Reading Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These at Christmastime

So already, one mid-December afternoon when I was driving home just before dusk, I happened to tune my car radio to a public radio interview with Claire Keegan, the author of Small Things Like These. 

 

I had just passed the convent that had long been the Jamaica Plain home of the Poor Clare Nuns, and I was now headed onto the Arborway.* Ahead of me lay a sea of brake lights that far outnumbered the just-coming-on Christmas lights of the houses to my left that, perched high on the hill opposite the Arnold Arboretum, easily peered into it, especially when most of the trees were bare.

 

The interview was fascinating for two reasons. The first was how determined the interviewer was to treat Keegan's novella first and foremost as an exposé of the dehumanizing horrors associated with Ireland's notorious Catholic-Church-run Magdalen Laundries. 

 

The second was how deftly, kindly, but firmly Keegan kept asserting her personal greater interest in the inner life and related actions of the novel's main character, Bill Furlong.*** As Keegan patiently explained, "But for me, it isn't a book about the laundries. For me, it's a book about a coal man who doesn't know who his father is because his mother [gave birth to him] out of wedlock. And I think it's more to do with hope and courage … I didn't want to write a story of cruelty and incarceration."** 

 

I felt like I was listening to a tug of war that the interviewer wasn't even aware was raging, so accustomed was she to assigning significance to works of literature on the basis of the degree to which social justice was their mission.

But having heard Keegan articulate what mattered to her about the novel, I knew immediately I wanted to read it. So I bought it for my husband Scott as a Christmas present, and even warned him I might read it before I wrapped it up to surprise him with it.

 

Finally, the Saturday after Christmas, I spent a perfect afternoon reading Keegan's book--perfect because of how beautiful and engrossing it was, just as its various reviewers have claimed. In fact, so drawn into it was I that the minute I finished it, I promised myself to read it again the next day. And I did.

 

Almost as soon as I'd finished relishing that second reading, my thoughts turned to that other great Irish novella set in the Christmas season--James Joyce's "The Dead." Henceforth in my mind, I knew, the twelve days of Christmas would be book-ended by these two beautiful works, each centered on a male character who is well-regarded, ill at ease, and especially ill at ease on a Christmas season evening when certain customary feelings and behaviors are expected of him.

 

Keegan's story takes place on a Christmas Eve that becomes atypical when the events of the day lead Bill Furlong to do something out of the ordinary and potentially momentous. Joyce's tale takes place at and after the annual Epiphany dinner party at which Gabriel Conroy always plays an important ceremonial role. Something important has changed at the end of both stories for both of these characters, though what will happen next is unknown.

 

As a Jewish person, I don't celebrate Christmas, but, having taught "The Dead" and T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" to high school juniors and seniors so many times, I still think of it as a twelve-day holiday that culminates on January 6 with the Feast of Epiphany. More than the ox and ass that bowed at the manger and the angels whose praising and proclaiming voices filled the heavens, the magi--you may refer to them as the wise men or the three kings--have always fascinated me.

 

These wealthy men of position who traveled so long and far bearing gifts**** and who experienced, according to the gospels, the divinity of the newborn child--how did their manger-side experiences change not just their inner lives, but their public lives among those who didn't have their direct experience with the miraculous baby? What was it like for them to return to their respective kingdoms alone? What happened next for them--or, maybe even more importantly, what did they do next? Eliot hazards more of a guess about all of this than the gospels do. 

Both The Dead  and Small Things LIke These raise similar questions about what next. The particular Christmases presented yield realizations--or epiphanies--not just about the underpinnings of and expectations of the worlds in which the main characters occupy particular places, but the characters' capacities to grow, to change, and to make changes. So what effects will their insights and new understandings have on their psyches, their spirits, their lives going forward? Will they welcome and work to integrate them into their lives, or will they consciously or unconsciously let them go?

 

In both books, marriage, family, and community play central roles; the Catholic church exerts an influence; and blanketing snow galvanizes insight.*****

 

Literarily speaking, they both rely heavily on the stream of consciousness narrative technique that Joyce originated to reveal characters' states of mind. Within these chronicled inner musings are details of conversation, place, and people that both establish the main characters' personalities and sensibilities and create overall mood. As tension ebbs and flows in both works, we the readers join these characters in being ill at ease and wonder not only how their unsettled evenings will conclude, but what tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will bring.

