Remembrance
My mother died on May 12th. We had taken her to visit her family in Illinois in mid April. She had a happy weekend with sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews. We brought her back to her memory care facility on a Sunday night. The next day she had a stroke and then a few days later, a clot shut down the right side of her brain. My sisters, Mandy and Emily, did the hard work of getting her out to the farm for her final days and she died there, in her back living room with us all around her. Her obituary is here.
We had a service in early June. We held it in Chester Town Hall. She had done so much for the town while she lived at the farm that the select board wouldn’t take any money. Some of the grandchildren did the music. Some of the grandchildren spoke. Some did both. Mandy and Emily and I also spoke. This was my contribution.
I once worked for a tree company, mostly hauling cut branches but also raking twigs off lawns and sweeping sawdust off sidewalks. One afternoon we were driving away from a job, three or four of us jammed into the cab. We were all talking and laughing when the manager asked from behind the wheel if I knew how to use a chainsaw. I said I did. He asked who taught me. I told him my mother. And the cab fell utterly silent. I remember sitting there, watching the lines on the road, and thinking—not for the first time—how unique my mother was.
A few years after she taught me to use a chainsaw, my mother waged a war on porcupines. Their population had surged, and they had started eating load-bearing beams in our buildings, chewing through them the way a beaver would. You could walk right up behind one at some critical beam that, say, held up the roof of the garage, with its head in a hole they had already made, still chewing. “You can’t stop them,” someone told her. “You have to kill them.” She could use a crowbar, he explained. If she hit one across the bridge of the nose, it would die instantly. So she kept a crowbar on the porch and counted the number of porcupines she killed.
That summer she was also rebuilding the floor in our barn by herself. At the height of this war, she walked out of the barn and discovered a porcupine eating a beam. All she had in her hand was her chainsaw. The crowbar was across the stream, at the end of the porch. This is an image I will always have of her, standing with a chainsaw in front of a porcupine and trying to decide how to kill it. She clubbed it across the nose with the base of the engine.
This resourcefulness, her independence, was who she always was and always would have been. But her intensity about it was a legacy of our father’s death. He died when she was thirty-eight. They had been together since they met as teenagers. Sometime in the first year after he died, my cousin Barb asked her a question. “Aunt Shirley? If Uncle Clint came back, what would you say to him?” Barb expected a romantic answer—part of a story, somehow, about a reunion between a wife and her husband. Instead, the answer burst out with all the raw pain of widowhood. “If Clint came back, I’d say, ‘Where the hell have you been?’”
Our father died a week after I turned twelve. “Take care of your mother,” people told me at his funeral. My mother didn’t expect anyone to take care of her. In the years that followed, she learned what she needed to learn and did what she needed to do. But I felt her fury, the raw pain of widowhood, almost every hour of every day. It made me feel guilty—as if I had done something to her, or he had done something that I should be able to repair. The only man-sized object in the family now, I grew closer and closer to the age when they first met. She wanted me to him. I wanted to be him—or at least an early version of him, some recognizable prototype. But I couldn’t do it. I was too needy and confused, too grief struck myself.
In those days, she worried constantly about all the work that had to be done at our place on Kinnebrook Road. Although I couldn’t fill the hole our father left behind, I could always help her there. I have worked there, the same way he did, ever since. As adults, my sisters and I would come to visit her with our families. My wife and I, my sisters and their husbands—six adults—could be scattered around the front of the house on any given summer weekend. My mother would walk past everyone to tell me what needed done as if the two of us were alone. If I sat in a rocking chair on the porch, she’d sit on the railing in front of me to discuss whether she had enough firewood for the winter or explain where the brush needed to be cut along the stream or ask me again to carry that bag of grain from her truck out to the barn.
