Let It Rain!

Maybe I am a lousy sister

“You have used confidences to curry favor with Mom for years.”  “If you want me to count the ways you’ve broken trust, I will.”  “You didn’t save my wedding dress out of spite.”  “How could you not see that picture of me on top of the trash.  You did it on purpose!”  Every text felt like a stone hitting my body.  I know I haven’t been perfect, but am I that bad?  Down, down I fell.  Even worse, they attacked my blog as “lies, lies, stories not your own, partial truths, "gaslighting," you cut us out of Mom’s death, we mattered, too.”  Yes, I know, I know.  But blogs are personal.  I was there when Mom died.  She opened her eyes, took a breath, and exhaled for the last time, looking into my face.  In that moment, that haunting moment, nothing mattered but the relationship I’d struggled to have with her.  It was personal.  Just because I didn’t include you when I wrote about that experience doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge your value.  I know you are part of me and I you, my brother and sisters.  We nurtured one another, giving and receiving.  I remember leaning on Katie, my rock, when I struggled with emotional problems.  I remember talking to Jennifer about books and ideas and praising her poetry.  We all, following Mom, looked to brother James as the man of the family.  At least, that's how I remember it.  We played the roles mysteriously assigned us within our family culture and have, since becoming adults, struggled to separate, to be ourselves.  Me, too.  I have a right to BE, too.  The lost wedding dress and coveted collectibles seem to me to be merely objective correlatives for the emotional gaps and misfires of human love.  It was a terrible storm.  But I want to take my siblings' criticisms seriously.  Did I "use confidences" to win Mom's love?  I guess it's possible.  The thing is:  Mom used me as a sounding board, as a confidante.  She shared her worries and feelings, and I reciprocated.  Of course, she was a worrier and, of course, she worried about her children--all of them, but I never felt this kind of talk was "trash-talk" or a betrayal except maybe once when I was entrusted with a very personal and sensitive story.  I'm sorry that I shared it.  Even worry is no excuse.  Going through decades of family photos, I see that Mom had much more adult relationships with my sisters.  She went on trips to see them, they did things in the world together.  I don't think I ever separated from Mom but was stuck by her side, which meant being stuck at the kitchen table listening or on the other end of the telephone line listening.  Mom's sister, Ruthellen, called Mom "shithead," and I was "little shithead."  I, too, could be envious of the relationships the others had with Mom; but I am not.  I know that each one is unique and important.  Each one is a story that should be told.  Now, every time I write a blog post, I risk alienating my family members further, since I don't seem to have the right words.  But I write of my Mother and my brother and sisters because I want to understand how the cracks got so big that the earthenware bowl of family must be tossed in the dumpster.  It's old.  It's beautiful.  In the bottom there is a delicate design of three sisters in bonnets fishing from a log with a bull frog looking on.  It came from great-grandmother.  It was passed down.  We can fix it.  Please save it.  I texted this to my brother just this morning.  Proof that the things themselves signify so much more.

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"Let it Rain!" (post from last week that I was reluctant to share)

I'm back in Flint.  It's Sunday, sun shining.  I need to be at Mass, but I have to drive Paul to Bishop airport to return his rental car.  We finish the errand too late for me to make 10:00 mass at St. Mary’s on Franklin Street.  So I drive to St. John Vianney, but the pews are packed and the people dressed up and the priest’s voice flat.  About to be boxed in by a handsome middle- aged woman and her well-groomed husband, I give them my seat and flee to the vestibule.  From a bench in the back, I hear the liturgy of the Word.  Moses speaks to the Israelites about the location of the ultimate commandment which is not far away in the Heavens but in the secret closet of each heart.  When the gospel rolls around, I hear Jesus answer the question put to him by a young lawyer, “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life,” with a parable of a traveler fallen among thieves, stripped, robbed, and left for dead on the roadside.  The officially religious people—a Priest and a Levite—looked on this man and walked on.  Only a Samaritan (the good Samaritan) stopped and tried to help.  He bound up his wounds, poured in oil and wine, put him on his beast and led him to in Inn, making provision for him.  The take-away is plain:  we must do the deeds of mercy.  The gospel somehow gave me permission to leave the liturgy before the eucharist.  It felt stale and I was restless, dying to cry out to someone … the clouds?  The sky?  My mother?  My God, my God?

I drive from Chevrolet Avenue over to the old Flint Farmer’s Market.  I park and head off down the river.  I have no route or destination.  I hear a voice from the soundtrack that kept me company on the 12-hour drive back to Michigan yesterday: “Sometimes I wonder if I’m ever gonna make it home again.  It’s so far and out of sight.  I really need someone to talk to, and nobody else knows how to comfort me tonight.”  That’s Carole King’s voice.  Where is mine?  And, for that matter, where is home for me?  I don’t know.  And I don’t know whether the issue is making it home or escaping the gravitational pull of Mom’s home where all the antiques and collectibles newly liberated from their fixed positions orbit like little moons or the balls of a juggling clown.  Careful, careful.  They auction people weren’t careful.  “They really trashed the house,” texts my sister.  I think I hear an undertone of reprimand.  Hopefully, I imagine it.

