Jagged Grain: A Memoir of Grief
Copyright © 2007. 43,477 words.
Chapter 1
The writer and scholar Ralph Ellison, who had also been a musician, once described the blues as an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, “…to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it.”
The news of my mother’s death came on a Wednesday. She lived alone and died in her home, so no one really knows the hour of her death. The coroner could speculate, but gave a window of probability that was three days wide.
We knew it wasn’t as early as Sunday, because someone claimed to have spoken with her on the phone that evening. That left Monday and Tuesday.
Why it was so important for me to assign an exact moment, I don’t know. I guess I felt that if I could recall what I was doing at that precise instant, I could determine if there’d been a feeling, a brush past my arm that would raise its hairs, or a whisper against my ear lobe, something that would assure me that I was cosmically connected to the woman with whom I’d once shared an umbilical cord.
All of Wednesday, the day I found out, I ran back over those last forty-eight hours obsessively. Monday I’d had a gig that evening. Gig is musician parlance for job. I was playing an outdoor party for some rich guy in the Mulholland Hills, who had security for his affair. He might’ve been a diplomat; I never really concerned myself with who the clients were. I just showed up and sang. From time to time, on certain types of gigs, I’d run into a distant cousin, who worked security for rich guys’ events.
I ran into him that night. He asked me how my mother was. Would that have rated as a sign? He always asked about my mother whenever we saw each other. But was there a moment in his question on that night? Which made it different from all the others? A hiccup that might’ve suggested that the answer to his question THAT NIGHT was not the same as all the other times? Was she even still alive at that point? Struggling through last moments? Reliving her entire life in a revved-up instant? Setting her spiritual house in order? Or was she already gone? Done with that task forever?
Tuesday I worked a gig early in the day, a brunch sort of affair at the Four Seasons Hotel, in their ballroom. It was a beautiful sunny May morning, and I’d received a gift bag from one of the employees on one of my breaks.
“This is from the Cohens. A thank-you token for the party you did for them last month.”
The Cohens owned the Four Seasons. They’d been lovely to me ever since I’d started singing in their lounge twelve years before.
I opened the bag to a beautiful strand of pearls. The only other real pearls I’d ever owned were a gift from my mother. Maybe this was the sign. And if so, how does one know to extract from this ordinary act of generosity something symbolic, profound? Is there a tap on the shoulder? Was the act of her passage happening at that very moment? Was the gift of pearls, perhaps, the tap?
I remembered instantly putting them on and deciding they went with my outfit, and I wore them for the rest of the gig, thinking (for a great portion of the gig, to be honest) how cool it would be to wear both strands together sometime.
Later that day I hosted a writers’ workshop in my home with two friends. We did this every Tuesday, rotating houses, and this time it was at mine. When workshop was over, Cliff went home (on his way to China for several weeks, so this would be our last workshop for awhile), and David Bills and I decided to go get Spanish food, which took us into Tuesday evening.
Since the coroner had said that she’d been dead at least a good twelve hours before she was found (the “maybe longer” is what stretched the possibility to as long as forty-eight hours), it’s accurate to assert that she was already gone by the time David and I were sitting down to a sweet tamale appetizer and a combo plate at El Cholo Spanish Café.
El Cholo was my mother’s favorite restaurant. A sign?
As I ran back over all of these moments on Wednesday: my cousin asking how she was, being given pearls, eating at her favorite restaurant, I realized that my mother was hovering and lurking in every gesture, every act, without my really noticing. Either that, or it is easy to read desperately needed signs into every gesture, every act. And if you’re a writer, it’s doubly tempting to make anything and everything a symbol.
But none of it contained a well-defined, clear, strident call. The prophetic voice that says: pay attention; your mother, the woman with whom you shared an umbilical cord, the person to whom you are connected in all ways spiritual, cosmic, and mystical, is at this very instant leaving you, leaving your brother and sister, leaving her own brothers and sisters, leaving this world, and changing your life forever.
It makes me wonder if our lives are only changed when we are cognizant of things, events. That the changing of one’s life ISN’T about the external event, but about how it is processed by each of us. Because, over my enchilada suiza late that Tuesday, when it is now certain that she was gone, just a house of flesh and bone, no longer filled with life and spirit, lying peacefully in its bed, I didn’t feel anything different. Nothing in the air around me moved me with any different rhythm or pulse. Nothing in the gut intuited a change in the ether, in the heavens. The world wasn’t darker, or lighter, or slower, or faster. The stars weren’t aligned in any fashion worth taking note of.
Irma, my best friend from childhood, and still my dear friend thirty years later, who had lost her father some years before, and who had only grown close to him in the last years, living most of her life not having any relationship with him whatsoever, tells of knowing the instant. She and her fiancé were on a trip somewhere far from home, and she sat up in bed and said to him, not knowing what had guided these words out of her mouth, but knowing to heed them, “my father has just died.”
She got the actual news the following day.
It seems most logical that the instant of learning of my mother’s death would be when my grief began. But maybe it was at the instant I realized that I did not feel her passing. That I didn’t have that moment Irma speaks of. That I did not feel my mother change my life forever.
Chapter 2
Wednesday. 10:00 am. I’d only stepped out of the house for the time it took to walk my boyfriend to his car. When I stepped back inside, the phone was blinking.
“Please call Officer Gonzales at…”
My car had been stolen three weeks prior. I’d gotten it back within twenty-four hours, accompanied by a phone call asking if I would be willing to testify against the guy they’d arrested. I’d told them yes, and they’d promised to get back to me in a couple of weeks. So a feeling of justice and gratification sat wide in my chest as I punched the numbers.
“Are you Angela Brown?”
“Yes.”“Miss Brown, I’m at your mother’s house.”
It wasn’t instantaneous, the realization that this wasn’t about my car. I don’t know why it wasn’t. Why would my mother’s house have anything to do with my car having been stolen? Still.
Being the one who was informed by the authorities, the one on whose shoulders the task of informing the rest of my family, and by extension the world, would rest, gave me a feeling of importance, instantly faded by the discovery that Officer Gonzales had tried my brother first. I had to remind myself that my mother’d had problems with my sister and me that she didn’t seem to have with my brother, and so of course he would be her first “in case of emergency.” That I was second on the list only magnified that her problems with me were slightly less than her problems with my sister. My mother lived for the hierarchy of who was loving her the best. And in the end, she felt that my brother had been the one.
I asked if I should come over there.