Interestingly, there's an actual stream in addition to that literary stream of consciousness that runs through Bill Furlong's town, or rather a river. Very early on the Sunday morning before Christmas Eve, looking down towards the River Barrow****** from the grounds of the convent, where he's gone to deliver a load of coal and which he characterizes as "still" but "not ever peaceful," Furlong muses to himself:

The day had not yet dawned, and Furlong looked down at the dark, shining river whose surface reflected equal parts of the lighted town. So many things had a way of looking finer, when they were not so close. He could not say which he rathered: the sight of town or its reflection on the water. (60)*******

There is pair of doubles in these few sentences: the town and its reflection in the river, and the things seen near and things seen far. They suggest that Furlong is already aware of decisions to be made: will he elect to see things close up and as they are, or farther away and "finer" than they are?

 

Reflections--literal and figurative--are a motif throughout the novella; more than once, they compel Furlong to encounter himself, either as he is or as a variant of himself. As he drives toward the convent on that same morning,"the reflection of Furlong's headlights crossed the window panes and it felt as though he was meeting himself there" (59). 

 

Once inside the convent, Furlong notices that "The whole place and everything in it was shining, immaculate: in some of the hanging pots, Furlong caught a glimpse of version of himself, passing" (67). But what kind of a version is it? Does Furlong see a better version of himself? a disappointing true one?********

 

 It's Furlong's acknowledgment several pages earlier that "Of late, he was inclined to imagine another life" that has sensitized the reader to language and images related to reflection, self-inquiry, and self-regard. Keegan establishes the motif subtly, almost inconspicuously, but we perceive it and sense the way it heightens Furlong's profound uneasiness that seems to be asking for release or resolution.

And that's the way this book works. Details and images are pebbles that Keegan drops into still water. Though they fall separately, almost unobtrusively, and nearly silently, the gentle circular ripples********** they create spread out and invariably overlap. The result is the sense that all of these "small things" are interconnected and important to moving the story and the lives it portrays forward.

Take for example the details related to haircuts and people who cut hair. In the first third of the novel, Furlong's wife reports that the son of the local barber has an aggressive form of cancer that will kill him within the year (37). Soon thereafter, Furlong recalls a recent visit to the convent to make a coal delivery during which he encountered several young women scrubbing the chapel floor. Though one of their number whose hair had been "roughly cut, as though someone blind had taken to it with a shears" had asked for his help, he had not given it (43). 

 

On a morning closer to Christmas, Furlong  again heads to the convent to make a delivery--and encounters either the same girl or a different girl with "roughly cut hair." This time, he does intervene on her behalf, though not in the way she asks him to (62)--which haunts him later. 

 

On Christmas Eve, after the snow has started to fall, and upon catching his reflection--another reflection!--in a mirror in a store window, Furlong decides he needs a haircut and heads to the barbershop where the barber whose son has not long to live "nodded solemnly at Furlong in the mirror" (103). There is so much silent suffering in the shadows of the holiday bustle--as if the customers in the barber shop fear the holiday magic would dissipate if they took a moment to acknowledge the barber will soon become one more parent in the story who has been forcefully separated from his child.

Photo of the Holiday Card from My Friend Elizabeth

A little later as the snow continues to accumulate, Furlong, like the magi, journeys from home toward a place where one might hope and expect to find the presence of God, especially as expressed in human compassion and kindness--namely a convent. But Furlong already does not experience the particular convent toward which he's heading as a place of peace and caring, and he has recently been recognizing that people often collude to hide harsh truths out of fear, convenience, or unexamined indifference. 

 

Once he arrives at the convent, he re-encounters the girl with the hacked hair. What happens next you will need to read the book to find out.

 

It's small things like these--these details of action, thought, and observation--that, first, establish that Bill Furlong is at a inflection point in his life, and second, propel both him and his story forward as he grapples with all that is at stake. The question of how and whether he can respond is a separate one, which reading this book will answer for you, or at least begin to answer--since what happens beyond its last page is a further question, one T.S. Eliot would have recognized.

 

How interesting--and rare--that a work of literature should have a title that suggests both its message about the stuff and nature of human lives, and the literary means by which it conveys that message. It's as if the method and the message are perfectly matched. And there is reason for hope, despite the cold and darkness of the winter nights portrayed.

 

I  hope you'll read--and maybe even reread--Clair Keegan's Small Things Like These, if you haven't already. For one thing, I'd love to know how you interpret the many crows in the novella. Meanwhile, Happy Feast of Epiphany, if you celebrate it. 

