DIED 2004
BY THE TIME I took a job at her son’s software company in Austin, she was a sweet old lady who wore fuchsia lipstick and pastel muumuus, a proofreader at the shop where we had our printing done. She corrected our errors with deliberateness and calm despite the extreme sense of crisis her son and I were prone to generate in any situation. I knew she loved poetry and music and politics, but I didn’t know her in her heyday, when she and her husband were the entire staff of the only newspaper in Marble Falls, Texas. When she wrote press releases for Ralph Yarborough and campaign ditties for Adlai Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson. When they begged her to sing song after song at parties attended by Ann Richards and Billy Lee Brammer and Willie Morris. I didn’t know how it was when her husband left, I didn’t know why she never married again. And then, gradually, she didn’t know these things either.
When she could not think of the word, could not remember the name, could not work, could not be alone, she bore the bewilderment with grace. Though there were times when it was too much. To be lost, surrounded by strangers, everything so wrong and idiotic, sometimes you could just smack them all and run out the door. You wouldn’t think there could be so many years of this, that death could be so patient, determined not just to take you but to erase you altogether. Yet one warm spring day in the timeless time after she couldn’t recall the names of her children or even that they were her children, those abandoned loves took her out for a walk. She burst into an aria, sang it full throat from beginning to end. Had she ever sung Italian before? Where did she learn opera? She marched on a half step ahead of them, betraying nothing, a smile on her still-red lips. Bravo, cara mamma, bravissimo!