“There’s no reason to, Miss Brown. If you tell us what mortuary to deliver her to, we’ll take care of it. But you’ll be pleased to know that she was in her bed, looking very peaceful, and with her socks on.”
Officer Gonzales’ qualification of her wearing socks struck me as odd, even as I couldn’t get the image out of my head. They were probably pink (I didn’t ask the ridiculous question; I just pictured it) and rolled down her ankles. My mother had delicate ankles, and she liked to show them off.
Then I was suddenly struck with mortification: what if he meant that this was all she was wearing? I couldn’t take the notion of my mother undignified. These things would’ve been important to her. She was always the one to tell us to make sure we wore clean underwear, in case we got in an accident.
I have envisioned the moment of learning of my mother’s death countless times in my adult life, to be frank. Wondering how I would feel in the instant, how I would proceed, how my life would be different without her, what it would be like to live in a world without Martha.
The actual moment brought a dread I hadn’t expected. The instant Officer Gonzales said that he was sorry to inform me that my mother had died, I cried outwardly, a kind of auto-response; not forced, but equally not profound. I did take notice of him saying the word died instead of passed. It seemed very official, very clerical, something befitting an officer of the law. Something secular and finite. If it had been a minister or a family member breaking this news, or even an African-American officer (the odd thought struck me), he’d have said passed. Or the other one is, made her transition. Perhaps it’s cultural, but black folk rarely use the word died. And I’ve never been able to determine if it is out of an old-world gentility, or an old-world belief in a literal Heaven. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate Officer Gonzales’ use of the word died, as I’m not so sure about Heaven, myself, but I did wonder if passed might not have been simply a gentler way to break the news to the child of the deceased.
I hung up the phone after all the necessities had been taken care of. Minutiae (I’d get back to him with an answer about a funeral home; I wouldn’t drive by there; thank you for calling; yes, I’m okay).
I hung up the phone and faced dread.
My house seemed suddenly quieter than usual. Surely the dread. It quiets everything so that it can be regarded with awe.
What did I dread? A life without her? A life without her would be an easier life. Though it was the truth, it shuddered me with self-disgust. Maybe THAT was the dread; that I would now have to face a Self capable of such thoughts.
Feelings of relief were not entirely selfish. She’d been suffering some malady of the deepest soul core for the last couple of months of her life. The kind you don’t emerge from without irreparable scars. But, okay, they were also selfish. She’d eaten us alive with her illness for years.
I found myself with a trilled breath. What do I do next? Of course I thought of my brother and sister first. Pam, Mike, and I were the bereaved. We weren’t the only ones, of course, but in a sense we were IT. My mother had no spouse (divorced from my sister’s father, Mike’s and my father, and my stepfather), no parents left, one sister and a stepbrother, whom she’d not seen in years because they lived in a different state. So, we three were, for all practical purposes, the bereaved; the dark, calm center of the swirling tornado of condolences and well-wishes and sympathy, which would soon consume us.
I called Mike first, curious, as he answered his cell, why Officer Gonzales had not been able to reach him. He answered instantly.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“I’m in the line at McDonald’s, grabbing some food and then heading back to work.”
I couldn’t possibly tell him the most profound thing he will ever have had to face so far in his life, while he stood waiting to order a Big Mac, surrounded by strangers.
“What’s up?”
I couldn’t figure whether to wait until he could have some privacy to digest it. And for a second I flashed on the time Mike’s dog, Queenie, died when we were kids, and my mother asked me to be the one to tell him, being the big sister. It was a heartbreaking moment to be the messenger of news that would make my brother cry and become vulnerable. I’d hated it, like a reviling metallic taste in my mouth.
Presently I stumbled, and apologized for the rotten timing, and said it.
“Mom passed.”
Mike didn’t cry. And there was no real surprise in his voice, though there was an obvious stunning, followed by the annoyed obligation to order his food. I thought he was going to start yelling at the cashier to “wait a minute!”
“Hold on a minute,” he said to me with great irritation.
This felt awkward and stupid and not at all the right way to break this news. He had to have been feeling even more ridiculous. I knew he’d never be able to eat what he’d just ordered.
“I’m sorry it had to come this way,” I said, when he came back to the phone.
“Naw, that’s okay. You had to tell me. Shit, I just talked to her a few days ago.”
My brother felt things deeply, but usually kept them inside. I always worried for him.
And then I went into business.
“Call Officer Gonzales. He’s at her place right now. Call him there. He wants to know what we want done, and I don’t know.”
“Okay, I’ll call you back.”
I knew Mike would know what to do. I felt like the younger sibling, though I was five years older. None of us had ever discussed laying my mother to rest, so I not only didn’t want to make a decision without Pam and Mike, I didn’t have a clue what those decisions should be. I just knew Mike would know.
Sure enough, I got the call back within minutes.
“They’re taking her to Angelus, and I told them to go ahead with embalming. And we’d come there later.”
Even though I trusted Mike to make the right decisions, I did wonder if he’d been hasty with the move to have her embalmed. After all, if we decided to cremate, then there wouldn’t be the need for that, and every incidental would cost us money we didn’t really have.
But then I thought, well, maybe that’s just a given. I felt completely ignorant on such things. And a little crass at having to think about money.
Angelus Funeral Home, on Crenshaw Boulevard, in South Central Los Angeles, was where folks went in the black community when they died. There were certainly other mortuaries in South Central, all vying for business via advertisements on the backs of the cardboard fans passed out in churches. But Angelus was an icon in the community. Kind of an automatic. And my mother didn’t even live in South Central.
“Thanks, Mike, for knowing what to do. Now, what do we do about Pam?”
My sister traveled a lot for work, and was out of town. She’d said very pointedly that she wouldn’t be cell-phone-able, but would check in. She even usually left us hotel information, but hadn’t this time, and wasn’t due back home for days. But my brother was at work today, so I told him I’d take care of finding her, and not to worry. I wondered if he’d leave work early, but I didn’t ask.
We hung up, agreeing to meet up at mom’s apartment later in the evening to talk to a manager or a super, and to see if we could find out any information.
I prayed Pam would call, as she routinely did when out of town, just to check in. In the meantime I called her daughter, my niece Chippewa, but only got her voicemail. And I wondered, as her recorded voice welcomed me to speak clearly into the phone, if this was the kind of news you could leave on a granddaughter’s message machine. She was the only grandchild of my mother’s, who had wished for many grandchildren, but neither Mike nor I were destined to deliver. In place of a gaggle of grandkids, my mother got one very special granddaughter, one who would receive her doctorate in only three more years.