 

* Collage created from three screen shots from the following websites: https://arboretum.harvard.edu/stories/portals-of-wonder-and-welcome/, https://www.etsy.com/listing/716230349/christmas-lights-svg-christmas-light-svg, and https://mass.streetsblog.org/2023/11/21/revised-arborway-bus-plan-would-make-room-for-hundreds-of-new-transit-oriented-homes

** Becker, D. & Tamagawa, E. (2024, December 11). Claire Keegan's 'Small things like these' is having a moment. In Here & Now. WBUR Studios. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/12/11/small-things-like-these

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*** Screen shot of Enda Bowe/Lionsgate photo of Cillian Murphy accompanying the following article: Wilkinson, A. (2024, November 7). 'Small Things Like These’ Review: The Fears of a Watchful Father. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/movies/small-things-like-these-review-cillian-murphy.html

**** James Tissot: The Magi Journeying (c. 1890), Brooklyn Museum, New York City: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Magi#/media/File:Brooklyn_Museum_-_The_Magi_Journeying_(Les_rois_mages_en_voyage)_-_James_Tissot_-_overall.jpg

***** Screen shot of photo accompanying the following: McCarthy, D. (2010, March 18). “Snow was general all over Ireland…” The last paragraph of Joyce’s The dead. Medium. https://medium.com/drmstream/snow-was-general-all-over-ireland-the-last-paragraph-of-joyces-the-dead-48b08b4c3b1f

*(6) Recolored screen shot on the following website. The townn is Athy, and it is on the Barrow River. https://www.waterwaysireland.org/our-waterways/barrow-navigation/the-barrow-way/athy*

*(7) Keegan, C. (2021). Small things like these. Grove Press.

*(8) Screen shot of a photo of a hanging rack of pots and pans available from Wayfair.

*(9) Screen shot of photo on chipcoffeeblog on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/chipcoffeyblog/93595106358/dropping-pebbles-in-the-pond-the-ripple-effect-is

*(10) Screen shot of photo on the following website: Crider, A. (2019, April 10). Is crow hunting worth my time? Project Upland. https://projectupland.com/migratory-bird-species/crow-hunting/is-crow-hunting-worth-my-time/

Writing a Long Poem During the Darkest Days

So already, the poem I've been writing for the last two months isn't finished yet. But the process of writing it has been so affirming and engaging that I wanted to write about it.*

It's been taking a willing, insightful village* to move the writing of this poem forward--and what could be more affirming than the thoughtful willingness of one's fellow villagers? How fortunate I am to have a writing group and poetry-reading friends from my college days who've read and commented on "November Dark" during these last weeks. Their sensibilities as readers and firsthand knowledge of me have helped the poem hone in on both my personal emotional truths and on some related more universal ones. I am so grateful to these reader-friends.

Still, this post is going to focus on my dark-day-in, dark-day-out relationship to the poem.

 

"November Dark" is a long--really, a long ass**--poem. Returning to it again and again during this season of late sunrises and early sunsets has been both comforting and challenging. And "November Dark" has insisted that I return to it again and again.

So why "long ass"? I know I'm not someone you'd generally expect to use that word, especially in writing. It's not just that the poem I'm writing is long--not as long as Paradise Lost, or even "Ash Wednesday," but long for me. And it's not just that it's taking me a long time to write it--not as long as it probably would have taken Elizabeth Bishop to craft what she would have considered a respectable first pass at a poem, but a long time for me.

 

More importantly, "November Dark" has had me stuck in its craw*** since early November--so "long ass" has more to do with the quality of the experience of writing a first respectable draft of it over a number of weeks.

 

Frankly, the poem has been completely inhabiting me--teasing me some days, daring me others, eluding and encouraging me in alternation, playing hide and seek with me--often acting more like a skittish potential lover** than a bunch of words on a page actually trying to become and say something. 

 

In other words, it's been plaguing me in the best possible way. It's been my companion, a soulmate**** who keeps me up at night with constant suggestions and considerations, with ideas for other words and alternative phrases. It's been fostering the kind of sleeplessness that inspires rather than troubles me--which is ironic because the poem is rooted in the experience of troubling routine sleeplessness. Once I finish this poem, I think I'll miss its knocking on the door of my consciousness at any hour, and my immediate flinging open of that door to welcome it. Realizing this makes me a little ambivalent about finishing it.

