Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen

by Matt McAllester

Sometime between my mother's keeling over dead, being cut up on the coroner's slab, and being dressed up in the funeral home, someone had decided she needed a makeover.

  John disappeared and, after a few moments, came back. “Okay,” he said.

  Despite John's best efforts with a Kleenex or baby wipe, I could still detect traces of a vibrant red on my mother's lips, which were stretched wide across her cheeks as if she had a very big mouth. The lips were not grimacing or smiling, just stretched; I had not seen that expression on my mother's face before.

  “She's so small,” I said. She lay in her coffin—not a fancy one—and wore her denim dress.

  When I was a boy I would put empty potato chip packets in my mother's oven for a few seconds until they had shrunk to minute versions of themselves. My mother looked like that: oven-shrunk.

  “Beautiful Mummy,” Jane said, and we both cried. Jane gently stroked my mother's graying hair, which lay flat on her forehead. “Beautiful Mummy.”

  It scared me to touch her. I had seen all those dead people, but I realized I had never touched any of them.

  We stayed for some time and I didn't want to leave her. I wanted to sit down and lean against the wall and fall asleep for the night. Because to me, this was my mother. It was not just my mother's body. I had no God, no religion, no sense of life after death. I sensed no spirit, no soul; no smiling, released, protective, newly omnipotent mother looking down on us. All I had was this lifeless body we were getting ready to burn. I had only a few hours left to spend with her.

  But we left.

  I sat next to my father at the funeral, the hymns leaving me cold, the liturgy passing me by unnoticed, the wooden box parked in the aisle to my left the only thing I cared about. I touched it with my left hand as I passed it by on my way to give the eulogy. I stood at the lectern, gazing out at the immigrant African and elderly Irish Catholics who, besides those who had come to mourn for my mother, seemed to make up the bulk of the regular congregation.

  Until she died, I had not known that this church, the Sacred Heart Church on Quex Road in Kilburn, a ten-minute walk from my flat, was where my mother had been christened during the Second World War. I had not known, in fact, that she was born in London. I had, over the years, become almost allergic to her past. I did not want to hear stories of the past, because for me they were all stories of pain and loss.

  Sixty-two years earlier my mother had been held in her own mother's arms on this spot, her forehead dampened with holy water.

  I stood at the lectern and read my way, with some effort, through this:

  I've been trying to fill up the hours since Mum died, and so one day last week I found a site on the Internet that was all about baby names and I stuck the name Ann into the site's search engine. I wanted to know what Ann meant. Hebrew for gracious, came the answer. So then I thought a bit about what gracious really means and I realized that I wasn't sure, so the dictionary gave me several definitions; one of them was this: characterized by tact and propriety. If the name Ann, I thought, implies being characterized by tact, then I think Granny and Grandpa seriously misnamed my mother.

  My mum was perhaps the least tactful person I've ever known. Even when she was a young woman, before she fell ill, I'm told that she had quite a capacity to embarrass and offend.

  And yet my dad fell in love with her, her siblings adored her, and she had an army of wonderful friends. And no matter what she did to embarrass or irritate Jane and me, we loved her.

  You see, that tactlessness was actually a good thing—it was a brilliant, attractive lack of inhibition that enabled her to cut through the nonsense and get to the point. My friend Rich told me last week that he used to come round to my house when we were difficult teenagers and my mum, unlike any other parent, would treat him like an adult, talking to him without condescension.

  It was that almost total lack of inhibition that enabled her to radiate love in that extraordinarily passionate and penetrating very public way of hers. It meant that I grew up in a home where we said “I love you” to each other all the time; where I used to kiss my dad on his cheeks, nose, forehead, chin, and lips every night before I went to bed; where I wanted to marry my sister because I loved her so much. And I think we three all learned that from my mum. I certainly did, and even though she's gone now, I'll always try to keep her particular sort of passionate and uninhibited love in my life.

  A bit later in her life, things got in the way of my mum loving those around her quite as well as she had done before. As a secret Jewish envoy to Ireland, she had to bring an end to the conflict there. As the heiress to both the Romanov and Hapsburg empires, she had a lot of letters to write. My mum had a lot on her plate.