“Please leave a message.”
Not yet! Not yet! Not yet! What do I say? Just call me back? This was news of a time-sensitive nature. Besides which she might know how to reach Pam.
I realized how indelicate it was, even as I was saying, “Chip, listen, I’ve got some bad news. Gran has passed, and I don’t know where you mother is. If you have any idea how to reach her…” Beep.
I ran back over it in my head. It was the only message I’d had to leave yet this morning. And then I went about getting the rest of the family informed.
My mother and father had a most unique relationship. An example I always used as a point of pride in my family. Already divorced some thirty-plus years before, they had nonetheless maintained not only a civil relationship, as is the obligation of the parents of children, but a genuine fondness for each other; so much so, in fact, that when my father remarried, his new wife, some significant years younger than my mother, as is often the path of the mid-life-crisis-enduring, divorced man, became an inexplicable confidante to my mother, and vice-versa.
One might envision fun sessions of dishing-the-dirt on my father. But it was never that. They had developed, over the years, a bond of deep ardor; so much so that on the day my stepmother gave birth to her first child, my brother, Andrew (my family never dealt in halves; as in half-brother), my mother was the first one on the phone to her in the hospital.
When both of my stepmom’s sons were born (young enough to be my father’s grandkids, though they were his kids, and therefore young enough to be my mother’s grandkids) they began calling my mother Gran. And Gran she was to them, till the day she died. Which, it suddenly hit me again, was today.
My stepmother, Afi, answered the phone and I asked to speak to my father, as though it had to be done in that order. But when she sensed distress in my voice and asked the matter, it was to her that I made the announcement.
It didn’t come out as delicately as I’d tried with my brother. I don’t know why. She loved my mother as much as anyone did. But when she completely fell apart on the other end, I felt sinister for being the indelicate messenger, and helpless for not being within arm’s reach to comfort her.
I expected her to hand the phone to my father, so I could try again to not be an insensitive lout, but instead she screamed to him: “Teddy jan! Martha’s gone!”
I noticed her use of the Farsi word jan, which was a term of endearment, used as a kind of suffix after someone’s name. I was often Angie jan to Afi, a tradition from her Iranian culture that I had come to love.
“What? Gone where?” my father responded, bewildered.
“No! She’s gone! She’s gone!” she cried with her thick accent.
There is drama in my stepmother. Frankly, it is part of her charm. She is a woman full of BIG life, which means BIG happiness, and equally BIG sorrow. But it was difficult to digest in this instant, as my father hadn’t even been given the opportunity, from either of us, to be handed this news with surgical gloves.
My father, finally on the phone, dealt with me somberly. I heard great sadness in his voice, which always broke me whenever I heard it, and which was only a handful of times in my life.
I told him that we hadn’t reached Pam yet, but that I would keep him informed of all plans. Following that phone call, there were, surprisingly, not as many others as I had expected to make. The network of the news of death takes on a life of its own. It is the beginnings of the tornado of condolences. So, before I knew it, I hardly had to make any other calls at all, as the phone calls came to me. They would all begin with: “Angie!” with a kind of lilt I only ever heard in black folks, and a definitiveness that required no further words. And I’d simply respond with “yes, it’s true. We just found out.” It was all a kind of intimate shorthand. Extended family from St. Louis. From D.C. From Wichita. And all along, me pleading with everyone not to spread the word beyond family, as Pam had not yet been found. It would have to be fairly bitter-feeling to find out about your own mother’s death after everyone else knows. I didn’t want that to happen. And finally, my mother’s lifelong church cronies. Folk who would be in her life till the end of it. And it turns out, they were. Folk that Pam, Mike, and I had grown up calling Aunt and Uncle So-and-So, or Brother and Sister Such-and-Such. Folk who were indeed family, even if not in blood.
The girl I’d been bitter enemies with for most of my life (we were roughly the same age, our mothers were best friends, we’d grown up singing in the church choir together, called each other cousin, and had divided bitterly somewhere in our early twenties, after years of contention) called and offered herself up in the most selfless, almost maternal, manner that I’d yet beheld. It was as if another person had been delivered up to this task.
I was to attend a rehearsal that evening for a gig the next day. A big deal thing for Guess Jeans at the Wilshire Ebell. There was no way I could bail on the gig, but I knew they could do without me for the rehearsal. My brother and I had Angelus to deal with, and my mother’s apartment. And then there was also just bereavement. No one should have to get in gear on the day a parent has died. I would never be able to focus on Caravan and Watermelon Man and Summertime.
And when I finally finished with all the phone obligations, including my boyfriend, who was shocked, as he’d just left my company and certainly hadn’t expected this to be the next thing he would hear from me, I finally just sat. It was already afternoon by the time I noticed. My breath was still trilled. Had it been that way while talking to everyone on the phone? Did I sound distressed? Meek? Wounded? Had I wanted to? Some people hated sympathy. But I was comforted by it, which begged the question: did I sometimes put it on a little to get the most of someone’s sympathy? I suddenly became hyper-conscious of my grief, which was definitely real, but tried to make sure that I remained pure with my expression and didn’t amp it up just a tad, for sweet words. Or maybe the fear was of self-pity. People are repelled by those in self-pity. It bothered me that I was so cognizant of the potential to “act” in this moment, which all on its own carried a kind of wrecked confusion.
And I was so divided on my own thoughts about it. Grief can evolve into an unending spiral of narcissism and the screaming out to be taken care of and awed. On the other hand, I, myself, got annoyed with my father when only a week before we’d spoken of my mother’s own grief over the loss of her dearest friend on this earth.
“It’s been two months,” he’d exclaimed. “It’s time for her to snap out of it.”
I knew, and had to repeatedly remind myself, that he came from a generation that had never been exposed to the ideas we now regard as common: understanding the grief concept; that the emotional processes were of a most individual nature, and usually involved many more layers of complexity than what was ever seen on the surface, and that to tell someone to “snap out of it” only betrayed an ignorance to that fact. But what was more worrisome to me was that it also revealed a shuddering lack of compassion and empathy.
Because, the truth is, no one is ever asked to snap out of it for THEIR sake, for THEIR goodwill. But for the shouter’s.
In essence, it is saying, snap out of it, because your depression is quite inconvenient for me.