 

So why has writing this poem been a particularly engrossing, extended experience? Why have I felt so attached to it? No doubt because its subject is loss and grief that are fresh, alive, and mine right now. As many of you know, my mother died in early October, my father died at this time of year four years ago, and Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump in early November's presidential election.

On December 5, when I was struggling to know how to combine certain ideas and blocks of content that I instinctively felt belonged together in the poem's third section, I wrote the following about the effect grief was having on my relationship with the world:

There's a sense that there's a veil or scrim interposed between me and the urgent, my blunted sense of the urgent, despite my recognition of it. And I was glad of that blunted sense. That's one of the interesting things about grief, I think: it both holds you and sustains you, even though it weighs on you and causes you pain. But really what it causes you is sadness because it's real and you know that you're wounded--and you're wounded in a healthy, understandable way. It's almost like it makes nothing else matter all that much. And you just try to go about your day as best you can without magnifying anything or dismissing anything. You don't make more of it and its effects; you don't make less of it and its effects.

As soon as I wrote this, I realized that though my long ass poem explicitly says I am mourning for my mother, it does not say that I am mourning for my father:

     Yes, I'm mourning for . . .  [my father and mother] both because I finally don't have to worry about her, but also because I always felt that my father was somehow alive in me because I was taking care of my mother, and that would have meant so much to him. So I carried him with me in this very active and  . . .  [embodied] way every time I went to see her. I still carry him with me, but not in the same way.

      The truth of the matter is that I now realize--well, it's not just now--that I'm really mourning for both my mother and father--her death took him away from me again, . . .  added another layer or level of separation to what was already a major separation. And how could I not be when so many of the pictures that I have of each of them are pictures of both of them?

In the same way I invisibly carried my father with me whenever I went to visit my mother in these last four years, my long ass poem, which makes no mention of him, invisibly carries him, too. Sometimes one poem can't tell the whole story, can't make explicit all the layers. And yet they're there. I think I'm writing this blog post to assert the presence of my father in the bones of my poem.

 

This year, Hanukkah comes exceedingly late: the first candle will not be lit until the Christmas Day night, and eighth candle will not be lit until New Year's Day night. I'll be lighting both my "Womenorah," as it was called by the Vermont artist who created it years ago, and the menorah that was always at the center of my family's Hanukkah observances throughout my childhood and teenage years. Now that both my mother and father are gone, I feel especially fortunate to have inherited what was their menorah.

 

On the second night of Hanukkah, I'll be lighting an additional candle--the one that marks my father's yahrzeit--the anniversary of his death on Jewish calendar. So there will be plenty of light in my dining room. And lots of memories.

It's been a long-ass year--I think everyone who's been at all caught up in this year's election fever feels this way, too. And yes, my long ass poem is close to being done. You will get to read it sometime in 2025 if that's your wish.

 

Until then, may you fully enjoy the various holidays you'll be celebrating as the solstice passes and we head again toward the light. May you and your loved ones enjoy celebrating with one another, and may your memories of those with whom you celebrated in years gone by be more sweet than sad. 

* "Cobbled steps meandering between quaint cottages in the North Yorkshire coastal village of Robin Hoods Bay. Pen & Ink - 8"x11"on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=472623692089089&id=100080243860310&set=a.165923569425771

** The online world offers two spellings for this word, "long ass" and "longass." Autocorrect likes "long ass" better.

*** Screen shot of work of art on this website: https://dateagle.art/blog_post/clare-price/--a Clare Price blog post.

****"Like chrysalids unfold their wings and soar into the night"--a painting by Scott Ketcham that will be on view in January and February 2025 in the Horan Gallery at the Ventress Memorial Library in Marshfield, MA. https://ventresslibrary.assabetinteractive.com/calendar/scott-ketcham-reception/

New Flowers: Scott Ketcham's Latest Paintings

So already, what's going on in the painting to the right? Are morning glories about to be trampled? Whose footprints are those? And why would someone want to trample those flowers anyway? Ultimately, what do you pay most attention to--the vibrancy of those innocent blue flowers, or the menace of those treading footsteps? Or are those flowers really so innocent? Maybe there is a mutuality here, a dangerous invitation proffered by them that elicits--even strives to elicit--the human impulse to master and even desecrate. And perhaps the invitation equally endangers both the flowers and the trampling soles--or is it souls? 

