Take care of your mother. (2019)

Momentous events can feel small, almost routine, when they happen. I woke up before dawn the morning my father died, much earlier than usual. I woke up suddenly and stared at the ceiling, wide-eyed. He hadn’t been home from the hospital in weeks. The rest of my family was still asleep. It was a Saturday. I immediately got dressed, which was also unusual. Shirt and pants and even shoes. There was a red and white beanbag chair near my bed. It was exactly a week past my twelfth birthday. I sank into that beanbag chair, book open in my lap—still a small, impossibly thin kid with a mop of thick hair that I never wanted to cut.

The phone rang in my parents’ room. I heard my mother wake up, through the closet that connected us. The door on my side of the closet was open. The door on their side of the closet was closed. She knew at the ring what had happened, and so did I. I heard two questions. When? And what was the cause? Her silence I heard next. Then she thanked the person who had called.

A long time later, maybe two hours, she came and knocked on my door. She found me dressed and waiting and setting my book aside.

I said I knew. That I had heard.

She walked across the room and knelt down to hug me. Neither of us were crying.

“What are we going to do?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said, standing up. “I don’t know.”

Then I listened to her go to my sisters in their separate rooms, knocking on each door before she opened it. Emily was six. Mandy had just turned ten. Mandy remembers not believing or understanding what had happened until she went downstairs for breakfast and found Anne Schwartz in the kitchen. She had left Marc with their children and come down the street to help.

Later that morning, I played baseball in the church parking lot. I told my friends that my father had died, still with no tears or even emotion in my voice. “Didn’t your dog just die?” one of them asked.

From all points on the compass, family came. Aunts and uncles and cousins coursed into New Haven, filled one hotel to capacity and overflowed into others. My father’s sister Ruth and her brothers came for their third funeral in less than nine months. I don’t know how many times Joe had traveled to New Haven since September. I missed his sons when he came and always asked if he would bring them next time. He brought them this time. Mark was a year older than I was and Joe a year younger. We slept together in my bedroom, which distracted me, and stayed closed to each other in the crush of all that family.

But all that family—the Virginia evangelicals, the Chicago doctors—almost got lost in the rest of the crowd. We had visiting hours and an open casket in our house, Southern country style. Hundreds came. Neighbors. Classmates. Colleagues. Patients. They came in the front hall, filed through the living room, and passed into the dining room, where his casket had taken the place of the table.

Facing the couch were two armchairs, side by side, with a small table between them. The armchairs and their table cut across one corner of the room, creating a small triangular space behind them that could only fit kids. We got back there by crawling under the table. I remember standing there with Mandy, watching over the backs of the chairs as people passed. The crowd aggravated the pain I hadn’t yet started to feel. If anyone wept, their grief seemed trivial compared to ours. If anyone didn’t, I wondered why they came. I wanted no comfort from anyone but my father’s family because they were all I had of him now.

The same crowds attended the church service, where it was standing room only. I walked into church wearing a sixties psychedelic tie that my father thought was funny, as if I could still amuse him, and then realized how inappropriate people thought this was. One of my uncles preached—my father’s brother Timothy. It was hard enough to preach his baby brother’s funeral sermon, but it was also hard to see and feel, standing at the pulpit, how secular our community was. “Northeastern nonbelievers” he later called the crowd that filed past those armchairs in our living room. But he reached them. Afterward, a neighbor wrote my mother:

“I found the service to be just that profound ‘religious experience’ which so many ministers have tried so hard (mostly in vain) to produce in me. I doubt that Timothy will ever preach a more moving sermon—or one with such effect. Had he asked at the end for all of those who wished to be saved to come forward, I am sure there would have been a stampede to the altar! It was impossible not to feel that the real value of life was being illuminated. . . . Surely none of us who listened can ever be quite the same people we were before.”

The next day a long parade of cars drove two hours to bury him at the farm, in that old cemetery still surrounded by a rusted metal fence.

The cemetery stood on the hill behind the house. In and among the gravestones of farmers named in the nineteenth century—Othenal, Abigail, Sammuel, Salmon—my father and mother had picked out a spot, looking toward the barn and the hill behind it, where that spring still barely provided water to the house. It was early March. My uncles and some of my older cousins had spent a day up there, hacking through the frozen ground by hand so a backhoe could dig the grave.

The long parade of cars parked along the road, pulled hard to the right so traffic could pass if any traffic came. The house stood across from the barn, around the corner in this picture.

The roofs and rear windows of station wagons and sedans stretched around the corner, past the house, and ended at the hearse, which was parked near the road that led up the hill to the cemetery.

The family stood in a circle around the hearse. Someone shouted out the title of a hymn and the Smiths all started singing as his brothers pulled out the casket and carried him up the hill, still singing, to the hole they had dug. His brother Sam, another preacher, spoke. There was more singing. All the tools they had borrowed to break through the frozen ground were still there, leaning against gravestones. We filled the hole entirely by hand.

Over those several days, in all these different places—our front hall, the steps of the church, the side of the road at the farm—many people shook my hand and said goodbye. And when they had finished sharing their sympathy or remembering my father, so many of them said, in the casual sexism of the time, “Take care of your mother.” I felt stunned each time I heard it. I don’t remember any consideration for how this must have felt to her—that a thirty eight year old widow would need a twelve year old boy to take care of her. Yet that was the culture and those were the times. She was often standing right there when people, mostly men, told me to take care of her. She was still so much taller than I was. She was often as tall or taller than the people talking to us. But when I glanced up at her, she didn’t look insulted. She had heard people talk like this her entire life and didn’t notice. Or didn’t know she noticed.

My mother didn’t expect anyone to take care of her. She didn’t want that. In the years that followed, she learned what she needed to learn and did what she needed to do. She rose to the challenge. She raised three children on her own but couldn’t meet the standard she once set for herself. Parenthood without him was so much less controlled than she expected, and there were so many more mistakes along the way. The chaos was exceptionally painful, and there were times when she did need someone to take care of her, as we all do.

At these times, I would remember my farewell with my father and his blessing. And I would remember my questions then. What is a good man? What kind of choices does a good man make? What does he say? What does he do? For years, these questions were answered by what I failed to provide. I was not able to take care of my mother when she needed it.