And while I understood that this could never be a conscious thought or impulse of my father’s (a good man!), I knew that it was what lay in one of the hidden layers of his exclamation. And it deeply bothered me that he didn’t get it, even as I was simultaneously just as frustrated as he was with my mother for not being able to snap out of it.
Our emotions can be so fickle.
Today I was the grieving. Today my father was the grieving. Would he eventually get it? Would I eventually become that vacuumed force that sucked everyone around me into the vortex of self-pity and martyrdom (look how strong she’s being!)?
When does grief stop being grief and start being abuse? I knew it was the question that would surface many times over the next few weeks and months. But on this day, the day that was getting eaten away by the ticking clock so much faster than I was ready for, I sat in my silent living room and was grateful I lived alone. Just in case the vacuum were to start sucking in all of life around me fairly soon.
Chapter 3
My boyfriend called again after several hours, and asked if I’d eaten. He suggested I get out of the house for awhile and meet him at an Indian restaurant we frequented. I wasn’t sure the protocol for socializing in restaurants on the day one’s parent has died. And annoyed with myself that I was so concerned about protocol. I needed to eat. I wasn’t about to whip up something in my kitchenette. It made sense to meet him.
Over the buffet at the Bengal Tiger, and after an appropriate passage of time, acknowledging that I’d just been through something heavy, Ross finally wanted to talk about a book idea that he thought he, David Bills, and I should collaborate on. I didn’t object to not talking about my mother, and I contributed to his conversation as buoyantly as I could. I also knew that Ross had a hard time with these kinds of things. Death, grief, emotion, facing it, having it sitting right there in your lap. So I knew that it wasn’t insensitivity that drove his excitement about his book idea. But it did begin to exhaust me. I needed to be thinking about my mother. Pure and simple. Not the obligation to. But the actual gut NEED to. I needed to think about Mom. Which was what I called her. Mike called her Ma, Pam called her Mama. I needed to not be distracted from the awesome hole that had just been left in my life. I needed my eyes and all my attention on that hole. So that I wouldn’t accidentally lose my footing and fall into it.
But I contributed. Until I told him I didn’t want to talk about the book idea anymore. The day was going by, and it was seriously concerning me that we hadn’t reached Pam yet.
When I got back home, there was a message from Chippewa, whom we called Chip, with the usual exclamations of shock and sorrow, and informing me that Pam had already gotten back and was actually in her office. I felt like slapping my forehead. It hadn’t even dawned on me to try her numbers, even if I did think she wouldn’t answer them.
So, had Chip called Pam herself? When she hadn’t found me home? Did Pam now know?
I felt ridiculous and somewhat malevolent that this day had gone half by, that life in L.A. was roiling at best for Angela, Mike, Ted, Afi, and a host of friends and colleagues, that the wildfire had already begun to spread, that the word was out that Martha Brown Hicks had passed away, and that her eldest daughter, her first child, could possibly be, at this moment, routinely going through her work day in Atlanta – unaware.
I dialed the number. When she answered and I identified myself, her gleeful tone told me that Chip hadn’t called her.
This was the one where I lost composure. My sister and I had a bond unlike any other for me. A large part of that bond was what we’d both been through with our mother.
Pam was the one who had broken the news to me about our stepfather’s death, four years before, a man we’d loved like blood even after he and our mother had divorced.
Now it was my turn. I stuttered, which instantly alarmed her.
“Baby, what’s the matter?”
I’d been trying to say that I was sorry to have to say this to her at her job. Although, I imagined, probably nothing could top the inappropriateness of telling Mike in the take-out line at McDonald’s.
When she asked me what the matter was, I said, “no, it’s okay.”
I don’t know what that meant. Maybe I sensed that she felt I was falling apart, and I didn’t want to be identified as falling apart. Maybe. I don’t know. And then it was blunt.
“Mom passed.”
Maybe not blunt, but unadorned. Come to think of it, it’s how I had broken it to Mike. I was a writer, but in this instant I was incapable of being eloquent.
“What?” she gasped.
And there was that lilt. She couldn’t believe what I’d just announced.
Here was the thing about Pam. She already had demons. Not hers. (I mean, we all have ours). But I mean that she carried my mother’s. Demons hanging around her head, taunting and jeering at her like the kids at school that pushed at your back as you walked.
My sister lived in Atlanta, and could only afford to come home every other Christmas. But she’d last been here only two months prior, in March, for the funeral of my mother’s dearest friend, and my sister’s godmother, Dolores. She was here for four days. And in that four days, my mother refused to see her.
She had refused to see us all, but for Pam it was an even deeper wounding, considering she only came to town every other year. That my mother wouldn’t grab any opportunity possible to see her eldest daughter almost broke Pam. What kept her together had to be the idea that time would heal things. That there’d be other opportunities. I was now delivering the news that there were no more chances.
I felt complicit in some evil scheme. The messenger always is.
I rarely detected fragile in my sister. She was the rock, against which everyone else always rested. So, when I heard fragility in her voice in this moment, it almost broke me. I filled her in on what I knew; that I’d only just tried her at work this late in the day because I’d mistakenly thought she was still out of town. She was out of town where I was calling her right now. She LIVED out of town. So, suddenly, it seemed even more ridiculous that I hadn’t found her sooner.
She said she’d try to get to L.A. as soon as she could, maybe a couple of days, and in the meantime, Mike and I would have to get the ball rolling with funeral arrangements. We talked briefly about what we should do, and both loathed to have to admit our instincts to have my mother cremated, when my mother clearly never wanted to be cremated. But the reality was, my mother probably hadn’t provided herself with any burial insurance and the three of us would have to take care of this on our own, and none of us was swimming in money. I mentioned that Mike had already given the okay for Angelus to embalm her, which might now be an unnecessary expense if we decided to cremate. But then my sister suggested that even if we decided to go that route, we should probably still have a viewing, perhaps the night before the funeral, because there were certain factions in my mother’s life (especially extended relatives and her church folk) who would have our heads if they couldn’t kiss her face in a casket, and admire her outfit, and swoon over her body, to say their goodbyes. I was SO against that kind of indulgent display; but I knew it wasn’t only me who had to be considered. I wasn’t the only one who had lost someone. So, it turned out, Mike’s instincts for embalming were the right ones, after all.