 

The painting is called "But only those who leave for leaving," which is an English translation of a line from Charles Baudelaire's poem "Le Voyage."

Scott Ketcham's annual open studios will take place on Saturday, November 23 and Sunday, November 24 at the Sandpaper Factory in Rockland, MA (see bottom of this post for details). Among the works on display will be a number of paintings that will be featured in his solo show, "The Flowers of Evil," that will run will run from January 4 to February 22, 2025 at Ventress Memorial Library in Marshfield, MA.

 

Because Scott's paintings regularly portray tensions, I have tried in my blog over the years to convey how they make visible and alive the unsettling truth of such authentic "contradictions" as avoidant approach, luminous darkness, ascending descent, and the monstrous seductive. It was while contemplating the monstrous seductive that I first thought that the poetry of Charles Baudelaire would speak to Scott's soul--so I gave him a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal  (The Flowers of Evil) for Christmas. As I explained in another blog  about Scott's work, "Given Baudelaire's many poems about mysterious, voluptuous women, I imagined that I would be stoking Scott's figure-painting fire . . . . So I was surprised when the book first inspired him to paint a series of floral still lifes." But hardly your typical pretty, reassuring floral still lifes.

 

There is something simultaneously irresistible and off-putting about Scott's tainted bouquets. Their hues, both natural and overripe, prompt vague alarm in the viewer. But the net effect of the balance embodied by flowers of themselves--vibrant with the thrust of brash brushstrokes but restrained by the fineness of thin lines scraped and etched--is a mesmerizing affirmation of life--but life necessarily (though not reluctantly) entwined with death. Baudelaire perceives the precipice and dances on it. Scott paints it.

 

Before you see more of Scott's paintings, a word about what you can expect from them in terms of how they reflect Baudelaire's poetry. Scott doesn't analyze Baudelaire's poems when he reads them; rather, he envisions them, allows the experience of them to wash over him. So the paintings you are about to see are not visual interpretations of entire poems; they are flights of painterly fancy inspired by words or phrases, especially as understood in the context of the sampled poem's mood and tone.

A few weeks back, curious about how Baudelaire's imagery, sensibilities, and themes were manifesting in Scott's paintings and knowing I'd soon be writing this blog, I visited Scott's studio. He'd laid out all the "Baudelaire paintings" on the floors so I could wander among them. I felt strangely like I was wandering through the "forêts de symboles" (forests of symbols) in Baudelaire's famous sonnet "Correspondances." And I LOVED what I was seeing. 

 

Scott is hardly the wayward frequenter of brothels, errant screw-up, and dedicated bad boy that Baudelaire was, but his work has always conveyed the power of sensation; his belief in the glorious oneness of body and spirit; and his recognition that oneness can be shaped by circumstance and choice--including warped by them.

 

Consequently, Scott's longtime fascination with darkness is evident in this new body of work. But that characteristic darkness is generally more enigmatic than oppressive. It suggests a transcendent reality reflecting the eternal struggle between--or maybe the fraught companionship of--light and dark, of life and death in all of their literal and figurative possibility.

 

Yes, humans are mortal. Yes, they often choose to succumb to their desires with the self-deceiving hope that immersion in those desires will liberate them. Yes, they often use their power, especially their sexual and emotional power, to control and manipulate others rather than to liberate themselves--check out "Stupidity, Delusion, Selfishness, and Lust,"* to the left. And yes, they often disdain others' surrender to the inertia, malaise, and ennui that some societies tend to foster before surrendering to it themselves.

 

But artists have powerful imaginations that can lift them--and us--above the dulling, sinister mire, permitting both them and us to encounter the angelic, the eternal, and the beautiful, if only fleetingly.**

 

And those artists, in addition, can render their encounters with the demonic, the dying, and the grotesque that are always lurking in the shadows of the angelic, the eternal, and the beautiful. To paraphrase a line from Yeats, a terrible beauty can always be born*** when a passionate, skilled artist with a penetrating gaze sets to work. The creation of such beauty is the artist's foremost means of liberation and revolt, no matter how temporary.

 

Take, for example, "I dream of new flowers,"**** seen to the right. Those new flowers--are they an aesthetic improvement over the flowers we usually see in floral still lifes? They are if their creator is looking to disrupt a paralyzing norm, or to convey some hard, overlooked truth about the world that holds us in its clutches. I love how the painting's red bulbous blooms emerge from leaves of seeming twisted steel, suggesting an industrialized world that easily brushes aside, disdains, even crushes the human.