From above the Flint River, swifts dip down to sip the water mid-flight.  No lead in their flight or mine.  I walk fast.  The sun is hot; thank heaven for the cool breeze.  Out from under the overpass of I-475 I’m on Lewis Street (one of the poorest streets on the east side).  I cross to the shady side of the road, and suddenly I hear this music.  The building is whitewashed.  No name of a church or a denomination.  Just a sign that reads “Jesus Christ is Lord.”  

I try the door but don’t force it.  I put my ear to the door, trying to make out the lyrics of the rousing gospel sounds, “All men who love God praise the rain, praise the rain, oh let it come down.”  I hear something like this.  The voice booming and the choir echoing in wave after wave of music falling down on me.  I feel like I’m resting against the big voice on the other side of the door.  The big voice that I cannot see.  The big voice that is calling my own voice out of me.  I don’t care what people passing by might think.  Drug addict.  Prostitute.  Someone who is hurting.  Tears run down my face.  Rain rhymes with Pain—the rain of troubles.  But the rain of tears washes away pain.  I notice the purple stains of mulberries on the sidewalk and the sign for Art’s Pub and Grub across the street.  It’s been closed for years.  “Let it rain ai ain!”  Later, when I’m back in my car, I use my SmartPhone to google the lyrics that I think I heard, and all the sounds fall into place.  

“Open the floodgates of Heaven.  Let it rain.  Let it rain.  Open the floodgates of Heaven.  Let it rain.  Let the rain come down.”  The church must have been playing a YouTube video the same one I was watching of Bishop Paul S. Morton, Pastor of Changing a Generation Full Gospel Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.  On the YouTube clip, he sets up the song by asking the congregation to put themselves in the presence of God—to find themselves in the Holy of Holies.  I recognize the Old Testament imagery of the tabernacle in the desert, and I remember that words in the Hebrew Bible are often compared to dew and drops of rain.  “I believe that somebody here tonight just wants Him to open up the windows of Heaven for you.”  Mm hmm.  I’m feeling all of this from sound alone, sound so strong it carries me into the presence of both God and Mom, and she is with Him.  And I am just crying on the other side of a door.  Open the window, Lord!  Mama, can you hear me?  Pray for me?  I love you, Mom.  They see me and know my love as I know theirs. 

When I get back home an hour late, Paul is still at the table going through old family photos.  Where’ve you’ve been?  He asks, and I tell him that I had a very interesting experience. I don’t tell him that a preacher I never saw and an invisible but audible congregation, moving within the space of that white storefront church on Lewis Street, gave me my voice back. 

Thinking back over the past week when I was home, working with the auctioneer to clean out Mom’s house, I realize that I was as stolid as one of her earthenware crocks.  Her house looked devastated without her organizing presence, and I when I was there, I wanted to cry but didn’t.  The couch she slept on for twenty years in the wood stove room was gone when I arrived.  Who took Mom’s bed?  The white bone china of great grandmother’s was all mixed up with Staffordshire face mugs and other knick-knacks, strewn carelessly over the blue carpet that still smells like cat pee even though the last cat was buried out back years ago.  Mom’s beloved things washed up in a wreck.  “Oh Mary Jo, I’ve made a mess of our lives,” were her first words to me after breaking her hip.  No, Mom, it’s just the way life goes.

She’s gone.  Never will she answer the door.  Never will she smoke a cigarette at the table.  Never will I smell the Kools and listen to her fret.  Never will I hear my name pronounced Mare ee Jo.  Never.  I want to scream at someone.  I want to cry for her.  At the cemetery, I moved toward her still unmarked grave and would have thrown myself down on the brown sod if my daughter hadn’t been with me.  Instead, I held myself together.  I did the job of executrix.  I took the fraternal beatings.  Swallowed the tears.  Swallowed the pain.  Stood up and got the job done.  But I felt and still sometimes feel like a frightened child with a world of whirling objects spinning around my head.  I am dizzy as I remember how the corner cupboards spilled out her Christmas Santas and blue and white German Meisen.  Kitchen cabinets gave up her favorite dishes—Poppytrail with the homely farm scenes.  Blanket boxes dropped their linens and embroidered handkerchiefs.  A silver-plated tea service was rejected as were the dozens of brass candlesticks standing mute in the corner of the dining room.  “They don’t sell.”  No one in this generation wants such things.  The cherry drop-leaf table that I worked at for years bid goodbye to the house, to the yard with the pressure of my pencil making words and sentences in its finish.  The furniture, now better called by its old English equivalent, “moveables,” left at the speed of light.  Is this what surviving a cyclone feels like?  “I want to go home, I want to go home.  There’s no place like home.”  That’s Dorothy’s voice.  Where is mine?  At the House of Frankenstein wax museum in Lake George (my daughter’s favorite tourist trap), the scariest exhibit for me is not the ax murderess or the witch burning or even the electric chair.  It’s the black hole.  A tunnel you walk through, trying to keep your balance while a vortex of stars whirls around and around.  “Kat I can’t do it,” I say in a panicked voice.  “Close your eyes, Mom, keep walking, and hold my hand.”  I made it through holding onto my daughter’s words.  God, I hope that Mom held fast to my words as I imagined talking her through the dark and whirling passage of her final hour?