This sobering bit of business exchange between Pam and me stopped us both at about the same moment, as we realized that our mother was gone. A mother who’d been a complicated entity in our lives, to say the least. A woman who had accomplished great things in the world, in her community, who had been hailed and lauded and written about time and time again in her career, who had been a courageous young mother of a little girl, Pamela; left by her first husband (the one before my father), and had escaped the limitations of her life in the Midwest for the opportunities on the coast, who had become a wife again, a mother two more times, had started out as a secretary, and had eventually become a civics leader and a corporate force, being the CEO of The Los Angeles Skid Row Development Corporation, which was an organization that funneled grant money into the Downtown homeless efforts, and had helped established Transition House, the Soup Kitchen, the Mission, etc., who had built a stable home for her family, had seen her children through our various scraped knees and teen angst years and rebellion, who had taught us the virtues of standing in the center of our selves strongly, who had made us fall in love with books, and art, and music; who, as a light-skinned beauty, had told her dark-skinned first child, as a toddler in the 50’s, that she should be proud of her black skin, when everyone else in that era was trying to bleach theirs; who had encouraged me, her second child, toward the acting academy that I craved, instead of university, but had fought like hell to get my sister into an Ivy League school, who supported my brother’s desire to go into the Navy, who understood that each of her children were different and unique and individual, and who never prescribed the same menu of life lessons to us all, but regarded us as our individual selves; who fell into alcoholism, and depression, and a secret kind of despair she rarely shared, who could easily manipulate the love and support of those who loved and supported her, who learned to lie and cheat and slander the names of those who threatened her sense of security, who felt shunned and unloved if we dared to love someone else in addition to her, who fell apart at the idea of the world not revolving around her; and who ultimately hid away for the last two months of her life, and decided to die.
I don’t mean that she committed suicide. The coroner confirmed it as a stroke. Besides, my mother believed that suicide was a mortal sin, and her religious beliefs were everything to her. But I do believe she willed herself to death. Just stopped wanting to live. I’m sure she rationalized a loophole in the Scriptures on the subject of wishing for one’s own death.
It wasn’t on our lips, but it leaned heavily in each of our thoughts, as my sister and I talked to each other on the phone, and decided whether or not to cremate, whether or not to embalm, and how we would pay for it. Business. Organization. Meetings. Check lists. On how to lay the largest force in our collective lives to final rest.
Chapter 4
I met my brother at my mother’s apartment in the early evening, and we hugged in a way that people who haven’t seen each other in years hug. The front office was closed, which we hadn’t considered. Among the things we needed to know was if she had a burial policy in a desk drawer, perhaps; something that might help us cover the costs of a funeral. None of us had a lot of money, and this would fall squarely on our three shoulders. As it should, of course.
But I couldn’t help thinking to myself, as we sat in the lobby of her building, waiting to see if a super could let us in, that I had $1500.00 in a savings account, which was the most money I’d ever had at one time, toward the pressing of the CD I was currently recording. A project I’d already worked on for close to two years. I still needed about $500 more just to do the pressing, and now that money would bury my mother instead. As it should.
But I couldn’t help thinking that my stepfather, who had prepared for his death by having his policies and papers in order, would never have his family going broke putting him in the ground. My mother was not good with such things.
I was a lot like her in that sense. My mother had made a lot of money in her lifetime. She’d held positions of prestige in her profession. She’d inspired the pens of columnists and journalists. She’d received commendations and medals and keys to cities, had befriended mayors and council members, had been a force in L.A. civics affairs. And in the end, she was as close to homeless as a person can be who still actually has a roof over her head. The journey from celebrated to humbled had been a tangled and complicated one, rich with stories and tragedies and ballads and hauntings and triumphs, that was vast in its scope, but still raced past the window of my brain in a violent fast-forward, as Mike and I sat quietly in the lobby of the place where our mother had taken her last breath.
My own path feared a similar resolve. I made my living as a musician, a singer, and had for my entire adult life, and I was now in my forties. I was self-employed, which meant that no employer was putting any of my money in 401K’s or any kind of retirement plan. I could put that money away myself, of course, but as any struggling musician will tell you, that’s hard to do when you’re barely making ends meet.
I would be the one who really would reach the official stats of homelessness, with my shopping cart filled with all my self-produced, unsold CD’s, and three cats. I laughed to myself.
It was the one instant of levity in this thick day that was still just as equal parts very-real-nightmare.
We were eventually told that we couldn’t get in, so we prepared to come back the next morning, just as we’d been told by Angelus that they wouldn’t be ready for us until tomorrow. It was dark out, as we parted our frustrated ways, and I made my way back up the Harbor Freeway to my bungalow in Altadena.
I’d experienced this surreality only once before: the death of my stepfather. The whole day had floated by, not marching away in lead boots, as days often did, but floating, as if half in one reality and half in another, which is literally what it is. The day straddles between life with the loved one and life without, and doesn’t quite reach gimbal lock, as they say in aeronautics, or, more accurately, an integration of realities, until the second full day.
Driving north on the 110, swiftly moving through the four tunnels of the oldest freeway in Los Angeles, the reds of headlights were sharper and deranged, the sounds of reverberating car horns bounced off the rounded walls of tile, the swiftness of the air around me told me that time stands still for no one, not even decorated CEO’s of companies.
It was late now, and I called David Bills, and my way of telling him the news was to wearily say, “well, the crucible of death seems to continue.” That referred to the fact that he’d lost his own father just two months before, and two days before that we’d lost Dolores.
That was the timeline of my mother’s ultimate fall. The news of Dolores’ death sank my mother. Snapped her in two, though we didn’t realize it at the time. Perhaps we should’ve, but she’d been there so many times before; this withdrawal from life, hibernating away from the world, falling off the wagon of her sobriety, and resurfacing again with a renewed vow to heal. And for a time, she would. It was a colossal rollercoaster that the whole family had been on for years. But she always came back to us with that infectious smile that was usually a strain in photographs, as if it belied a deeper layer of despair (obviously, it was so), but was larger and brighter than the sun when it was unconscious and in the present moment.
There is a photograph I have that captures that unconscious, radiant smile. She’d visited Italy, and it was a snapshot of her being serenaded by a waiter in a restaurant. The smile was equal parts ecstatic joy at the wooing attention, and giddy embarrassment (but the good kind!) of making such a public, lust-for-life scene.
I love that photograph.
I took it out after I got off the phone with David, who was always the one I could come to, talk to, pour my heart out to, about anything going on in my life. And who would listen and offer in a way that was completely compassionate and fearless about going deep. But when I sat with the photograph, my gut suddenly surged, and I realized I couldn’t look at pictures of Martha quite yet. She lay in a morgue tonight, far away from everyone who loved her, even farther away from that unconscious, giddy smile and the large life she’d lived for sixty-eight years.