 

But maybe Baudelaire's aesthetic and struggles aren't your thing, and you find yourself wondering, "Why would I want to engage with the products of such a perverse, tortured imagination?" In that case, I think you might simply enjoy the enigmatic qualities of Scott's paintings.

 

Take, for example, the painting on the left. What first catches your eye: the woman's lovely face and her intense engagement with the flowers? her slender fingers spreading themselves out lusciously among the delicate white daisies? or the gray-faced man who seems to be enduring having his skull serve as a planter? Its title, "The things we loathed became the thing we love," comes from the introductory poem to Les Fleurs du Mal.* But who exactly is loathing whom or what? And does it redeem us or debase us if we do come to love what we loathed? 

 

 

Then there are these two paintings, both of which bring Medusa to my mind.***** As the Book of Genesis says, "Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made." But which of the women above is more subtle? more disempowering and dangerous? Are both to be equally feared--and pitied? When are the feared to be pitied, and the pitied to be feared? And did Medusa relish or hate being Medusa, anyway?

I leave you, "Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!" ("hypocrite Reader — my double — my brother [/sister"]") with these questions, and an invitation to come to Scott's open studios later this month. I'd love you to experience Scott's poems inspired by Baudelaire's "sickly flowers."****** Thank you for reading, and hoping to see you in Rockland, Marshfield, or both.

 

* from "Au Lecteur."

** As Baudelaire explains it in "L'Albatros" ("The Albatross"), 

The Poet is like that wild inheritor of the cloud,
A rider of storms, above the range of arrows and slings;
Exiled on earth, at bay amid the jeering crowd,
He cannot walk for his unmanageable wings.

*** from "Easter, 1916."

**** from "L'Ennemi" ("The Enemy"). 

***** from "La Chevelure" (The Head of Hair) https://fleursdumal.org/poem/203 and “Hymne à la Beauté” ('Hymn to Beauty)

****** from "Dédicace" (Dedication)

About My Mother and Me

So already, this is a tale of two sixteen-year-old girls and a movement. The movement was second wave feminism. The two sixteen-year-olds were my mother, who turned sixteen in 1944, and I, who turned sixteen in 1971. So this is also the story of a mother and a daughter.*

 

My mother, Thelma Soble, passed away earlier this month on October 2 at the age of ninety-six, and since then, I've been doing a lot of remembering and thinking; hence my realization that this is a tale of of two sixteen-year-old girls and a movement. My mother was very nice, and I was usually pretty nice--and we locked horns a lot when I was in my twenties and thirties. I suspect that that had a lot to do with who we each were and the messages we each received as teenagers.

At sixteen, I was often sad, sometimes angry, extremely cautious, quite self-conscious, often judgmental, and very good at one thing: learning. I was also surrounded by female friends and female teachers who were basking in the promises of equality and self-realization offered by the women's movement. The first issue Ms. magazine** came out in 1972, but it was Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, and Woman's Day that kept arriving at my house monthly.

My mother, who herself had been a very good learner, never aspired to be, as far as I could tell, anything but a very smart wife and mother who, I believe (though my sisters might disagree), saw herself as raising three daughters who would be wives and mothers, even if they did something else besides that--but not anything that would ever vie with their commitments to home, husband, and family. 

 

Meanwhile, my friends were reading The Feminine Mystique and The Female Eunuch, and even though I was not, I was listening to what they said about them. 

Then in 1973, my color-inside-the lines self got into Radcliffe. Of course my parents were proud and excited--but for very different reasons than my female teachers were, especially my French teacher, Mrs. Mederos. "What a moment in time to be going to Radcliffe," she told me. "The whole world is changing, and you will have choices I never had."

Then, of course, I made the same choice she had made, and became a high school teacher. But I didn't become a wife until three decades later, and I never became a mother.

With my dad at Marina Bay on her birthday

And my mother was never disappointed in me. Worried, yes, about how I would navigate the world without a responsible man to guide me or take charge altogether. Worried, yes, that I might be lonely. Sad, I think, that I wouldn't be a mother, but not because she felt I owed it to her to produce grandchildren. But never disappointed in me. I give her so much credit for that. Flexible, loving, and insightful, she was able over time to adjust to and genuinely support the life I had, which probably wasn't the one she'd imagined I'd have.

