The Bridge is Love

Sept 2013

I am face to face with my mother. An urgent call from my sister had me over the bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn in less than an hour. I meet them in the Flatlands section, where telephone wires stretch high over the streets and the sun sucks the color out of everything. Not tree in sight; a desert of semidetached “Futurama” homes built in the ‘50s. What is my mother doing here? Medicare, I guess, Medicare is what she’s doing here. We’re in her cardiologist's waiting room.

“Mom, why did you take all 5 pills?” I speak softly, trying not to sound accusatory or incredulous. She's downed the full contents of a prescription.

“The doctor said to take it in the morning,” her voice and inflection spookily childlike. She seems bewildered by my shock, a response that only compounds it.

Soon after this incident, we find k-cups scattered across her counters--lids punctured, grounds spilled--as though caffeine-seeking rats had thrown a fiesta. My mother can no longer operate her coffee maker.

I am dreaming. Dreaming of my body aging: I’m with a group of young women; I ask them to speak up so I can hear. I’m with an old man, hair dyed garish red, who says “people our age. . . ,“ presuming I’m as old as he. I wake thinking sic transit gloria mundi . . . Thus passes the glory of the world, a cautionary line from the old Papal coronation ceremony, a little grandiose as applied to the little old Jewish lady my mother had become, but somehow profoundly apt.

My mother was the glory of the world; of my world, my early world, a world strangely reasserting itself, like the original image on a canvas painted over many times. To my young eyes, she walked in a ring of light wide as the world.

A hazel-eyed, small boned redhead, my mother was striking, smart and “vivaciousness” this last, a highly prized quality in the 50s when Debbie Reynolds was an icon of the popular imagination into which my mother’s was securely plugged. In that post-war burst of mandatory optimism, my mother seemed committed to being perky, even as...

After my mother breathed her final breath, where did she go? Being present at her death was to find myself suspended in the profound mystery of things; death, I suppose, the original mystery, that is, after life itself. Even after we wrapped her body, covered her face and stood as she was carried on a pallet from her home, I couldn’t leave, as it was clear to me she hadn’t entirely left.

My sisters, niece and nephew dispersed to other rooms and I sat in a mild stupor on the couch alongside the now empty hospital bed. The atmosphere was strange, the air thinner and lighter. I sat on the couch alongside the now empty hospital bed and, in the stillness, became aware of my body abuzz with activity; I could vaguely sense colonies of living atoms cohering as my solid form. But as my attention extended beyond my body, it was clear that I was not alone.

Today is the anniversary of our parents’ marriage, which famously took place 5 weeks after they met.

In my mother’s telling, they were two sparkling souls with just enough shading to project the illusion of maturity. My father, at 37, was old for the time but medical school, war and its aftermath covered that nicely. Having been a liberator of Dachau and decorated for saving sick and broken survivors, he had the allure of reluctant hero. My mother, at 25, had had a failed marriage, but was chastened by it, pursuing a Ph.D. at night while teaching by day and being courted by other “eligible”s, validating her status as a good catch, despite the marital failure.

I later realized my mother’s storytelling was greatly influenced by characters she’d seen in 30s comedies--think Hepburn/Grant in Bringing up Baby--the brilliant, socially bumbling expert meets beautiful, independent, madcap gal. They clash. Sparks fly. But, in the end, find each other irresistible and realize their destiny together. “In the end” for my parents was 5 weeks, after which they eloped to Hyde Park,...

Within 7 years, my mother was not just my mother but mother to four other beings. I wasn’t even the first to claim her, having arrived 13 months behind my sister.

Besides being our mother, she was in some ways my father’s mother, cooking his meals, choosing his clothes, being home to receive him, exhausted from the mix of boredom and pulse-raising emergency that marked his life as a doctor.

Sister #3 objects to me calling my mother an atheist, insisting she was religious in her fashion or in Sister 3’s words “spiritual.”

Now it’s true that of her five children, one is an Eastern spiritual devotee, one is Unitarian, two are tribal, High Holiday Jews (one with strong leanings toward petitionary prayer, largely focused on her children getting married) and I am a religious mutt-- a Perennialist of sorts, sharing the common yearning, expressed in many religions, to experience the divine: a meditator, member of a social-justice based synagogue, student, at different times, of the Torah, the Gospels, the Principal Upanishads, Thomas a Kempis, Plato, Teresa of Avila, Simone Weil and Gurdjieff, among others.

How did this happen to the offspring of committed atheists??

The best I can say is that my mother had a religious temperament. She was capable of fervor, ecstasy and rapture; Sufis, revivalists, Southern Baptists and Elvis fans had nothing on her. But her spiritual enthusiasm always...

The quick sale of my parents’ house means that 61 years of stuff spanning the last half of the 20th century and the opening years of the 21st has had to be cleaned out in 3 months.

The vanishing of my mother makes the loss of the house that much more painful; my attempts to hold on reflected in how much stuff I’ve asked to be delivered to me, as the movers I’ve overpaid will do today.

