Relic

The destination of my pilgrimage had shifted from Lindisfarne to the family home, a blue cape cod on Sylvan Avenue—the first street in what became a massive suburban development in Queensbury that laid waste to woods in its wake.  “She had a hard life,” said a woman I met once on a plane.  I must have told her about Mom’s hip break and gone on to review her life from the time she was widowed at age 50.  She never remarried.  Never even dated.  “How could I?” was always her comeback.  She took care of her parents as they aged and died.  Her children left physically and some left emotionally, too.  Her response:  fill the house, every inch, pack it tight (Mom was a genius at packing), finding little spaces for everything she couldn’t let go of, things precious and potentially necessary to someone someday.  In her house, nothing was lost; and while she lived, no one was permitted to order the chaos.  “I know where everything is,” she’d say, even when she really didn’t.  For years we’d been moving piles of newspapers and magazines off the kitchen chairs so there would be room for guests on feast days.  “Just put it down by the washer.”  “If not there, then, there’s room in the bathtub upstairs.”  We even used a junk car, the 77 Olds for storage, as well as our greenhouse that was rotting in the back yard by the fence.  We, her children, always obeyed.  For years we carried piles of stuff round and round, looking for places to put it.  We had been immobilized artifacts and ephemera--history--and spoke of the furniture and collectibles as if they were sacred.  Perhaps that is why neither of my siblings who lived near Mom had made any effort to clean the house in the eighteen months between her fall and her eventual death.  “It” was too “overwhelming.”  Yes.  They have jobs and lives.  Yes.  But there was more to it:  the stuff Mom collected was imbued with sacredness.  How could she have trusted me with the job of handling the “tangibles,” disbursing them, unsettling all that was sacred in what was to some eyes is an antique store and to others is a hoarder house?  When I arrived and began the work, sure enough, every piece had a talisman-like power to lead my mind back through the years to gone worlds and once dear places:  the northern mountains, the southern pine barrens and across the Atlantic.  There was garnet from the North Creek mines, hunks of slag that looked like meteorites from Batsto, jars of shells and grains of beach sand, a paper mache coal mine with a balsam wood elevator, grade school stories corrected by her, machines to bunch asparagus, railroad lanterns, pictures of the Yorkshire Dales and ruined abbeys, and even her high school scrap book.  Nothing lost but me.

On the drive from Michigan, I was reading about the cult of relics in medieval Europe, and, like any pilgrim, I felt I was going to Mom’s house (her shrine) to be in the presence of an invisible person.  Relics that turned up were thought to do so by the grace of God and were understood to be messages to the pilgrim from the beyond.

First day of the cellar clean-out, the dump truck arrived and up came the boxes full of children’s clothes.  I recognized each outfit, and it was hard to let them go.  But the dump truck was there to be filled.  College books.  Luggage smelling of mildew.  College books.  Buddhism.  The Turko-Grecian War.  Hurry, hurry, time is money.  “Throw it,” “You can’t keep that,” “They are mildewed.”  “No baby clothes.”  Pressure to look fast and discard.  A box came up with another box on top.  It was black with swirls of color.  Thin enough to have held stockings, lingerie, sets of pocket hankies.  Too pretty not to open.  I stopped long enough to read the fine print:  “Barton’s.”  It was a chocolate box, and when I opened it, I was stunned.  

There was a faded old photograph that captured, even with a quick look, joy beneath gray layers of time.  The reflection of the flash was a bright spot still shining in the window behind the kitchen table.  A family group sat around a table sharing a watermelon.  The women held up their pieces.  The table was covered with an oilcloth.  I flipped it over, and, miracle of miracles, the people were named!  There was Uncle Frank (my mother’s favorite).  He is visibly happy.  I can see the ring on his left finger and his striped trousers or maybe that’s the long dress worn by Cornelia Grawe (who must be cousin Mildred’s mother).  Frank wears a suit and tie, and the women are wearing the high collared blouses of the late nineteenth century.  Their dark hair is swept back and pinned up.  My great grandmother, Kate Wescoat, is sixth from the left.  She is young—no babies yet.  I know she married Philip Wescoat in 1900, and so the photo must have been taken around the turn of the century.  The photo speaks to me of the joy of living in an extended family.  The pleasure of sitting down together for a simple meal—just a watermelon.  Even when I was a kid, my Jersey relatives had such meals.  If we visited Grandmother Walker (born a Wescoat) in the early summer, we’d have meals of strawberry shortcake.  In their world, strawberry shortcake was not dessert.  Ruth Wescoat made big casseroles of fluffy biscuit, and the red red juices of strawberries layered with whipped cream filled us up.  Whatever fruit was in season was always the main dish. 

