My mother’s bedroom is hot and stuffy and exactly as it was when she died in it a month ago. Every inch of space has been piled high with stuff. I feel my once-familiar claustrophobia as my brother Jay and his wife, Macie, and Tim and I step around folders, piles of linens, stacks of papers and jazz and classical music CDs, and boxes filled with various health devices. In one corner alone there are three boxes of Himalayan salt lamps, another three filled with portable air ionizers, as we vie for somewhere to stand. Though she managed to distill an entire lifetime and eight moves from her farm-girl childhood in Illinois to a glamorous life in New York City, to Beverly Hills, and back to the East Coast, to all that remains here in one bedroom and one hall closet in this two-bedroom apartment in West LA, it’s impossible to ignore the heaviness of purpose that descended when my mother set her mind to something. Heaviness evidenced by the press surrounding us now.
“How do we even start?” I say.
The cedar chest from my father’s bachelor apartment on Fifth Avenue, where she lived when they were first married, sits against one wall alongside the queen-size headboard. The bed itself fills the small room. The upright piano my brother Greg bought her last year takes up another wall. A tall, many-drawered dresser and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf each fill a wall; her rolltop desk and exercise machine—a treadmill type of thing but really, with all its handles and protrusions and knobs, unexplainable, maybe it vibrated, she had something she used to lie on that vibrated at the house in Queens—have been pushed up against the fourth. Around these larger structures and piled on them, covering every available surface, items have been laid one on top of the next, like strata, each representing a different period of her life. The musty crocheted throws from my father’s study in the Dakota sit folded on top of the braided rug my Midwestern grandmother sewed from my grandfather’s socks and ties. Boxes of newspaper articles about Illinois Jacquet, jazz great and my mother’s late partner of twenty-three years, are stacked in corners. Boxes and crates filled with who knows what have been jammed under the bed so tightly, there isn’t even a sliver of light. There are layers of smells, too, clinging to their objects: another, invisible kind of strata. The minty stink coming from the jars of all-natural ointments and salves sitting on her bedside table and crowding the small sink by the hallway closet, decades-old incense from the ashram tucked out of sight and sweetly cloying with the edge of something sharp—sandalwood?—the smell reminding me once again of my mother’s ramrod allegiance to these adopted spiritual practices, the ever-present sweet spice of ginger and turmeric and cumin and the oregano aroma of Ayurvedic herbs that clung to everything of hers, even in life.
Macie lifts the top off the cedar chest to reveal the silk and wool comforters I remember from our visits to my grandparents’ farm—the silk worn through, the wool stuffing coming apart now—and the sheet music that sat propped on my mother’s Steinway grand during our childhood. Also inside, my grandfather’s WWI uniform, each piece of clothing wrapped carefully in gauze: green wool trousers, shirt, jacket, hat, dog tags that bear his name. This isn’t a bedroom; it’s a museum, the reason she could endure this suffocating squeeze. Each day, even, she was living the important purpose of preserving and teaching what she had come to know to all who entered the space and looked upon these items.
Jay has turned to the bookshelf and is fingering a stack of ashram photographs, which will later be burned per instructions from the ashram when none of us claim them. The wall-size bookshelf is filled with book after book on various spiritual philosophies; recently she had been most interested in the Vedantic teachings and the peoples of the Indus River in the Indian subcontinent, which she said was the cradle of civilization. Most of these books she had mentioned to me; many she had sent me duplicates of.
“Look at this.” Jay stoops to pull a thin folder from between two books, how-tos about improving eyesight and the danger of wearing glasses because they weaken eye muscles, and hands it to me. The folder, made of thin cardboard reprinted with photos of Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Luke Skywalker, is one of ours from high school. Inside I find pages filled with the unmistakable ink, dotted with bright stars of Wite-Out and covered in the darker typewriter letters that had pressed into the wet, from the typewriter on which my brothers and I used to write our pre-computer high school papers. But I have never seen these particular pages, the date 1981 typed in the top corner, the year her marriage to my father was ending. There are some longer paragraphs, but mostly these are notes, a start to something, about her love of wandering her family’s farm as a child, of the majesty of the Mississippi, of her companionship with Topsy, her beloved Saint Bernard: subjects she often liked to share with us, but here are recorded in snippets of notes that in places are poetic and detailed.
First treat of the day—walk to fruit orchard w father to sample freshly ripened fruit favorite—yellow sweet cherry, birds’ favorite too, often beat me to it … sister’s and my job to pick fruit as it ripened for eating or canning … peach fuzz itched.
Pool of water left after flood on concrete walkway from swollen slough, watched family of tadpoles grow.
During war years when wheat prices were at their highest, Mosenthein Island farm flooded 5 yrs. out of 6 … If flooded early enough, sufficient time to plant soybeans and recoup some of loss.
“Mom wrote?” I feel stunned by this compilation, maybe a touch betrayed. I have been writing my whole life, since I begged her to buy me my first journal at the drugstore on Seventy-second Street, a block from the Dakota, and rushed home to make my first journal entry. I’m nine. I have three brothers, two Siamese cats, and a golden retriever named Sandy. And while she had recently said to me, “It will be you who will tell our story,” I hadn’t understood the implications because she had never shared with me her own attempts to do so.
“You should have the folder, Chris,” Jay says. Jay writes screenplays, but I am the prose writer, so our mother’s prose is by default, apparently, my domain. When I get home, I look the folder over more carefully. Tucked in the pages behind her childhood reminiscing I find more notes documenting the physical symptoms that plagued her all her life and the supplements she experimented with, supplements that were seen as crackpot—my father’s favorite word—remedies by most of the population at the time. The list and accompanying descriptions of her ailments seem to be written for a health practitioner; there is such attention to detail, to the minutiae of each symptom, details I know no one else was listening to, I realize she is writing to someone she expects is going to finally hear her.
1968–69—Adversely affected by air pollutants—up nights with pains in chest and arms from incinerators. Also sick from too much automobile exhaust on streets. (We lived in New York City.)
1971, January—severe allergic attact (sic) after 2 Bufferin—swelling & redness over face, hands, & chest.
After this, every attempt to eat, no matter what, gave me immediate diarrhea, very rapid pulse beat, flushed feeling, and engorged and painful blood vessels in hands and feet.
Lost 20 lbs.
Allergist merely shook his head as to what to do, except to prescribe tranquilizers and antihistamines, both of which I refused.
In these pages, I also sense the same intent I felt in her crowded bedroom and in our daily lives growing up under the dietary restrictions she enforced: to pass down what she felt was important, to teach, to impose. But the stories of her childhood she told and that I find reiterated in these notes, also felt like the start to something, the setup to some important payoff yet to come. I know she didn’t expect to die as she had, in an instant, after lying back on her bed, legs crossed, arm across her forehead, taking a moment to rest. She didn’t expect to die at all; isn’t that what she had been fighting all along? I think dark thoughts, I find, listed with her symptoms; I have fears of death, confirmation of the gloom I sensed, growing up, but couldn’t place. But she had died and we didn’t expect it either.
“Do you mind that I’m going to be writing a book about the fact that I was hungry?” I asked her once, after reading to her a section I had written about our first week on the Program.
“Just tell a good story,” my mother said.