As she grew older, her circuit around the house started to shrink. I first realized this maybe ten years ago when a cherry tree fell across our upper field. Any previous year, she would have called me at work the day after it fell. If I went up there for the weekend and left without cutting it up, I would have gotten the same call at home Sunday evening or as soon as I sat at my desk on Monday. But that spring I found the fallen tree before she did. I had other things planned that weekend, so I didn’t cut up. No call at home Sunday. No call at my desk Monday. The next time I was up there I forgot. I meant to do it the time after that but got involved in something else which took the whole weekend. I finally cut it up in July. When I bucked up the tree and brought the load down to the woodshed, she wondered where the wood had come from.
In the years that followed, she became increasingly confused by numbers. She had a little business and had taught herself how to use databases, but after a point she almost couldn’t use a computer at all. Then she couldn’t remember how to use the handset for her landline. Then it wasn’t safe for her to drive on the roads anymore. But whatever else she had forgotten, she still did all the mowing. She remembered where the rocks were, where her fields were muddy at the beginning of the season, and where the banks along the stream were unstable.
Eventually, her doctor said to her, point blank, “You won’t be able to stay in that house more than another six to ten months.” As the clock ran out, as the day approached when she would have to move closer to my sisters and I in Boston, I got her tractor stuck. A big crowd of us—brothers in law, nieces, and nephews—struggled to get it out with shovels and boards and chains, mud up to our ankles. Then we had to go home to start work. I told my mother we would be back the next weekend, but on Monday she called a few people she knew in town and got the tractor out by herself.
In the nineteen sixties and early seventies, while our father was alive, we used to go to the antiques auction that Senas had at their barn in Worthington. People sat in folding chairs while old Mr. Sena stood on stage and auctioned off furniture, farm machinery, and whatever else he had found in his travels around New England the week before. His sons would hoist something like an armchair or a desk above their heads, and he would start the bidding by saying, “You’ll never find another one like it.”
There’s this long tradition in literature of comparing the cycle of generations—of people living and dying—to leaves. But every leaf, when it goes in the fall and returns in the spring, is the same. What makes grief so hard, each time we lose someone, is that no one will ever be the same. Think about all the stories we heard today. There will never be another one like her. She leaves a hole that no one will ever fill. And she isn’t the first hole in our lives—for any of us—and she won’t be the last. We each live with a collection of unfillable holes. We will each leave behind an unfillable hole of our own.
How do we find value when life involves so much change and separation? My mother first confronted this question as a young widow. She confronted it again when her brother died of a sudden heart attack. Her answer was to stay engaged and interested and curious about life while it lasted—to move and do, to talk and think, and to always learn more about people and the natural world.
Once, my brother-in-law Bob and I were walking in the woods with our kids, and we found the bones of a fisher cat, picked clean, in the middle of a game path. The kids’ first reaction was, “We have to bring this back to Grandma!” We squatted there for a long time, picking the bones out of the leaves and putting them in a hat. Then we stood up, and within a hundred yards we found another fisher cat, this time held together by fur and skin. “Grandma will want to see this too!” the kids cried. We stuck the decaying corpse on the end of a stick, which my oldest, who was probably eleven or twelve at the time, insisted on carrying. We came out of the woods and walked down the road to the house, Isabelle leading with the stick and the fisher cat over one shoulder like a cartoon hobo at the front of a parade.
My mother, who was at the sink washing dishes, came running out of the house. “What have you got there? A fisher cat?”
“We have two!” Isabelle shouted.
And they spent the whole afternoon at the picnic table on the porch, dissecting the corpse and trying to reconstruct the skeleton of the other one.
Maybe five or six years later, when my three children were mostly teenagers, they were sitting in her living room. They were all heads down on their devices when my mother came in from the barn and said, “Hey kids, I want to show you something.” They didn’t hesitate for a moment—no lingering on a game or video, no pretending they didn’t hear her. They dropped their devices and leapt to their feet and followed her outside. Whatever it was she had to show them, they knew it would be interesting. Think about what a compliment that was. The way I see it, that’s the best anyone can do: Stay interested in younger people and keep them interested in us. I hope I can do the same. I hope we all can do the same.