I knew instantly that this photo would be my best find, my relic, and I found it on the first day of a week-long clean-out.  I felt sure it was a message from my mother (historian and saint).  Who else could have nudged me or turned my attention to that chocolate box that contained a photo about the real sweets available in this world?  I posted it to Facebook with the wish that my Mama had rejoined her family group at such a table in the world we mortals cannot see. 

But the real message is for the living.  Four of us, four children, grew up in Mom’s crowded house, and, despite the fact that she bought things in triplicate, there is a sick feeling of competition, as if there is not enough to go around.  It’s possible that Mom was too much the historian, too much the teacher, leaving each child with needs for attention and affirmation that went unsatisfied.  Four rooms.  Two girls (13 months apart) had to share a room for there to be enough space; and one now resents that, resents that she wasn’t treated as a separate individual.  As we matured, each adult child wanted Mom for themselves, claimed her, sought to be her favorite.  Even though I shared the watermelon photo, Jennifer had to see the original and clearly wants to possess it for herself.  Where does this capitalism of the heart come from?  What experiences feed into a belief that the essences of life can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on love, stage a hostile takeover of history or happiness?  It’s based on scarcity economics, the notion or perhaps the feeling that there’s not enough to go around, and the belief that these intangible phenomena exist in a fixed quantity to be scrambled for, rather than that you can only increase them by giving them away.

Antique Salt Water Taffy Box / Inside was Mom's hair

It's as if she just stepped off the beach or climbed down from a tractor after plowing a field

Medieval saints were often exhumed and some found to be incorrupt.  Their books, shoes, jewelry, and even their bodies were taken as relics.  Days after the clean-out I dreamed of objects unearthed, objects appearing.  Shirley Temple in her original box.  Her white dress is stiff with age and dust, and her eyes rolled back are yellowed.  Open an ancient looking Fralinger salt water taffy box to find my mother’s honey-colored pigtails still soft and bright.  Open the box.  Open the box.  What would my mother look like now?  In my dream, I opened a box to find her body changed:  skin like brown-black leather and fingers like sticks.  And even in the dream, my siblings and I quarreled over her mummified remains.

But the relic photo has an urgent message from the rural extended family to the suburban children of a diasporic farm girl.  Family should not be taken for granted.  Place and position mean nothing.  Family exists in its extensions.  “This is my body.”  “It is good. It is sweet.  Take and eat.”  My sister, Jennifer, rightly noted that the people in the photo arrange themselves in a Last Supper kind of pose.  But I prefer to see the ritual carving of a watermelon world as Mom’s wish for us to share and enjoy and come together.  If we grab and hoard, then the spirit of Nesco, will be truly lost as this photo almost was.  There is something for everyone in Mom’s house—a house that represents her mind and spirit if not her body exactly.  “Do this in remembrance of me.”

