Exits
It was 1984, the year George Orwell made famous, when my mother died of a heart ailment. I was at the Hyatt in Los Angeles, getting ready to do the TV show Solid Gold, when I received the call from my father. In the saddest voice I'd ever heard, he told me that everything possible had been done to help her, but it just hadn't worked.
I received the information and then I turned into a machine. Automatic pilot. I didn't tell the band that my mother had died until after we'd performed, and I have no idea how the performance went or what songs we played. I just knew I had to keep moving, because if I stopped, I'd have to think about an incomprehensible loss. The days following my mother's death were a gray vacuum. I remember Skip being gentle, not at all melodramatic, just close and concerned for my feelings. He'd have to be that strong again a few years later when my father died while we were on the road.
For several months before his death, my father had a private nurse attending to his needs. I'd call him from the road or write silly postcards trying to cheer him up, but I don't think there's any substitute for the physical companionship of someone you love when you feel sick and lonely. I've often wondered why I'm never there when people die. I'd like to have held both of my parents and shared some of their thoughts on the process of dying. I'm not sure I could have said no to touring without causing major problems to Starship, but the more I think about it now, I see that I should have been with my father. Even with the nurse there, family might have made him a bit more at ease with what he knew were his final days.
“Now you're the matriarch,” Paul reminded me of the natural but bewildering reality.
Some whiny little part of my mourning was anger— “How could you leave me?” No matter how old a person is, it feels like it's too soon for them to go. I talk to my father and mother sometimes, hoping their spirits can hear, about my love, my mistakes, and my gratitude for their peaceful parenting.
The older I get, the more I see the striking similarities between a parent's and a child's genetic makeup. In my case, I got my mother's personality, or at least the showtime aspects of it, and from my father, I got an almost exact duplicate of his body (minus the critical gender specifications). But there's an added element that distinguishes each of us, one from the other. It's the individual's specific way of perceiving the world that swings the whole game in a different direction.
The way I see it, that missing number in the DNA soup is the soul, our unique spirit that puts a seemingly new spin on the predetermined template. But sometimes the inherited parts are so similar, it's astounding. Everything about my body structure, hair texture, and the shape of my hands, feet, legs, and nose corresponds with my father's. It goes so far that when the dentist made a mold of both the top and bottom rows of my teeth for braces, and I placed them beside my father's molds, each tooth was in exactly the same place. Not just similar—exact. When I looked at him then, I thought I was seeing myself thirty-five years in the future, doing some conservative banker cross-dressing. But his shy, retiring personality was not part of the genetic hand-me-down.
That's where my mother stepped in. She and I could make the same remark at the same time about the same person, without any of it having been part of the context of the previous sentence. And she gave me my only paranormal experience. Several months after she died, I was lying in bed reading an unrelated spy novel, and I heard her voice say, “Grace?”
All right! I thought. I'm going to talk to a spook, and it's my mom. I said, “Yes?”
But that was it, no comment, no advice, no warnings, no bad jokes, just a query in the form of my name. I kept at her for a while, talking out loud, saying, “It's okay. I'm not afraid, you can chat—say anything. I can hear you. What do you want to talk about?” But she didn't feel it necessary to say anything more. She just made the brief connection—then silence. I still don't know exactly what I was supposed to understand from that, maybe just that she does indeed live without form. Is it something my mind did for the comforting aspect? No, I'm already open to intangible phenomena, so I wasn't looking for proof. It was the shortest gabfest I've ever had.
I know my parents live in me, with or without aural remarks. They are not missing, but their forms are missed.