  Jane and me at the front door at Port an Droighionn

  Sadly, in the course of her missions and her drinking and madness, she pushed away a lot of friends and family members.

  But it was her illness that made her angry and hurtful; it was not her. A huge malfunction took hold of her brain and became as much of a burden to her as anything to anyone I have ever seen. And this is what actually makes me so admire her, makes me so miss her, makes me love her so much even now—because, apart from one attempt at suicide, for which I am sure she was long ago forgiven, she never gave up. She had so little to live for for so long and she kept fighting, and she must have known something that I didn't, because, at various points, I thought she'd be better off dead. I was wrong. A sort of miracle happened. With the help of her treasured, limitlessly giving daughter, Jane, and her own sheer determination, Mum found happiness and love and a sort of sanity again. I've never managed to show such strength, such courage, such resilience, such hope, such a refusal not to take the easy option. I've never fought against such odds. But my little, damaged mother fought and she won. In that sense, it wasn't a miracle at all. It was not something that happened to her. She made it happen. It was a choice, a very difficult one—and all I can say is that I hope to be able to remember her hard choice for the rest of my life and to remind myself of it when faced with difficult decisions and challenges.

  Mum's choice was this: to get better, and to keep loving.

  In the past few years, she lived up to her name again. She was gracious. Other definitions offered by the dictionary: characterized by charm or beauty, by elegance and good taste, by kindness and warm courtesy; of a merciful or compassionate nature.

  She told Jane and me that she was ready to die. Well, we were absolutely not ready to lose her. We had our charming, beautiful, elegant, tasteful, kind, warm, and compassionate mum back. But now she's gone and so all I can do is to feel her with me somehow, in some way, and to look at a final, archaic definition of gracious: enjoying favor or grace; acceptable or pleasing.

  I hope she is enjoying favor with her God, that she is as acceptable and pleasing as she is no doubt tactless, wandering around heaven, loudly making friends with whomever she comes across, loving her children and all of you from afar with the same passion she loved us with while she was here.

  My eulogy, I should say, contained three inaccuracies. First, her recovery was not quite as complete as I suggested in the church. Second, I didn't buy any of the heaven stuff—but this was her funeral, not mine, and she believed in a heaven that we all go to. Third, I didn't feel her with me in the slightest. She was very much not with me, not then and, I was sure, not ever again.

  We drove to the crematorium in a fleet of minicabs. I almost lost my temper with our driver, and when we reached the crematorium there was no one to direct us to the correct chapel. Finally we found it and filed in. The coffin had preceded us and was sitting in front of a red curtain. The priest, a kind, soft-voiced Indian from Kerala named Father Benny, said the final words: “Take something of Ann with you in your hearts when you go.” Perhaps it was a standard funeral line. But it felt to me like Father Benny, soon to return to his native India, had understood that my mother had been complicated but good, that there was a lot of my mother you would not want to take away w
ith you in your heart but a lot that you would. The coffin rolled through the curtains.

  The tapas at the pub dining room where we held the wake were delicious. I had been able to help with that part of the arrangement.

  5

  ON A QUIET MORNING, I STOOD ON A BRIDGE OVER THE canal in Little Venice with an umbrella keeping me dry. The late-spring rain pattered on the surface of this waterway that bends its way from West to East London, hidden for much of the way by homes and warehouses and tunnels. I was early for my appointment with the therapist whose office was in the tall, white-painted Georgian house overlooking the canal. I had stood here before, over thirty years ago, holding my mother's hand as I looked down through the metal railings at one of the broad, low boats that take tourists through the city. I must have been two or three years old. It is the first thing I remember.