That night I slept, but did not dream (and I always dreamed). It was a fitful sleep, though. And in between the bouts of slumber, I’d stare at the black ceiling and wonder if she planned on visiting me in a ghostly state. Haunt me. I didn’t believe in such things. But still I wondered. And what I couldn’t know that night, but would discover much to my shock in the weeks and months to come, was that the line between believing and not believing would become more and more blurred as time would go on and my grief would take its shape.
Chapter 5
Thursday. The first full day of knowing.
I dropped the ball.
These alarming words woke up and spoke to me, waking me up, on the morning of the first full day of knowing. It was already a warm morning (today would be a hot one), and my gut churned to remind me that I’d dropped the ball.
It was two months ago that I’d last spoken to my mother. Two months had never gone by in our entire lives of not speaking. It was HER hibernation, but I’d been angry too.
The coming Sunday would be Mother’s Day. The cruelty of irony and timing had not been lost on me, but everything connected to it had, until this first light of the rest of life without her.
Monday I’d taken a package to the post office; a gift and a card to her for Mother’s Day. Now, as I sat up in my bed, I frantically went back over Monday, trying to remember what time I’d dropped the package in the post box. Early enough and it would’ve arrived at her place on Tuesday. If she was still alive by the time her mail came, maybe she got it. Maybe she knew that even after two months of not speaking, I was making the move to fix this rift between us. Maybe she knew in her last moments that I had not forgotten about her, that Mother’s Day could never come and go without my nod to her.
It was a stretch at best, this belief. But it was all I had to assure me that she knew, in the end, in her end, at her moment, that she had not been forgotten, not unloved, not abandoned, as she’d given herself to believe.
I’d spoken to my father a week before, and he’d informed me that my mother had invited them (my father, step mom, and the two boys) to go to church with her on Mother’s Day, and maybe do a little brunch afterwards, where she and my step mom could both be celebrated.
I was stunned as my father told me of these plans (“I don’t really want to go to church, but Afi says we should”). After we hung up, I sat on the edge of the bed with a knot settled in my stomach, but swelling up to my chest and threatening to strangle me. It was the first moment that I realized that her hibernation was not just a hibernation; her past pattern of a kind of passive, hands-up, reclusiveness that allowed her habits without scrutiny. The kind that Pam, Mike, and I had always made pains to draw her from, only eventually, to throw our own hands up and acknowledge that she would resurface when she was ready and steady to try again. We’d thrown our hands up this time, as well. But THIS time, according to the reports of my father, THIS time, it wasn’t hibernation. It was estrangement.
She was contacting people. Just not us.
I recognized her very loud gesture, which she knew would get back to us; that she was asking for my father and his children’s company because her own children had abandoned her. A part of me was wounded and slapped dizzy that she would make this gesture to strike at us, especially since she was the one who’d withdrawn. But another part of me knew my own complicity in this estrangement. I’d thrown up my hands.
I’d already been struggling with what to do for the coming holiday, when I got thrown this unmerciful curve ball. The dilemma had gone something like this: Could I actually just call her up, knowing she wouldn’t answer, and leave a message inviting her to a brunch somewhere? An invitation she would only ignore, as she’d done with everything else in the last two months. Or worse yet, actually getting her on the phone and trying to make sweet and light about plans for Mother’s Day, all the while completely denying the huge day-glow elephant between us (“where have you been for two months?”). And bringing up the ugly baggage that surrounded us during a phone call that was meant to offer an invitation would be equally perverse. How could I proceed forward with plans for a day to celebrate her, when so much murky water was between us, the murkiest ever, and not make the gesture fraudulent and ulteriored? I’d wracked my brain to think of what I could do to gently acknowledge this coming day for mothers, and yet still acknowledge that there were things that needed talking about.
I’d finally come up with the idea to send her a package. A gift in the mail would be non-threatening; she wouldn’t be forced to face me, to talk about anything; she’d only get to open a gift and a card that would tell her, in no uncertain terms, that she had been remembered. That she was still loved.
I would write her a letter; one that expressed my despair at whatever she was going through, and my desire to repair our severance. I would explain why not seeing her on Mother’s Day was only because I was paralyzed to know what was the right move to make, in light of everything, but that she was not forgotten; indeed, she weighed heaviest on our hearts these days, and that we would have many more Mother’s Days to celebrate. I would wish her peace of spirit and a desire to connect with us again, as we missed her.
Of course, now that I’d spoken to my father and found out what she was trying to assemble for Mother’s Day, should I bring that up in the letter? Should I ask why she refused to see Pam during the three days that Pam was here for Dolores’ funeral? I didn’t want to be accusatory or put her on the defensive, but I also didn’t want to write her a letter that would be falsely rosy, or dishonest, or withholding of what was truly on my heart; I believed that that had lived enough between us, and healing meant being open and honest.
I wrote the letter. I didn’t mention her plans with my father and his second family. I did mention our bafflement and despair over why she was hibernating, and why it began with refusing to see Pam. And then I mentioned the many future Mother’s Days we’d have between us, which presently, as I sat up in my bed on the day after she’d died, seemed like a cruel joke now.
I’d accompanied a copy of The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. I’d inscribed it with “Happy Mother’s Day, 2002.” (A day, it turns out, that would come and go without her.) At the time I’d had no doubts. To be honest, I kind of thought she might live forever. There’d been a close call before. A couple of years ago, her blood pressure had gotten dangerously low and she’d been rushed to Midway on San Vicente. I remember getting the call from Mike, and wondering if it wasn’t time to brace myself. Being prepared for the possibility had given me a strange sense of calm. She was in a hospital. She’d be watched round the clock. We’d go and visit her, and maybe even be holding her hand at the moment she’d slip away. And the next thing I knew, I’d gotten the word that she was back home again. This was a woman who had to’ve completely destroyed her liver; who lived with the kind of tremors that spelled certain nerve damage; who’d been enfeebled by her addiction, and was so much older than her sixty-something years; yet she’d never gotten cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or anything degenerative. She seemed like she was going to defy every odd. So, in inscribing “Happy Mother’s Day, 2002” in the Dalai Lama book on happiness, and in promising many future Mother’s Days together, there was absolutely nothing in me that didn’t fully subscribe to it.
I’d been almost certain she would probably never read the book, but it would, at least, tell her, most clearly, that her happiness was of utmost concern to me. She would find the gesture lovely, even if she wasn’t speaking to me.