 

No, the person who was chronically disappointed was I, in her. I first felt this way when I was sixteen. While I was having my secret thoughts about my feminist future, my mother was often sitting at the kitchen table playing double solitaire with her mother while her father watched his afternoon shows in our family room.

I hated that my grandparents were at our house so much of the time doing what I thought were stupid, useless things. Plus I loved doing my homework at the kitchen table, and when my mother and grandmother were playing cards there, I couldn't.*** So I angrily told my mother one afternoon, "You have to decide what's more important to you, being our mother or their daughter." Pretty brutal, I know.

 

Once my sisters and I were grown up and out of the house, I wondered why she didn't seize the opportunity to make her world bigger. She did expand her world briefly--to take an adult-ed Hebrew course, an adult-ed Mandarin course, and a part-time job at the local bookstore. And she was out of the house plenty, always busy transporting local elderly relatives--we had many of them--to their various doctors' appointments, the pharmacies where their prescriptions had just been filled, and the department stores where they needed help buying something they couldn't bring back home without having someone younger and stronger available to carry it inside.

 

Over the next two decades, we generally got along and had plenty of good times, but often bumped into those places that made us know how different our attitudes were. When I told her I relished being independent, she told me that she loved being dependent. When I told her that I loved having good friends, she told me she didn't feel the need for good friends because she had family. When I told her I liked coming up with ideas for what to do and getting others to join me in doing them, she told me she preferred waiting for others to come up with ideas and then being invited to join them. "I like to follow someone else's lead," she told me. 

 

A visit with her grandson and great-grandson

Most often, she followed my dad's lead, and the two of them were enthusiastic attenders of every concert in which I sang and every school event in which I was any way involved. And she was always game to travel to Maryland to visit her grandchildren, who were crazy about her, just as she was crazy about them.

 

But mostly, she happily stayed home and, from my point of view, kept her world small, family-focused, and familiar. Periodically, despite my knowing she wouldn't change, her habit of saying no to so many invitations and opportunities frustrated me. After all, she was smart and curious, so why not take the next step? Why not spread those wings? 

 

It wasn't until about eight years ago, not long after I had stopped working at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, that I understood her resistance to saying yes to the new, especially the new and potentially challenging. 

 

That morning, I was taking her to a cardiologist appointment, and she was still adjusting--or not adjusting--to my father's and her new life at Orchard Cove, the senior living community in Canton.  It was a terrible time in her life. She was at the beginning of dementia--no one had used the word Alzheimer's yet--and she knew and could feel that something about herself was different and wrong. It still breaks my heard to think of how lonely and frightening this must have been for her, and I'm only glad that in the later stages of the disease, she seemed no longer to suffer with this sense of not being herself. 

That morning, while telling me that she was struggling to remember things, she told me a story she'd never told me before. When she was sixteen, her father had said to her, "I would never tell you anything important because you forget things." Mind you, my mother was an excellent student, had no cognitive disabilities, and was especially adept at learning languages, which generally requires memorization and the application of rules.

My mother and her two sisters on her 80th birthday

Growing up, I had never thought that my grandfather was a particularly nice man; I'd always felt that he preferred to reign over his family rather than to be an equal member of it, and my mother, aunts, and grandmother always seemed to me to be overly concerned with pleasing him. So all I could imagine was how devastating his comment must have been to my mother. Whatever she was struggling to remember seventy years later, she had no trouble recalling his wounding words to her teenage self.

And to think of how such words would have played over time, despite her academic achievements and so many other indicators of mental acuity. I'd always felt my mother lacked confidence, that she wondered if she really measured up, and now I understood at least part of why she shied away from situations in which she might fail, might risk hitting some kind of wall,  might somehow prove that he was right and that she couldn't be trusted with anything "important."

At around the same time, I was writing a lot, having continued the habit of writing morning pages I'd begun while doing Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. Difficult as the years were as my mother's Alzheimer's worsened and she necessarily progressed from Independent Living to Enhanced (assisted) Living, and finally to Skilled Nursing at Orchard Cove, I realized in retrospect that I had written my way into a new, more nuanced, and definitely kinder understanding of her, three pages at at time. Leave it to writing to surface all the possible perspectives through which any one person might be seen, appreciated, and understood--especially if you believe, as I had come to believe during my years as an educator, that everyone is always pretty much doing the best that they can. Including my mother.