I know that objects never entirely satisfy, that imbuing them with power is superstitious, even idolatrous, yet I stubbornly cling to my mother’s things, the things she loved and touched and used: The lamp by which she read. The vases in which she placed roses and lilacs from her small garden —now abandoned and dotted with splayed bushes, scattered and sad as makeshift graves. The paintings from the front hall and living room, backdrops to so much life lived in these spaces as well as the photos that captured it: well-fed doctors and their tipsy wives, shoulder straps askew, beaming at the camera after one-too-many on New Years, relatives...

I study my face in the mirror. The asymmetry getting more pronounced around the mouth, little cracks fanning from the outer corners of my eyes; I can no longer pass for a young woman. You not would look at me and use the "o" word: Those of us who lose our parents later in life know we’re not orphans in the narrow sense; not waifs at the mercy of fate and chance. The culture has little sympathy. There’s a reason Dickens’ fame wasn't built on 50-year orphans with Nespresso machines on their counters.

Still, even if the culture expects that I man up and get on with it, an insistent undertow exerts its hollowing force. The day my mother died, I was no longer anyone’s child. The barrier that had stood between me and the grave collapsed. The iron truth that one can die in grief and pain regardless of how fortunate she'd been in life told me everything about the limits of personal agency, of human control.

Some time during the Mad Men era, my mother began to drift away. By then, all 5 of us had survived early childhood and my parents had installed a German au pair, based on their notion that, given the Aryan bent for music, murder and cleaning, Greta would either seduce or intimidate us into compliance while keeping us presentable, none of which turned out not to be the case. Though sweet and pliable, she was a hard-core introvert; could barely eke out a hug, much less the maternal warmth I, for one, needed.

In those days, when I came home from school, my first question would be, “Where’s my Mom?” Greta’s answer always seemed to be the same: “Manhattan,” otherwise known to those in the outer boroughs as “the city.”

At some point before dinner, I’d hear the front door open and would fly down the stairs. My mother was home. “Mom, I won the spelling bee today!” “Mom, I got a hundred on my social studies test.”

But often my rivals had bested me and were already flocking around her with upturned, open mouths: “Mom,...

In those days, one of the places my mother chose to spend her time and my father’s money was in the jonquil-yellow sanctum of a man touted as a “Shear Genius:” Kenneth Battelle or just “Kenneth” to his clients; among them, Jackie Kennedy, Lauren Bacall, Babe Paley and . . . yes, well, my mother.

Though Kenneth’s style was self effacing, his ambition was not and he had a hand in iconic images of the time that endure to this day: Jackie’s lanky bangs and asymmetrical flip under that watermelon pink hat on the day JFK was shot in Dallas. Marilyn Monroe’s teased platinum wave for her hot, breathy rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” at Madison Square Garden in 1962.

Like my mother, Kenneth had been a talented child born in a backwater to a family that struggled through the Depression, all of which rendered him susceptible to the Hollywood glamour peddled in films of his youth.

Syracuse couldn’t confine him as Brooklyn couldn’t confine my mother. For both, Manhattan was Mecca. I think they understood each...

All of this flooded back on a call with Sister #1 about a week ago. Actively grieving the mother she loved, lived with her whole adult life (along with her family), and cared for, she’s still trying to shake off traumatic memories.

Sister 1 was speaking about one of the tasks she most dreaded during my mother’s illness--the weekly trip to her last hairdresser, Zena, a Russian-by-way-of-Israel émigré, at a place called Forever Young Unisex Beauty Salon on Avenue M.

“I’d call ahead to see if they were ready . . . As Mom got sicker, if we were there and they didn’t take her right away, she’d get confused and start screaming ‘What’s going on here?’ ‘What’s happening?’ “

In those days, the winter and spring of 2014, just getting my mother’s pajamas off and putting on her street clothes played out like a scene of elder abuse. She fought and cried like a trapped animal. The one time I had to do it, I had a distinct awareness of looking sadistic, and, in my anger at that, I began to feel sadistic....

A few days later, my curiosity got the best of me and, with memories of Kenneth’s East 50s fantasia floating around, I hopped the train to Brooklyn to see the last place that tended to my mother’s famous auburn hair. . . or hairs as they were at the end, only as auburn as Zena’s dyes could make them.

Getting out at Avenue M, I walk block after block of one and two story stores, leaning together like so many jumbled, mismatched teeth (Superior Kosher Fish flush against a combo shoe store/copy center next to New Age Mystical Readings). As the side streets are a mix of crowded apartments and large single-family homes, I’m aware of the intense disparities of wealth, class, citizenship and rights pressed nose to nose in New York.

It reminds me of once seeing my mother on Avenue J, a sister shopping street, in her fabulous Kenneth bouffant and a mink-trimmed cape and diamond earrings, running home from the subway on the day my brother had been accepted to Amherst, early decision. Giving her some slack, as 1) she’d come from...