  But I had few other memories of London. We left when I was three, for Edinburgh, where I grew up. After college I moved to the United States and soon after became a newspaper reporter. My newspaper sent me to the Middle East, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and I went gladly; went just about anywhere there was a conflict, anywhere I could dive into the pain of others and feel alive and invigorated by the most extreme experiences human beings go through. After the invasion of Iraq and the increasingly bloody summer of 2003, however, an unstoppable impulse returned me to London, a city that I barely knew but that now seemed like the only place in the world I could live. My mother, my sister, my closest friends all lived in London. This was where my family, many years before, had been whole and happy. But though I had now lived there for over a year, it was still a city I barely knew, because for much of that time I had been in Iraq or another country. I still needed the A to Z to find my way around, to find the neighborhood where I'd spent my first three years.

  I turned my eyes from the water and moved toward the large white house. The trees along the canal were the yellow-green of high spring, and I had an urge to touch them and be surrounded in greenery. I had been running a lot in recent days, searching out the lushest, most life-filled parks I could find. I wanted to roll in deep grass. I wanted to lie down sideways at the top of a grassy slope and roll down, over and over, until I'd reach the bottom all dizzy and be steadied by my mother, who would be waiting there.

  I had not met the therapist before, but I knew he was a former foreign correspondent, which meant that there would be so much less to explain. He had helped other war-buffeted correspondents, their numbers growing quickly in the years of unending conflict since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and I was hoping he could help me. I had an important assignment for my newspaper coming up, and I needed to be a bit more functional than I was.

  We sat down in his office and he asked how he could help me. He was immediately likable.

  “I'm supposed to go on a trip to Nepal, to track down the Maoists, and I don't know if I really feel up to it,” I said. I had not made a single phone call. I had not set up a single interview. I was leaving very soon. “It's not like it's dangerous there, but I don't really want to go.”

  “How long's the trip?”

  “A month or so. I'm kind of exhausted. I mean, loads of us are in this situation, the post-9/11 endless-war thing. Afghanistan, Iraq, you know. Perhaps I have post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “Are you having flashbacks or nightmares?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you get irrationally angry?”

  “Sometimes.”

  He didn't look too worried about me. Perhaps his being a former correspondent made him wise to the whining of someone who had chosen, entirely of his own accord, to do what was essentially a very stupid job.

  To me, my gloom seemed to have this screamingly obvious source: cumulative war, perhaps accented by my mother's death. The battle of Fallujah, during which I had been embedded with the American troops, had taken place only seven months before. It had been the most intense combat the American military had experienced since Vietnam and it had been terrifying.

  “Also,” I said, “my mother died three weeks ago.”

  “Oh,” said the therapist, his face shifting with sudden interest. “No wonder you feel terrible. I'm so sorry.”

  I told him about wanting to be surrounded by greenery. He said that was common. I didn't tell him about the wildebeest.

  I filled out a questionnaire designed to test whether I had the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and the results showed that I was perfectly okay. The source of my virtual paralysis had nothing to do with war, he said. The problem was a bit less glamorous and quite ordinary, really: My mum was dead.

  I was surprised by his conclusion. All mothers die sooner or later, don't they?

  “There's some research that's shown that mothers and sons have particularly close bonds,” the therapist told me. “This is going to be very difficult.”

  I appreciated his sympathy and his insistence that my sadness was to be expected, but I still felt that my recent howling, animalistic fits of grief were disproportionate, that they somehow didn't match up to what had just happened. I had lost my mother—an extremely common event that conformed to the natural sequence of life and death. Millions of mothers, I figured, died every year. Even if sons and mothers are particularly close—and I suspect fathers and daughters and mothers and daughters might contest that—a son's losing his mother was one of the world's great unoriginal misfortunes. Besides, parents are meant to go before their children. And at sixty-two, my mother, who had lived an unhealthy life for decades, was not exceptionally young to die. Off and on, I had been expecting her death for more than half of my own life.

  The therapist suggested two ways I might help myself. I should read some books on grieving, and I should know, impossible as it might now seem to me, that time tempers grief. The first anniversary would likely be punishing; the second surprisingly less so.

  I thanked him and walked along the canal in the rain to buy dinner in the stores on Clifton Road where my mother used to shop when I was a baby.