Kat and I stayed up north in a rented cottage on Indian Lake, continuing the family tradition.  Our cottage is just down the road from where my father died and where my mother stayed for years.  Mom kept us returning to the same lake where we’d been traumatized by finding Pop’s dead body.  Calling and crying.  Pairs of loons winter separately and find each other every summer at the same northern body of water.  Mom probably didn’t imagine her kids as loons, but I think she did hope that hurts would be healed if we just kept coming back.  She tried valiantly to keep us connected to our lost father through immersion in the spirit of the lake.  It did and didn’t work.  Ritual cannot substitute for sharing feelings, and words are all we humans have.

 After one hectic day down at Mom’s house in Queensbury (50 miles south of the cottage), when we return Home to our cottage at dusk, I grab a paddle at the “office” and run down the hill to the lake.  I’m going for a “ride” in a kayak as Mom loved to do.  I revert to present tense because I need to relive the experience.  I paddle to the middle of the lake and let go.  I drift.  I can see the house on the hill (Camp Mary) where Pop died.  I see the mountains growing black in the fading light.  The sun is bright in my eyes.  I drift, and details of my parents’ bodies and lives come back to me.  My father’s printed boxer shorts, the way he’d meticulously fold toilet paper on his thigh before wiping, the smell of his aftershave.  My mother rubbing Vaseline on the infected wound on her leg, her arthritic hands, her love of weeding and going out to the wood pile, the orange fires she made in her wood stove from late autumn through cold springs.  Random details.  The rocking of the boat is lulling.  I lay back and feel I am leaning on their recovered lives the way I’d lean into Mom’s chest when I’d ride on her lap as a child home from Indian Lake, watching the lights on the dashboard, watching my father’s head drop and hearing Mom’s voice wake him, “Joe!”  When Mom kayaked, she stayed close to shore, afraid of deep water.  I’m not afraid.  I go out deep.  When I was a little girl at the Jersey shore, I’d beg my father to “carry me out deep” where I’d get to jump off his shoulders into green surging waves of ocean, sure that he would catch me.  I see now what a gift that was.  Carry me out deep!  Open the floodgates of Heaven!  Let it rain!  Let it rain!  Such details like Mom’s collectibles liberated for some new combinations in the lives of their children fly around and around in my mind.

I paddle back.  My daughter is waiting to fish.  We fish and catch two large and feisty small-mouth bass, which we admire and release.  Up the hill and into the cabin, I settle into the flannel nightgown, compliments of Mom’s stockpile.  I grabbed the last down comforter, and I AM comforted that somehow she is still provisioning the vacation that meant so much to her.  I boil water and pour it over a tea bag, stirring sugar into the teacup with a delicate sterling silver teaspoon—Lancaster Rose.  She collected a set for each daughter to give us for our weddings.  I know for sure that I will not let Mom’s things sit on shelves or be mere decorative flourishes in my life.  They are free now to be used, to inspire, to sing in their own way about her grace, her love, her benisons.   

Back in Flint, when I think of the vacation and try to picture my cabin, I instinctively go to hers.  Her big tree, her deck, her gas stove, her table.  It takes a real effort to remember the interior configuration of my own cottage, hard to focus on just my view.  And tonight, that feels okay.  It tells me that I remain in her orbit, that she continues to organize and animate the beings she created.  We had one stormy night at the lake this year when it rained, really rained.  And the floodgates of Heaven opened.  (Perhaps Mom opened a window.)  And in the morning, the mountains exhaled their visible breath.  My mother’s last word, the barely audible sound of breath leaving her lungs, is now part of the world-breath that hovers over the trees, hovers over the surface of the waters, and I know that one day, at an hour I cannot predict, my last exhale will merge with it, too.  Until then, the small voice in my own heart, responding to her last “word,” says:  let us love the things of this world and one another, let us dizzy ourselves with the fullness of it all.  I felt my own soul rise up at the sound of birds and Mom running water to fill the coffee percolator.  Wrapped in her mantle, I go outside to breathe through every pore a new day after rain.