One day when we were visiting my mother on Skilled Nursing, my younger sister Lauren remarked to me, "I'm surprised to see you being so loving with Mummy. You always seemed so angry at her." I explained to her the important role all those morning pages had played in my ceasing to sell my mother short in some very important ways. She had always done the best she could.

All of that set me up to be a really good companion to my mother over the last five years of her life. Of course, the fact that she quickly became one of those very sweet, cheerful, loving Alzheimer's patients--so many people don't--certainly helped. And so I close with the words I said at her graveside burial service a few weeks ago, feeling so grateful that her long life gave me ample time to love her without anger and to be with her: she deserved nothing less.

 

First of all, just to say how nice it is to see all of you here. Thank you so much for being here with us.

 

Before we start sharing memories of my mother from before she had advanced Alzheimer’s, I wanted to talk you about who she was during these last few years. Because it’s too easy and incorrect to think that Alzheimer’s erased her altogether, even though it definitely changed what she could take in or do, and what she could express.

 

I’d like to talk about that expression part for a minute because my mother always loved language, loved words, loved wordplay and word craft. If you saw her obituary, you know that she adored crossword puzzles and that she was very good at writing clever rhyming poems. She was a French major in college, so when she arrived on the Skilled Nursing Floor at Orchard Cove, she regularly spoke French with the staff members from Haiti and Cameroon. And up to the very end, if you were wearing a T-shirt with words on it, she could and would read those words aloud, though I don’t know how often she understood them.

 

One of the ways I knew the mother I had always known was still very much there was because of the deliberate ways she used the language that she did have—and what it said about what she thought mattered in life. For example, if I told her that Scott and I were going to visit his dad, or that my cousin Nancy [her niece, the daughter of her sister Elayne] was hosting everyone for the Seder, or that one of my college roommates was coming to visit—anything involving spending happy time with the people who mattered—she always said, “That’s nice.”

 

My mother at twenty or twenty-one

When I told her about something I was going to do that was going to take effort, that was going to require me to learn something new—like taking a poetry-writing course or rejoining the choral group that I’d been singing in before COVID--she always said, with authority, “That’s good.”

 

And when I gave her a good, long hug, she would often say, almost dreamily, with her blue eyes sparkling, “That was lovely.”

 

Then there were the words that, according to the Orchard Cove staff, she usually said with a smile whenever any of them helped her with something: ”Thank you.”****

 

I want to end by telling you that two days before my mother stopped eating and drinking, she and I had a really wonderful visit. She greeted me with an exuberant, bright-eyed “Hello, honey,” and then we watched part of an episode of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” As many of you know, even though there’s a lot of Jewish content in it, it’s not a family show—there’s lots of swearing in it, and sometimes even some partial nudity. And my mother LOVED it! Every time someone swore, every time something racy or off-color happened, she said, with a really gleeful smile, “Oh my goodness!”

 

I’m going to cherish the memory of my last visit with my mother as much as any of my older important memories of her.

Despite her long years as someone with Alzheimer's disease, I can attest that in some of the most important ways, she was always herself. This morning, as I've been preparing to post this blog, I keep hearing in my mind's ear the first line of a Theodore Roethke poem: "I knew a woman, lovely in her bones."***** My mother was lovely, and I feel proud to have been her daughter--and proudly very much her daughter. 

 

P.S. And one more thing: be careful what you say to sixteen-year-olds. They remember.

* Screen shot of painting accompanying the following blog post: thisihumblyspeak. (2021, October 28). To the memory of mom. thisihumblyspeak: moments of thought and life reflections. https://thisihumblyspeak.com/2021/10/28/to-the-memory-of-mom/ [Note: this painting is by Donna Ashworth and is called "SOMEWHERE INSIDE OF YOU IS A LITTLE GIRL.]

** Screen shot of the cover of the first edition of Ms. Magazine; from the Ms. website: https://msmagazine.com/about/

*** Screen shot of banner drawing on blog called Lev Hardware: Lev, A.M. (2022, January 27). i am not painting even when i am painting. Lev Hardware: ghost girl. https://levhardware.wordpress.com/

**** The nurses and aides at Orchard Cove didn't just take good care of my mother. They loved her, and they were explicit about that. I will always think of them as family as well as truly compassionate professionals.

***** Roethke, T. (1975). I knew a woman. The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (p. 122). Anchor Press/Doubleday.