Holding On to the Dead

                My father’s and mother’s deaths couldn’t have been more different.  Pop was 53 and died in his sleep of a massive heart attack.  His children found him the next morning on the pull-out couch in the rental cottage at Indian Lake, deep in the Adirondack Mountains of New York state.  No time to say goodbye.  While I answered the coroner’s questions, his body was taken somewhere, and my brothers and sisters and I never saw him again.  Closed casket.  Mom, on the other hand, was 88 and in a slow decline after a hip break.  Pneumonia after pneumonia had weakened her, and her body gave out.  Even though we had time to let go, time to say goodbye; and even though I was with her when she died and had hours afterward to sit with her expired body and talk to her and talk about her with others, it was still over too soon.  I wanted to keep her.  I wanted to help prepare her, so I pulled off her socks and helped to wash her body.  I wanted to witness all the people that cared about her speaking in loving ways.  I wanted the song the tattooed aide, Jean, played on her cell phone, “What does it Look Like in Heaven,” to go on forever.  But I participated even in the parts of the ritual I didn't want:  I walked behind the gurney, I rode the “cargo” elevator down to the back entrance, and I let them slide Mom’s body, zipped in a bag, into the transport vehicle.  I let them take my prized possession, my world, my mother.  Our close and complicated relationship was over too soon even though she was 88.  

Tending to a long dead relative, the Torjans are comfortable touching and interacting with the expired human body.

                The nursing home staff graciously gave us time to be with our mother.  This was a pleasant surprise because I’d heard Mom complain that the staff at these facilities covered up death.  “They don’t even tell us.”  Because they don’t want to upset people whose own deaths are imminent.  But Lois, my mother’s roommate, was kind.  “Is she still with us?” asked Lois, pulling back the divider curtain on the morning Mom died.  Lois was kind and compassionate throughout Mom’s dying.  She’d been married to a man who ran a funeral home in Argyle and had told me once before that she enjoyed helping people through their grief.  A dozen or so old people in wheelchairs and on foot came into the room to pay their respects to my mother, lying gaunt in her bed with her stuffed newfie on her sunken chest.  Being loved even in death is reassuring to everyone, no matter their age.  Hiding death is terrifying.  Ironically, it was the Catholic priest who rushed us at the grave—“I have to cut this short … I have a very important meeting to attend to discuss how to cope with the shortage of priests.”  I wondered silently how this grieving family would cope with his shortage of compassion.  We stood there beside the casket at a loss.  Someone laid a bough from Mom’s crabapple tree on the wooden box.  Someone else balanced a Kool cigarette on the center molding, carefully so it wouldn’t fall into the hole.  Mom hated to waste a good cigarette or even part of one.  We took turns kneeling and touching the wood as if it was her like the way we kiss the wooden feet of the wooden cross on Good Friday.  She was our Jesus now.  Goodbye priest; we don’t need you.  “O.k.  now we must let the cemetery people do their work,” interrupted Sarah, the waxy-faced director from the funeral home.  We were not allowed to watch them lower my mother into the dark.  We were not allowed to see dirt.  The gravediggers were not even called gravediggers but “cemetery people.”  The social tarp was pulled over the Act 5 ending of our family’s life together.  We left feeling dissatisfied.  We left angry.  None of us were ready for life—the common life we shared through Mom—to be over.

                Moving on after death.  How is it possible?  When Pop died, I felt nothing but anger at the gatherings of well-meaning relatives and neighbors who would tell funny stories, who smiled and laughed.  I wasn’t ready for any of that.  I hated the fact that we were expected to just go on with life, forgetting about his death, ignoring the obvious and utter change.  Years later when I was writing a dissertation on complaint, I read books on elegy and despised the Freudian theory that to complete the work of mourning, the bereaved had to find a compensatory object for the lost loved one.  In the wake of Mom’s death, searching online for connection and comfort, I found an anthropologist talking about a culture in Indonesia—the people are called Torajans—who literally live with their dead relatives for long periods of time.  If grandfather dies, his body is rubbed with leaves or injected with formalin, and he is laid out in the family home and allowed to metamorphose.  His clothes and bedding are changed periodically, and he is taken out for a “walk” around the village.  Family members bring him food, drink, and cigarettes once a day.  When a guest enters and asks about grandfather, his daughter may say, “he is still sleeping,” or “he is sick.”   The anthropologist acknowledged that this may seem gruesome to western people, but that the Torajans had a “relational” perspective on death, understood it as a “social process.”  The years with decaying grandfather in the living room gave the family time to transition, to develop a new relationship to him as a revered ancestor instead of a living family member.  The process of dying wasn’t over until the family could throw a lavish funeral for their family member—a party for the village that involved the sacrifice of many buffaloes, which are the spirit animal that is thought to carry the soul to the afterlife.  The blond anthropologist was evidently taken with this culture because she married a Torajan man, who has happy memories of playing with his dead grandfather.  “If we could expand our definition of death to encompass life,” she suggests, “we could experience death as part of life and perhaps face death with something other than fear.”  We have much to learn from peoples like the Torajans.

