About
ten years ago, soon after my mother was first diagnosed with lymphoma, I drove
down to Huntington Long Island where I grew up, and I took her out for
dinner—just the two of us. We had spent very little time together since I was a young
teen for reasons which will become apparent, and we had never had dinner alone
together since I was a child. I was
both nervous and confident, knowing that this was the time when a kind of
accounting would be revealed about what kind of son I had been.
My mother was a bright, educated, strong willed, critical
person—intolerant of romanticism or sentimentality.
If someone accused her of being tough, they would not be far off the
mark. So, our dinner was not going
to maudlin, nor was there going to be any gushy revelations.
Still, she had not said anything to me about me, good or bad since I was
14 years old. And I rarely asked
for her opinion—because it was usually obvious, between the lines.
Once I sent her a draft of a short fiction piece that I had
written—because she edited a poetry journal on the Island.
She carefully annotated half the piece, read the rest, and then said she
would stop there, writing a mixed, if somewhat formal review at the end.
Bemused by her stopping her detailed comments in the middle I mailed it
back to her saying how much I valued what she had already done—and wouldn’t
she just comment on the rest. She
finished the task—although I knew she thought she had better things to do than
reading my mediocre fiction. And
she thought I had better things to do than to write it.
But that was a few years back, and now sometime after the waiter removed
the soup bowls and after both of us had had half a glass of wine, the time had
come for my mother, emboldened by the likelihood of her imminent death, to speak
her mind freely about me, her youngest son, for the first time in 25 years.
This review, I’m afraid, was not even mixed.
“You’ve been loitering in life,” she said with earnestness.
Now children, and even adult, are notoriously poor in distinguishing reality
from fiction when it comes to parental evaluations.
Depending upon what part of the brain comes into play and also, what time
of day—or night—we ponder them, these evaluations can be accurate or not
accurate. At 3:00 in the
morning, for example, when our reptilian brain is hard at work, parents are
always right—especially if they have said something particularly critical the
day before. But at 8:00 that
evening, I did not panic. I had
lived a life motivated, in part, by the need to counter my mother’s lack of
attention, and the sense that I had little place in her world.
And I had generally been successful: honors at Cornell, Boston
University PhD program at 21, Massachusetts
General Hospital psychology by 23, Harvard Medical post-doc at 24, married and
raising three teenagers while still in my twenties, and now another child in my
thirties. So I asked her with a smile: what could I do so that
she would no longer consider me a loiterer.
She answered without hesitation: you
should be playing the violin.
I
had stopped when I was 14. I remember the day I garnered the courage to tell my mother I
would no longer play the violin. She
sat in the Danish olive green chair in the living room—the same room where she
gave hours of piano lessons, played Mozart and Chopin sonatas, and sang Brahms
Lieder. I stood in front of her
staring at the floor, avoiding her eyes. She
accepted my simple declaration with resignation—but I felt I had seriously
hurt her. I then walked off
to my room and cried for an hour—knowing full well that I had severed our
connection. From that point I
knew, unless I resumed my hours worth of scales, etudes, and concerto’s, the
basic meaning of life beyond passing on one’s genes—being valuable to
one’s mother—was, at best, in question. I guessed she would not look at me in the same way again.
And she didn’t.
But here we were some 25 years later, continuing the very same living room
conversation as if no time had passed. But
now, instead of a full, dark head of hair, she wore a kerchief covering her bald
pate. And I was suddenly an adult, treating her to dinner for the
first and only time in my life.
She
said directly it was important that I play again.
And I said that I understood her wish, and I would give it some thought.
For four months the thought circled my mind—it came in and out of
consciousness on its own accord. When
it entered I was not hostile to it, but I could not play solely because my
mother wanted me to, especially since it was the only part of me she truly
valued. I would not be coerced—if
I played, I needed to come to it myself. And
I needed to find my own pleasure in it.
And then one day I pulled the violin out of its dusty case.
I found an accomplished teacher, and I began practicing an hour a day.
When I told my mother, she seemed pleased to hear the news.
I would guess she was thrilled, but with my mother, I could never tell
for sure. She would ask me, every
couple of weeks when I spoke to her, how the practicing was going.
I would report honestly: o.k..
I wasn’t very accomplished when I had stopped, so the good news was
that I hadn’t lost much in the way of skill.
A
few months after I started playing again my father called to tell me my mother
was going to need to have her lungs drained of fluid.
Although they tried to stop me, I said I was coming down.
I packed an overnight bag, grabbed my violin and Bach’s A-minor
concerto and drove through a late March snowstorm to Huntington.
When I arrived that evening my mother was, as I suspected, far worse off than my
father had let on. I told her I had
brought my violin and I would play for her in the morning.
The next day I went down to my father’s office in the basement to warm
up, thinking this was going to be the most important recital I ever played.
My hands trembled and I could barely draw the bow across the strings.
When it was clear I wasn’t going to ever warm up, I went to the bedroom
in which she lay, apologized in advance for my sorry effort, and began the
concerto. The sounds that came out were pitiful—my hands were shaking
so badly, half of the notes were out of tune.
Suddenly she stopped me. “Play
it like this” she said—and she hummed a few bars with crescendos and
decrescendos in an effort to get me to play the piece musically.
When I finished, she said nothing more, nor did she ever mention my
playing again. I quietly packed up
and put the violin away.
That weekend of my mother’s death, I asked her many questions about her life. The most important were: Did your mother love you, and how did you know? She answered quickly: yes, my mother loved me, and I knew because she came to my piano recitals. And during that weekend three small things happened that I now hold onto as tightly as I can—because, in my mother's eyes, I fear I barely existed. She said, with genuine and unabashed delight and surprise, that she was so glad I had come. She also said --for the first time since I was ten years old—that I was dear to her. And the afternoon before my father and I drove her to the hospital for the final time, she asked me to look at her last poem, still a work in progress. For an hour we combed through it with equal voice, line by line.