Now, again, as I sat in the middle of my bed on this next day after finding out, I prayed like a fiend that she had gotten the package before it was too late. It was possible. More than anything, especially after the phone call from my father, I needed her to know at the instant of her death that she was loved, not forgotten, not abandoned.
“She HAD to have gotten the package before she died!” I literally said out loud.
I repeated the homily so many times, it nearly hypnotized me.
Chapter 6
She had stopped talking to us almost immediately after we’d gotten the news of Dolores’ death. We were, coincidentally, having a phone conversation about Dolores’ illness (cancer), and discussing how to be prepared for the inevitable. I knew this death would rattle my mother from her very foundation. Dolores had been Martha’s dearest friend ever since they’d met at Trinity Baptist Church in the late 50’s, very shortly after my mother had come to Los Angeles from St. Louis with a small child, and had met, then married, my father. Both were young brides, with husbands who had also bonded, and the foursome became inseparable. So much so that on three completely separate occasions they lived next door to each other. I was never sure if it was a case of Martha following Dolores, or Dolores following Martha. But they were rarely apart. They’d seen each other through the raising of six total children between them, divorces, remarriages, deaths, and close to fifty years of devotion to each other. They even, at some point, and wildly, became Martha Brown Hicks and Dolores Hicks Brown, though this was not a case of trading husbands. But was, instead, a perfect illustration of the deepest cosmic connection and strangely alluring serendipity. They were a pair of angels, guarding over each other and each other’s children. Vicki, Teri, and David were as much sibling to me as Pam and Mike, and were literally Pam’s god-siblings, which in the African-American culture meant pretty much the same thing.
So, on the late February day in 2002, as Dolores lay on her death bed, with round-the-clock vigil held by her extraordinary family, my mother and I talked about being prepared for Dolores’ death.
When the news came, I immediately got back on the phone to my mother, because I knew this blow would not be a consolable one. She sounded so saddened, but not hysterical. And my mother could do drama. She had swooned over the casket at her own godson’s funeral only a couple of months before that. I’d walked into the funeral with her, her escort for the day, held her as she stomped her feet at the casket of her godson, Don, and began to wail, stood beside her at this funeral, which took place at the church I’d been raised up in, where all of her social life existed, and watched the looks on others’ faces as my mother, decked out in her finest suit and hat and mink coat, and genuinely wrecked that her godson had succumbed to heart failure at too young an age, walked past them all with the fragrance of old liquor emanating from her skin.
I fought with everything in me not to cry. Not for Don. For my mother’s name. Her reputation amongst a group of aging, old-world gossips. I always cried for her affliction; her inability to find happiness and peace. But on that day, I cried for what I knew was brewing in the minds of her friends.
So, as we talked about Dolores’ passing (the news had just come to each of us minutes before), I suggested to her that more than anything Dolores would want her to not fall apart, to walk upright with head held high, and with the grace that both women deserved and had earned. I suggested that she remember that Dolores had children who were grieving; she had brothers left behind; she even had a mother still around, who had outlived her. And to try her best to keep her own sadness in perspective against that of Dolores’ immediate family.
I did this to lessen any possibilities of an outrageous scene at Dolores’ funeral. I did this to not make any worse a reputation I feared was creeping upon her. I did this to not allow the gossip-mongers and wolves any more fodder. I did this because Dolores was the most dignified woman of grace I’d ever known, and I wanted my mother to rise to that occasion; a place she’d been once, but rarely reached in the last few years. And lastly, shamefully, I did this because of my own mounting humiliations in the face of her steady decline.
It was a terrible thing that I had suggested; to tell someone to manipulate their grief for the comfort of others. It remains one of my great regrets.
My mother listened quietly, and agreed to honor Dolores in the best way she could. She was always humbled in the face of being reminded of some public behavior, which would always break my heart in two. It would’ve been so much easier if she would just argue with me, get defensive and insulted that I would infer such. But she never would. She would just ask, “Did I really do that?” and then apologize and fold away in her shame. And I would feel evil and unfit for the job of being there for her. She was already beginning to fold up a bit, this time too, but I would not realize to what degree until later. She gently suggested that she perhaps write something to read at the funeral.
“I think I’d like to call it ‘God Gave Us Dolores’,” she uttered, humbly and passionately.
“Mom, I think that’s a wonderful idea.”
A selfless task to take her out of her own head would be just the medicine.
“Would you sing if they asked you to?” she asked me.
“I don’t know, Mom. That would be really hard for me.”
Turns out, I could’ve used a little selfless task of my own.
My sister had come to town for Dolores’ funeral, whom Pam and I had always called Miss Hicks, but Mike called Aunt D, and stayed with me in my bungalow in Altadena. Pam called my mother as soon as she got into town, and made plans to go by her apartment. This would be a few days before the funeral. On the day she was to go by my mother’s place, she called from the road (she’d rented a car, so she wouldn’t be dependent on me for transportation, because there were friends she wanted to see while in town) to say that she was on her way over, but my mother didn’t answer the phone.
“Mama, I’m on my way over there, but you don’t seem to be home.”
They’d made plans. Pam was confused, so she decided to run a few errands, and then try again. When she did, still nothing. So, she drove by. She knocked on the door. No answer. She stayed awhile, knocking several times more, sitting in the lobby, pacing the floors, until she gave up and drove back to Altadena.
I told her of my last phone conversation with mom, only a day or two before, and that she’d been making plans to write something for the funeral. But Pam was mystified why her mother had suddenly disappeared. I told her that mom just probably forgot, but that they’d find time to see each other outside of the funeral itself, and not to worry. For the next two days, Pam called her, and only found an answering machine, with my mother’s cheery voice beckoning to leave a message.
On the morning of Dolores’ funeral, we called my mother to find out if she wanted us to pick her up. She was still mobile, herself, but considering everything, we thought she might like for us all to go together. And she still hadn’t seen Pam yet.
Still no answer.
And from that moment forth, including a startling no-show at the funeral of her dearest friend and confidante –– we never saw her again. (Though, we couldn’t possibly know that at the time.)
We couldn’t believe she’d missed it. We were stunned to see her name in the program as one of the readings that would be given, with the title “God Gave Us Dolores”, just as she’d said to me on the phone, and that she was nowhere to be found. We couldn’t think of an answer to give when people asked where she was, especially Dolores’ family; her absence was a glaring omission considering how famously close they were.