Corpse of Torajan woman, Tana, going out for a walk

                In the long history of western societies, there have been peoples who have kept the dead with them.  I think of the 7^th century Anglo-Saxon monks, who carried the body of Cuthbert around northern England at the time of the Viking invasions.  Before they placed Cuthbert in his final resting place, the monks opened the box and found that his body was “incorrupt.”  That means that it hadn’t decayed, was fresh and flexible, as if he were just sleeping.  This was one of the many miracles that established the cult of Saint Cuthbert.  Research suggests that holy men and women were frequently exhumed by the faithful, who still searched for confirming signs that there was a spiritual life beyond death.  The dead were seen as persons, medieval historian, Peter Brown, explains.  "Indeed the cult of the saints in sixth-century Europe is an illustration of the ancient and poignant theme--the quest for the Ideal Companion.  The saints, said Ambrose (made bishop of Milan in 374), were the only relatives that you were free to choose. Their protection had the intimacy of a surrogate kinsman.

                It seems to me that in our world, because of the dominance of scientific positivism, we need practices that recognize, mark, and honor major losses, and we need desperately new understandings of death, informed by the lifeways of peoples in other places and other times.  My own mother used to tell and re-tell the story of Grampy being laid out at home.  I never asked her how many days he lay in her Aunt Ruth’s parlor, but she said she talked to him and bumped into him when she had to run the vacuum.  

                My neighbor Lark, who works at an elder-care facility, lost her mother in 1994.  “It’s still hard,” she admits, but at least once a year, Lark says that she has a weirdly comforting dream.  “Me and my sisters go and dig Mom up and we take her out for a car ride.”  Whenever I have this dream, I am just so excited to really see her.  I guess it’s kind of weird that we have to dig her up, but it’s still wonderful to see her and talk to her.”  I’ve been praying, really praying, to have such a reassuring dream.  I want to see and feel my mother’s presence.  I want her in any form.  I want her death to be part of my life.

                “It isn’t over.  Death doesn’t mean the relationship is over.  Of course, death makes the person no longer accessible in the same way, but you hold on to them by remembering.  That is how you grieve.”  My current therapist thinks that the panic I feel at losing my mother stems from the fact that my father’s death was so sudden.  He did disappear.  I’m not satisfied with the cliché that “you have your memories.”  We lose memories, all too easily as well.  No … I want to hold my mother’s hand.  I want to light her cigarette.  I want to see her toothless smile.  I realize that none of us can know, but rather than rely on psychological or even religious truisms, I’d rather trust my feelings.  And I feel that my mother and I are on some kind of journey together.  I know this because every night since she died I sleep a restless sleep searching for her.  I don’t have vivid or colorful dreams; what happens as night feels more like “dream thoughts.” The first week after her death, my dreaming mind was full of my effort to get to where she is … to help her somehow.  Now, the third week, I sleep more deeply and have dreams with situations in which we talk things over:  the tiresome nursing home people, whether her boyfriend can live with us, whether she likes clown-suited nurses.  Weird things like that.  But at least we are talking.  My friend, Lark, tells me to end the day with a cup of tea and a talk with Mom.  I am trying to do that, too.  When I see something on my daily walks that reminds me of her, I try to remember to talk to her about them.  If I am more assertive, if I complete my sentences, if I am courageous, then maybe I can even improve my relationship with Mom.

                I still think of her eyes when they looked at me for the last time.  Close to death, they were still so blue.  The blue of longed for things that are always far away:  mountains, the ocean, a city on the horizon line.  The world is blue at its edges and in its depths.  Essayist Rebecca Solnit explains that blue is the color of light that got lost.  “Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us.  It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. … This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.”  My blue-eyed Mom was always a little bit distant.  Not a hugger.  Emotionally cool.  Leaving her babies asleep at the foot of the mountain to ride to the top and ski down.  When she opened those eyes and looked at me in her last moments of life, she tinged with blue my solitude, grief, and longing, setting me on the road that leads (perhaps) to the conclusion that some things we have only as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant. 

