You Too Can Write Parental Death Reminicences Like Dave Eggers!

[mallorys_camera]

Eggers' reminiscences of maternal cremains reminded me of my own Adventures in Dead Parent Dumping.

In death as in life, my mother was exceedingly well organized. Her will was explicit regarding the disposition of her mortal remains: she wanted to be cremated and she wanted her ashes to be scattered at the intersection of W. 72nd Street and Riverside Drive in Manhattan.

Why W. 72nd Street and Riverside Drive?

The hell if I know¹.

We'd lived seven blocks away in a tiny little apartment on W. 74th Street between Central Park West and Columbus. Riverside Park was outside the Central Park circuit Roberta and I had carved out for our Saturdays, although I used to drag poor little rich girl Brooke Allen there². Also, in the decade before his death, my grandfather had been the last renter in a luxury building, fronting Riverside, sprawled between W. 72nd and, W. 73rd³.

Anyway, here was my mother, dead⁴, and I didn't have a clue how I was supposed to carry out her stipulations.

TBC if I ever have the time...

(1)W. 72nd Street and Central Park West might have made some sense – right in front of the Dakota which we loved and the IND subway stop which I sometimes rode in inclement weather to Hunter where I went to school. Unless it was Nor'easter or blizzard conditions, though, I much preferred to walk. Hunter was at 68th and Lexington, not so far. I liked to hoard the subway fare. I was saving up for a dollhouse, had actually managed to accumulate forty dollars or so – a huge sum of money for an eleven year old in 1963 – before my mother found my hiding place, a copy of The Magic City by E. Nesbit, and stole the money I'd stockpiled from baby-sitting and subway fares and the dinner money my mother would toss my way when she had a date and expected to be out all night. I preferred to walk and starve if it meant I could have a dollhouse and consequently at eleven years old, not only was I very tall for my age, I was also very skinny.

(2)Brooke Allen, spawn of wealthy San Remo Apartments-dwelling producer couple, Lewis and Jay Presson Allen, for whom my baby-sitting services had been spuriously obtained by a fraudulent ad my mother had posted in the nearby candy store. Brooke was ten when I began baby-sitting for her. I was eleven, but very tall for my age. My mother lied, said I was 14 and immediately began hitting the Allens up for theater tickets. Baby-sitting Brooke consisted of dragging Brooke on endlessly long walks through city streets and teaching her the pastime Roberta and I indulged in every Saturday, to wit: pick out some interesting-looking bystander from the crowd, trail them for a couple of blocks and speculate out how they would kill their mothers. Brooke was very game, although she did request the rules be modified to include paternal homicide as well.

(3)Although, honestly, I couldn't really imagine my grandfather in his senescence was at all a happy memory for my mother, since every time she talked about him, she would recall his false teeth – "He kept them in glass by his bed, Patty! They had all sorts of crud floating from them!" – and how longer ago, in childhood, whenever her own mother would pick up the wire hanger to beat my mother, my grandfather would sink down into the sofa, pull a newspaper up over his face, pretend to sleep. My mother – never particularly descriptive in either spoken or written prose – nonetheless managed to infuse these memories with so much vividness that they have actually become my memories, daguerreotypes engraved in my brain.

(4)I wasn't with her when she died although I'd spent the preceding 72 hours by her bedside, and we'd actually had a couple of okay conversations although for the most part she was pretty out of it, morphine plus her kidneys were shutting down so all kinds of toxic amino acids were gun-slinging through her brain. Once she bolted straight up, stared at me , "I am not a bad girl!" Like a belligerent two year old: "I am not a bad girl!"

Another time we were talking about life after death and she asked, "Do you think there's… something?" and I said, "You know, I do. It doesn't make any sense at all, it's the kind of thoughts you have when you're stoned out of your mind on nitrous oxide in the dentist's chair, suspended between life and asphyxia, and you think, 'There's a river and I've somehow caught the ferry…' but yes, it doesn't seem real to me that consciousness should end," and she said, "Me neither. But let that be between us," meaning don't tell Annie and Janie who were in the next room, deconstructing my mother's life and times raucously, Brooklyn accents at their loudest and most nasal which often happens to Brooklyn expatriates when they reunite with someone from their native land after strangering in the strangeness. But maybe she meant don't tell anyone at all in which case I am betraying her by telling you (assuming you're actually reading; this is pretty long), not the first time I've sold out my mother for cheap attention, nor (I suspect) the last.