It was a beautiful service, and we all convened at Dolores’ house for food and mixing afterwards. But as for Pam, Mike, and me, we couldn’t get the alarm out of our heads.
There was one last desperate try, when Pam and I went out to the car and dialed her number again. She actually picked up the phone that time, and sounded so despondent and confused that Pam insisted on coming over.
“Mama, we can be there in just a few minutes.”
“No. I just want to be left alone.”
“But, Mama, I’m leaving tomorrow. If I don’t come over now, I won’t get to see you before I leave town.”
“No. I just want to be left alone.”
I’m not sure which shook me more. That my mother was obviously in crisis and refusing help? Or that my sister sat choking on the blow that (on this rarest of occasions for her to be in town) her own mother was refusing to see her?
I got so angry with my mother that she would make my sister feel this way. So angry that she could not rise from her self-wallowing murk to be there for Dolores’ family, for Dolores’ memory. My sister was angry too. But even more profound than that, she was wounded.
That was two months ago –– two months of a complete immersion into something we could not define, could not penetrate, of futile phone calls, and drop-bys, and no return calls, and my sister having to go back to Atlanta, and life for all of us having to continue in spite of my mother’s stubbornness, and finally throwing our hands up, which brought us to Mother’s Day, and my only thoughts leading up to it were that I needed somehow to let her know that she was still loved. I’d delivered the beautifully wrapped gift and card into a post box that Monday afternoon, and the following Wednesday morning got:
“Miss Brown, this is Officer Gonzales.
Chapter 7
When Mike and I walked into my mother’s apartment later in the morning, for me it was with that dread returned. What were we really there for? The practical matter, of course, was to see if we could find a burial policy. We didn’t even care about a will. We just wanted to be able to give her the kind of funeral she’d want, and deciding whether that would be a simple cremation and a memorial service, or an all-out funeral procession down Jefferson Boulevard, replete with sarcophagal carriage and marching band (as had always been my mother’s jesting request), could only be determined by finding an insurance policy.
But there was a deeper pull that led us there, without either of us having to say it. Perhaps a clue as to her state in the last moments, some hint into the hibernation that had claimed her for two months.
As the super opened the door, I wondered if we would detect the smell of death. My brother was stronger about these things. I think. Perhaps it was only my assumption, because Mike tended to be a bit of a stoic. He never cried. He steeled himself, instead, to be there for others. I was the crier.
We walked into her one-bedroom, one-bath apartment to the eccentricities that had always spelled my mother, but had especially increased as she became an older woman. An eccentricity that had always been charming and infectious and full of rich character, as in her penchant for being known as the Hat Lady (she sported a fabulous chapeau for any and every occasion). It had its disturbing elements, too, however.
Her apartment was small and intimate, but she’d decorated it with just about every bit of furniture, art, and artifact that she’d ever collected over the years of living in large sprawls. The house I’d grown up in seemed like a mansion to me as a child. It was a two-story edifice of 4000 sq. feet, with a formal living and dining room, a huge entry corridor, a family room which was the size of the living room and dining room combined, a breakfast room, a kitchen, a service porch, a walk-in pantry, and a stairwell that led first to a landing, then to a library, and from which could be accessed three bedrooms, one a master bedroom, and one (mine) that had a sun-room adjacent. Two full baths, and a powder room. An upstairs deck that looked over the back yard. I used to think we were rich. We were, in a sense. But, of course, my mother and stepfather had worked hard all their lives for what they had. No one was sitting around planning spa days, and golf days, and summers at the beach house, or out on the yacht. We were middle class. But to us kids, we were rich.
My mother had done all the decorating in our house, from the peg-and-grooved wood floors, to the intricate moldings in the ceilings, she’d put her personal touch on everything. She lived for beautiful things. She collected antiques, but didn’t JUST collect, as could often be the habit of someone with money and a desire to make a status statement. My mother learned about every piece she’d ever acquired, as befitted her voracious hunger and curiosity about other cultures and history. She could tell you the difference between a Queen Anne chair, a Baroque dining set, and a French Provincial chaise lounge. She could tell you the history behind what brought about the design. Or the pattern in a set of Blue Delft china. She lived for her tapestries that played out scenes of the Revolutionary War or that wove a landscape from some famous artist.
She loved her DaVincis and her Rembrandts, and often sat for hours in a tufted chair, beside a Belle Epoque floor lamp, with her head buried in a book about the works in the Louvre. She once came back from a trip to Paris and had brought me a print of a Millet, a rural landscape with the portrait of a farm girl and her sheep. My mother had seen the original in the Musee d’Orsay, and had been stupefied and in wonder and awe over how much the peasant girl’s face was MY face.
And with great abandon and wild verve, and with the belief that usually only a child has the power to generate, she proceeded to tell me how I MUST have lived in another lifetime in Paris, and had been painted by all the local artists who’d ever crossed my path.
My mother had that about her. A sense of whimsy and imagination that she fully invested in. A kind of loopiness and a romping in the stars that I get from her. I am somewhat of an eccentric (have always been called so) because my mother was. I believe it was her loveliest quality, and the one trait I have loved inheriting from her.
But when she lost her ability to sustain a house like the one I’d grown up in, when her struggles with addiction led her to bad money management, to early retirement, to several halfway houses, and eventually to the sober-living facility in which she died, which offered her a humble 600 sq. feet of space, she couldn’t let go of all the wonders that had defined her. So I stared on this post-death day at close walls that were covered from ceiling to floor with her Michaelangelos, and her Monets, and her porcelain cup-and-saucer collection, and her silver serving trays, and her gilded chaise lounge. And books. And photo albums. And there was barely room to walk. I realized that my mother had learned to cocoon herself, to protect herself from outside forces, from her own poverty, from the threat of the street, by keeping herself enclosed, almost draped, or mummified, in her fineries.
She’d also stopped wanting to let sunlight in (she was afraid the sun would fade the art on the walls, was what she said; I believe she was afraid to fall in love with the wonders of the earth again, because she was already deciding to check out), so there was a dulled mustiness to the room. Mike and I walked through with a kind of slow and deliberate reverence. There was not the smell of death, but there was the smell of ash and cigarettes, and a darkness on the walls from the years of being a smoker. Ash trays were full all around the apartment. Her English Manor chair which sat directly in front of a small television set had burns in it. But there wasn’t the sign of a bottle anywhere. And we knew that in this hibernation she had to be drinking.