Offerings of cigarettes to the dead continue in Indonesia

Pastures New?

St. Anthony, St. Anthony

Please come down

Something is lost

And can’t be found.

Saint Anthony is my mother’s go-to saint.  Right now I need his help because for the past three weeks of nights, I cannot sleep but look for her obsessively.  For my husband, the dead are dead: just gone.  For religious friends, the dead go to heaven; “they are in a better place,” end of story.  The story of my life with mother and maybe every daughter’s life with her mother cannot have such a clear ending or maybe any ending.  After I read a book on “fell” shepherding in the Lake District of England, I understood better.  A fell (from Old Norse fell, fjall, "mountain") is a high and barren landscape feature, such as a mountain range or moor-covered hills.  In fell farming, the sheep spend most of the year on upland pastures that are not fenced or walled.  In theory they could wander right across the Lake District.  But they don’t because they know their place on the mountains.  They are “hefted,” taught their sense of belonging by their mothers as lambs.  “Heft” can be used as a noun, a verb, or an adjective, and it basically describes an attachment or bond to an animal’s special spot on earth. 

As long as Mom was here, on this earth, my place was somehow secure … even when she was at the nursing home.  Now that she is gone, gone too is that invisible cable that bound me to her and to my place.  At night, I follow an irresistible urge to head home … to her, to her in a box, to do something, to get somewhere, to suckle.  No places are recognizable anymore.  Where is my place on the mountain?

The morning I sat with her before she headed off to her own place, I kept my hand on top of hers.  Her hand was like a rocky mountain, and it was warm in the way stones absorb the heat of the sun.  I remember thinking of her body, even in its shrunken state, in terms of a landscape or a world.  My mother.  My mountain.  She was it for me.  And like a good fell ewe, she taught me the places where I belong, to which I will be returning all my life:  Nesco on the edge of the Jersey Pines, Brigantine—the sea isle off Atlantic City, and Indian Lake.  But even more than these beloved places, she taught me how to find good pasture anywhere.  She led the way.  Even in hard times.  I talk to her as I walk.

“Mom, I was coming up through Kearsley Park yesterday, and the purple phlox was blooming like mad.  Suddenly, I remembered that God gets pissed off if people don’t pause to acknowledge the color purple.  So I did, and I noticed a path along the stream.  I followed it into the bushes, and I saw evidence that homeless men had used it as a washing place.  Some of their clothes remained on the branches.  Along this part of the stream, I’ve seen woodchucks and even deer—so near the road.  When I took the path to the washing place and thought of these men without houses, I thought of you going to the laundromat all those years and enjoying the adventure of it.  For most people, laundry is a chore we take care of in the privacy of our own houses.  But you filled the cellar so full you couldn’t have a repairman down to fix or replace the machines when they broke.  No worries.  You didn’t complain; just did what you had to do.  Even from this distance, I can still hear you striking up conversations at the Broad Street laundry.  I see you rubbing stain remover into the collars of your white blouses and standing outside in your jeans puffing on a Kool cigarette.  No cell phone to scroll through.  No book to read.  You looked.  You sensed the air of the day.  For you, this was pastime passing excellent, and you drove home with a sense of accomplishment.  Work is something that you relished.  It was life.  It was fun.  You showed us how to graze.  ‘Graze, my daughters on the fields of this world.  Don’t shy away.’”

There will be no other mother for me.

 

Why didn’t I stay by your side like Jennifer did?

I wanted you to come to Michigan, but you didn’t want to leave your own home turf and Jennifer packed up her life and headed north, going to the place where she’d been hefted.

What about me?  Banished.  Far away from my familiar mountains and fields.

Can we find each other and find a new place to graze together, Mama?  Will you lead me there tonight?

Dear Saint Anthony, I pray

Bring her back without delay.