So anyway, her breathing wasn't that Cheynes-Stokes broken-down-washing-machine raspy-type gasping. Her breathing was pretty normal, really. Except every now and then she would forget to take a breath, and Jane, Anne and I – by now (Sunday afternoon, April 1 2001) gathered by her bedside, holding hands – would have to take a breath for her.

"Look at you, Lynnie!" cried Janie. "Like The Lady of Shalot, lily-pale. So beautiful." You can always trust Janie for the obscure literary analogy.

In fact, my mother did look rather beautiful, her skin was absolutely translucent and her eyes, when she opened them, were a bright, unworldly emerald green, and occasionally she would talk, no conversation now, just orders. "Water!" she'd demand crossly. Or "Shut up!"

She's not going to die today, I thought. I was a bit cross myself. Driving between Monterey and San Francisco every day and a half was no picnic, plus Robin was only seven, and while it was true that Ben got to played Primary Parent due to the demands of my stressful but exceedingly remunerative corporate job, surely Robin still needed to spend some time with me, every now and then. Max and the stressful but exceedingly remunerative corporate job itself, I didn't worry about – Max was 14 which meant the less he saw me, the happier he was; and earlier that year I had made a point of attending my boss's father's funeral, a rather toney, well-attended affair since my former boss was/is the scion of a rich, well-connected San Francisco political family. Anyway, quid pro quo – if the boss gets to have a dead parent, so do the workers, right? This is a democracy.

"You guys are both leaving tomorrow, right?" I asked Janie and Annie.

And they both nodded regretfully or rather they nodded with regret – there were Responsibilities that could not be put off any longer: in Anne's case, a contractor hired to repair her deck – "I mean in Santa Cruz these guys are booked tighter than heart surgeons, Patty. You would not believe –"; in Jane's case, a whole generation of Ithaca College students who sans her ministrations would grow up ignorant of 20th century poetry, poetry by Theodore Roethke (I wake to sleep and take my waking slow) as well as others whose names escape me now and, in any event, not being very well versed in poetry myself, I did not learn until the one-year anniversary of my mother's death, April 1, 2002, when I drove to Ithaca to watch Jane teach.

They would leave the next morning but be there that night.

Which meant they could spell me. It would not matter if I took a break.

Except, of course, she died a few moments after I left for home.

Comments

[nokomisjeff.livejournal.com]

It's posts like the one you just wrote that make me look forward to every one of your posts.

Thanks,

Jeff

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you! I am thinking of you and your wife daily.

[original-broad.livejournal.com]

Wow, a footnoted post! This is fascinating, yet again.

So, what do you think of Eggers, and, more specifically, You Shall Know Our Velocity?

[original-broad.livejournal.com]

Also, "...Brooklyn accents at their loudest and most nasal which often happens to Brooklyn expatriates when they reunite with someone from their native land after strangering in the strangeness."

I love this.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Haven't read You Shall Know Our Velocity. Just finished Heartbreaking Work of Etc which I'd avoided for many, many years.

I... liked it. Cautiously. I didn't expect to. I could see where he was going with it in terms of structure, style and content (the Triple Whammy!) and that kind of transparancy always appeals to me.

I feel like I'm as old as the moon these days, but one thing I remember very vividly from my twenties is howw you would get into these scenes and the scenes would be totally involving, and then one day you'd wake up and the scene would be gone. And the book cnveryed that particular experience very, very well I thought. It's a difficult experience to write about.

[lacachet.livejournal.com]

Do you ever page through your friend's "stuff", and there is someone you always want to read, right away? That is you, my friend :)
BTW, Happy Belated Birthday---

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Oh, that is very nice of you to say.