Dear Diary: Good Will
My mother-in-law passed away this morning, between eight and ten o’clock. She was formidable and exacting, but we all got used to that a long time ago. There is a ghastly ripped-out hole where she used to be.
When my own, my own adoptive mother died, I had just turned 29. We were on pretty good terms toward the end, as she shuttled back and forth between M D Anderson and the house in Tanglewood. Two months before she died, she asked me if I would do a dinner party for her. There were two couples whom she wished to entertain. Of course I was very happy to do it — amazed, really, that my culinary ambitions were no longer a dirty secret (a boy who wants to cook!). I don’t remember what dishes I prepared, or whether I joined the others at the table (I like to think that, feeling profesional, I didn’t), but I do remember that it all went very nicely, even though it was obviously odd: my mother was already such a shadow of herself, physically, that she might as well have been sitting up in her casket.
Whatever the guests made of the occasion, I knew that I’d been recognized. Not accepted, perhaps; I don’t think that my mother could ever accept me, even if she knew me now. Her idea of big strong men was fairly blinding and closed to nuance. Later, when my father told me that he and my mother had (latterly, at least) assumed that I was homosexual, I had to smile at the easiness of the packaging: as awful (to them) as homosexuality must have been, it was preferable to inscrutability. I don’t think that it ever occurred them that, as the child of other, unknown people, I might, as a matter of course, be inscrutable to them. I was at least, finally, recognized as such — inscrutable, much as the United States was recognized by the signatories to the Treaty of Paris, in 1783.
Then my mother died. As I said the other day, I was overcome by paroxysmal sobs when I saw my mother laid out in her casket, dead dead dead. Yes, it was her — but it was also death. I learned that that’s what happens: death is a body snatcher that replaces the person you knew. The person you knew is gone; the imposter in the casket makes you want to throw up, or scream.
I got over the hysteria pretty quickly. But ten years would pass before I would feel firm about regarding my mother’s belittlements as wrong. I would come to understand why she belittled me, but I would never forgive her. They say that that’s bad — that you really ought to forgive. I couldn’t agree more, if what you’re talking about is resentment. I don’t resent the way that my mother treated me. I simply refuse to excuse it. I don’t “hate” her (whatever that means). I don’t wish that she’d been taught the error of her ways in some dramatically satisfying way. (“All I want is ‘Enry ‘Iggins ‘ead!”) I know that she thought that she was “within her rights.” But I also know that, when it came to meaning well, she could be lazy and self-serving (I remember being shocked, as a teenager, to discover that, although my mother had lots of rules, she was governed by no principles.) So I refuse to say that she “meant well.” That’s what not forgiving her amounts to. It’s a judgment, and, having made it, I’m done. I talk about it too much, I suspect, but what I’m talking about, what I’m trying to get right, is the quality of being done.
As for my father, I forgave him everything — I was a slut of forgiveness. It’s rare now, but he still does occasionally spend time with me in a dream. He is always smiling and wise and patient and fond of me. He was all of those things in real life — but he was also (and this I cut from my dream dad) completely at sea about fatherhood. He might as well have been standing there with the manual in his hands, disconcerted by an unhelpful index. There was no entry for the likes of me, and he didn’t find “weirdness – general” particularly interesting. But although he could be very stern from time to time, and extremely clear about the obligations of a gentlemen — which never sounded fussy or prim, coming from the son of placid Clinton, Iowa that he was (I’ve even forgiven Clinton!) — he never made me feel like a reject.
I’m already older than my mother was when she died, and about ten years younger than my father when he died. I have come to believe that I understand the world at least as well as my parents did — which is to say that I’m no longer invested in trying to convince them that they were wrong about it. I’d much rather convince you that what they were right about — all that they gave me — hasn’t been thrown away.