  6

  A WEEK LATER I WAS IN THE SKIES ABOVE THE KATHMANDU Valley, the plane swooping down through the clouds to a city that seemed calm but was teetering on the verge of catastrophe. Nepal was a country of one anachronism piled on top of another, where an autocratic king was considered by his more religious and loyal subjects to be a reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu and where some of the country's dispossessed had taken to the hills in a Maoist insurgency.

  It took three and a half days of hiking through the hills, treading through paddy fields and alongside rivers, to reach the Maoist capital of Thabang, which was really just a slightly larger village than most others in the region.

  In the evening, I asked the most senior Maoist leader in the town about his plans for the new society that he and his comrades would create once the revolution was victorious. We sat in a dark room and he promised me they would be merciful when they took Kathmandu.

  And then it was three and a half days back along the same path, single-file hiking for hour after hour. When it rained we sheltered under rocks. When we reached the end of each morning, we found a guesthouse where we slept for an hour and ate rice and dal off metal plates. In one place, close by a river, we ate finger-sized fish, and the rice was flavored with hot lemon pickle. We took our boots and pants off and waded into the strong river, rubbing three days of sweat from our bodies as the sun baked our faces.

  In the rhythm and the repetition of those days of walking and refueling on rice, my messy grief sorted itself out so that all that was left was the same question and plea that had first appeared in my mind in the confusion of immediate grief. There was a clarity to it now. I wanted to know where my mother was, and I wanted her to come back.

  I was surprised by the persistence of these two thoughts. I knew she was gone forever and I knew she wasn't coming back. But that seemed unbearable. I had to do something to find out where she was and to bring her back to me. I needed to work the problem a
nd find a solution. We hiked back to where the road began and made our way back to Kathmandu.

  My sister is not a religious person, but right from the start she felt our mother with her, watching over her. When I returned to London I told her that I had no way of feeling the same.

  “Sometimes I just slip into this little church on Farm Street in Mayfair,” she said. My sister worked in an art gallery in central London, and the church was a short walk from the gallery. “It's a Catholic church and it's really pretty, really small. There's a little chapel there—to Our Lady of Lourdes—and for some reason I'm just drawn to it. I know Mum went to the church sometimes, but I don't know if she went to that chapel. I light candles for her. I feel very close to her there. You could try going there. Besides, it's round the corner from the best butcher in London.”

  “Okay,” I said, and forgot about it.

  I called my aunt Kata, my mother's younger sister. Kata was the person my mother talked to most, other than Jane and me.

  “I miss Mum,” I said, crinkling into silent tears as soon as I had said it.

  “I miss your mother terribly,” she said. “But I talk to her every day. I talk to them all, to her and Mummy and Daddy. She sits on the couch. She's very bossy. She can be quite cruel sometimes.”

  “You mean you actually talk to her and see her?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I know it sounds crazy, but it's true.”

  My couch remained unvisited. My sister reminded me a couple of times about the Farm Street church, but it had no draw for me. Was this what happened to the godless when faced with grief? Sudden, irreversible motherlessness until you die. Atheism's toll. The shocking lack of consolation only made me hunger further for a way back to her.

  After my visit to the therapist, I had gone to a bookstore and found an entire section devoted to grief and mourning. I bought three books, and when I got home I looked briefly at two of them. I'd known about Elizabeth Kübler-Ross's groundbreaking work and her description of the five stages that follow death: denial and isolation; anger; bargaining; depression; acceptance. Now, even glancing at this carefully mapped-out route to feeling better and accepting the unacceptable made me close the book in irritation. The second book focused on the death of parents. It was full of real-life anecdotes about dead mothers and fathers. But there was, of course, nothing in there about my own dead mother; I found myself entirely uninterested in anyone else's. I didn't want to read about coping and reassessing a dead parent and how you may feel. I did not want to cope or come to terms with my mother's death. The book discussed the two-year anniversary. The idea of my mother's death reaching me like a ripple from a distant storm, easy and fading after two years, was not appealing. It's not that I was enjoying the pain, but I didn't want it to fade. The pain was a link to my mother. It was the pain that was driving me to find a concrete way to be with my mother again.