded my mind during this difficult season—questions that seemed at once irrational and deadly important. Who would look after Daddy if I were to die? After my siblings and their families? Who would keep my children safe? Who would look after Howard? I was struggling to find a safe place, to find clarity, to find relief from this crippling anxiety.

  At long last, I realized: the key to it all was Mama.

  After I started my own family, when I began looking southward again and thinking about writing this book, I thought it was a simple urge I was following—to come home again, to regain contact with a simpler way of life, to foster a real connection between my young children and my older, wiser parents.

  Then Mama passed away, and for a moment the world she left behind felt impossible to sustain. My creative outlet was gone. The survival of my family was under threat. My Daddy was on his own. And I had lost my rock of comfort and support.

  Only then did it begin to come into focus, just what a deep and complex legacy Mama had left for me. There was nothing simple about it.

  It’s one of the hardest things we can do, to come to know our parents. We grow up watching them through the wrong end of a telescope; we think we’re watching all there is to see of them, but the image we see is limited, finite, and heartbreakingly remote. We can never know them the way they were as children, for instance, or as courting lovers. We never know just exactly what went on after we were sleeping at night; we can only assume that they argued about money or family, and hope that now and then they slipped outside to kiss on the porch.

  But if we’re lucky, we have friends and relatives who find the right time to show us the view through their telescopes. They share their memories, and when they do—again, if we’re lucky—a new, more three-dimensional picture can begin to emerge.

  I have my own store of memories of Mama. Most of what I’ve told about here comes from among them. But there’s more to tell, and much of it may be—for me, anyway—far more important.

  First of all, she was a gifted woman, possessed of intelligence, keen perception, unshakable character, and an appetite for hard work. But Annie Kate lived in a time and place that gave her few options for self-fulfillment. She grew up poor and I think secretly ashamed of it, married and had four children in almost as many years. And she learned early how to steel herself against life’s disappointments. I think now of what her childhood must have been like—those Depression times Uncle Joe recalls so vividly—and I realize she must have been like a flowering plant in rocky soil, that could survive but never bloom.

  In Daddy, Mama married a man who was handsome and strong, and a good provider. But he was difficult, too—demanding and not always able to give in return. Still, she loved him, and was committed to him and to the children they had together. These were the cards she was dealt in life, and she did with them what she could.

  Though I wasn’t aware of it when I was a child, I think that many of the people around her recognized the sacrifices my mother made in raising us. She made a kind of faith out of denying herself, as if even a well-deserved pleasure were a sinful indulgence. Once, I remember—I was maybe nine or ten years old—we all went with Daddy to buy Mama a beautiful mink stole as a gift. She knew the joy it gave him to buy it for her, and I know that on some level she loved having it. But in the end my mama just couldn’t allow herself something like that. She took it back to the store as soon as the moment had passed.

  And they weren’t strictly sacrifices of disposable income or creature comfort that she avoided. When I was young, my mother helped my father keep the books for his engineering office. Aunt Nancy remembers her as a woman whose potential was obvious, but underutilized. “She only had a high school education,” Nancy says, “but she was very shrewd in business. This was before computers; everything was written longhand. She mastered it all. And nothing got by her—did she ever know who owed what, when, and where! If she’d had the opportunity she could have run a Fortune 500 company.”

  Later, though, as computers entered the workplace, Nancy watched as the march of technology seemed to outpace Mama’s self-assurance. “She didn’t believe in herself enough, didn’t have a lot of confidence in her abilities. With any kind of schooling, education—if at some stage in her life someone had taken the time to talk her through these new machines, had showed her what she was intimidated by, she could have mastered anything. But by that time all she’d say was, ‘I can’t learn all this, Nancy. I’m too old.’ “ (It was the same refrain when we urged her to cut out the cigarettes that would eventually kill her: “I’m too old to quit.”)

  And so Mama stuck to what she knew. She worked, and worried, and developed a kind of defensive shell around herself that wasn’t always easy to penetrate. She always refused to pity herself, which is why she hated sentimentality: if she had started down that road, she might not have been able to find her way back. Besides, self-pity is a sign of weakness, and she had passed her whole life fighting to stave off weakness.

  Mama protected us, and gave us all her native strength. But here is the hardest truth: It wasn’t given to her to nurture us, to help us recognize our dreams and chase them. As much as she took care of her children, sheltered us, and provided for us, she’d never been given the tools young people need to foster their own potential, and so she was unable to pass them on to us. She never knew how to set us on the right path, only how to guard and hold us close. And I have lived my life running from, and returning to, her all-encompassing embrace.

  As Mama’s eldest daughter, I see now that much of her repressed longing and ambition
was displaced onto me. And in turn I came to fulfill a certain unstated role in the family, one that’s common among firstborn children and among my family in particular. It’s the role Mama’s mother, Annie Raye, played, carrying the weight of her family on that dislocated hip every day for decades. It’s a role Mama knew, too, stepping in for her own mother, straightening her brothers’ ties as she sent them off to the dance. (One wonders if she ever went herself.) And it’s a streak she might even have recognized in my father—the boy who dropped what he was doing every afternoon at 4:30 to make sure his mother was still alive.

  The loss of Mama proved it to me: I come from a people who put their family above all else, for better and for worse. And with Mama gone, I’m stepping into the shoes she left me.

  Jenna sent me an e-mail not long after Mama died, and it says a lot about the inner pain and defiance our mother lived with. “I remember thinking that her being on morphine in those last days allowed us to say anything we wanted to about her death and our love for her,” my sister wrote. “It allowed us to cry next to her, because she couldn’t have handled it otherwise. It allowed us to tell her what we needed to tell her before we let her go. She heard all of us, and you know, she finally did cry. Sela, it was perfect.”

  I’m glad for the window of honesty with Mama that the pain medication gave us. But it grieves me to realize how long she’d kept those curtains drawn. We were, of course, a close-knit family; I know Mama’s whole life was invested in us kids. Yet there’s a level on which I never knew my mother as well as I wish I did. I remember once, in my childhood, watching her talking and joking with Aunt Sarah’s son, Tommy—and thinking, “Why can’t she talk to us that way?” It may be that Mama just took her parental responsibility too deeply to heart, and never felt able to let her guard down with us. Or it may be that she just didn’t know herself well enough to share herself.