Praise of Motherhood

Kevin

To my sister, Mathilde, who knows the loss.

With thanks to the three people who read this book to death as it was being written: Michael Hulse, Irina Bortoi, and my father.

Thanks, as well, to my family: I owe them much of myself — in body, mind and joy.

Un lapin ne nous effraie point; mais le brusque départ d’un lapin inattendu peut nous mettre en fuite.

— Paul Valéry

ONE

It was Veterans Day; the Pope spoke into a microphone so the thousands around him could hear his weary voice. And in the airport lounge my sister and I waited for our flight to take off, trying not to listen to the televised broadcast of the Pope’s solemn speech. I held my sister’s hand and heard her say fuck for the first time.

fuck, do you think she’s going to be okay

and I said I don’t know

and she said "but why aren’t they telling us what’s going on"

I don’t know

I don’t want mom to die

I know

I’m so scared

I know

and the Pope went on, speaking of the dead, the men whose lives had been lost in a terrible war, and he praised them, their families, for the courage they’d shown. He spoke of Christ, but not much. Sometimes he closed his eyes and paused. From the airport lounge, sitting in front of the television screens, I had to rely on the cameras for a sense of what being there was like. Safe and comfortable and mourning out of patriotic or humanistic duty, in a spirit of contemplation. The Pope did not know that my mother was dying in a little hospital in Portugal. Neither did the lady who announced, on the intercom at the airport, that out of respect for the men who had lost their lives during the war however many decades ago now, we were all invited to stand for two minutes of silence. Everyone else in the lounge stood up, but my sister and I remained in our seats and hugged each other.

As far as I knew, my mother was dying or dead, a small, tanned Portuguese woman with curly dark hair and two dogs, two kids, a lovely loving wonderful lady, all of that sob-story stuff. It turned out that when we were waiting for our flight, she was still alive. She would only die in the evening, after the Pope was done speaking and everyone was having dinner and no longer thinking about the veterans. But nobody had warned me. Nobody had warned anyone. Everybody was on the way to Portugal, my uncle, my grandfather, me and my sister, all of us trying to protect someone. They didn’t tell me what had happened until I arrived in Portugal. I didn’t tell my sister everything I knew, which was next to nothing, because I wanted to think I could protect her. I spoke to my father on the phone and he was in tears: I will be there when you land, he said,

and I said:

but why, what’s going on

I’m not sure, I’m not sure, but if I were you… oh, Jesus, if I were you I would brace myself for the worst

And he broke into tears and hung up. They had been separated fifteen years.

On the plane my sister and I spoke little. I told her it’d be okay. I told her even if the worst happened, I’d be around for her. You’re my little sister. Tell me about Denver. How are classes going? She gave short, bored answers, and she asked me about my life. I told her I’d been about to take the train to Paris from London with a friend when I found out something was wrong with our mom.

"but what’s wrong with her" my sister said

I don’t know

"why don’t they just tell us"

because they’re trying to keep us sane

how can I be sane when my mom is dying all of a sudden

I really don’t know

When we arrived in Portugal, and I saw my family standing together waiting for us — my grandparents, my father, my aunt — I knew at once there was no hope.

My mother had been taken to the big nothing and that was it and what could I do about anything except to write and doodle and try my damnedest to cry — cry, for God’s sake, cry, you ingrate, can’t you even shed one tear for your mommy — nope, no crying, and that was a pretty recurrent problem for the next year or so, the lack of tears, the passionless way I dealt with everything — cry, if you don’t cry you will never be taken seriously again — but by whom? Who cares if I cry, it won’t change anything. And though I didn’t cry I kept a series of notes, tiny memories it was important not to forget, ever-ever, things to stick into the book I had already decided to write about my mother.

I spent the night in my mother’s house. When I got there, Vlad asked me how she was. I told him she was dead. And the world inside him seemed to collapse all at once, his muscular body trembled, he could not believe it, could not believe it, and he expressed himself in the best Portuguese he could. I could only understand half of what he was saying. Then he switched to Ukrainian and sobbed louder and hugged me and I was numb. The numbness lasted a year. You have lost the woman you wanted to marry, I wanted to say, and I have lost my mommy. We’ve probably lost the same thing.

I phoned my grandmother’s house and spoke to my sister to see if she was all right:

do you think you’ll be okay tonight

she said yes

we’ll see each other tomorrow

yes

and there wasn’t much to say apart from goodnight, I love you, things that were meaningless in the face of our non-mother. We hung up and I went into the kitchen to drink some water.

Mother was dead but there was still food in her fridge. What do you do with a dead woman’s food? You don’t eat it. That is like eating death itself. I gave it all to the dogs. All of it went splat on the floor and the dogs lapped it up. That was the first night. She’d been dead three hours and already, like the selfish boy I was and am, I’d started removing little pieces of her from her own house. Letting the dogs eat everything in the fridge ought to have made them ill but they seemed fine. And anyway who cares if the dogs die. My mother was dead, and they were her dogs. Let them die with her. Let the dogs go back to that infinity like their precious mommy. I sat in that kitchen, marble tiles cold under my feet, open fridge humming, dogs slurping and chewing on everything from beans to raw beef to yogurt, and I felt a weird thickness in the brain that, I think, can only come when someone has died. You know the numbness: your shoulders are tense and your head is heavy, but it all feels natural. Loud thoughts about trivial things, a lot of pacing, clenched teeth, and the notion that you’re teetering above some gaping abyss. It’s a horrible thing to go through but there you have it. I started thinking about nothing in particular, certainly not about my mother, and I don’t care if it’s a defense mechanism, a way of dealing with the immediate pain of loss, but not thinking about your mother when she’s just kicked the bucket is a pretty terrible thing to do, and I imagine everyone goes through it, so I’m not alone. I was alone that night, however. Me and the dogs, sitting around at the kitchen table, imagining a life without our mom, without pancakes in the morning, without intelligent discussions about things my sister found boring, without anything, for all I cared. The kitchen stank of food when I left it. I lay in bed for a while.

That repulsive image of my mother lying there in the hospital, brain-dead, breathing softly through tubes, nothing inside her head now except death. The machines were keeping her alive. God, make those machines work a little harder, don’t just keep her alive for me to see this. I don’t want to see it. Not the whistle-like breathing through tubes. This is not my mother, not as I want to remember her. If that’s my mother then where is her smile, tell me that, and don’t say she’ll always be in my heart because she won’t, she won’t be anywhere that matters after she dies. She will be nowhere once she’s not even here in the hospital bed. You show me where, exactly, my mother is in my heart. Which ventricle? How much blood does my mother require to linger in my heart? How do you show off how beautiful and wonderful your mother is when she’s hidden in a muscle somewhere under your ribs? Where is her substance? What can your poetry do to make her less absolutely, terrifyingly, impossibly, absurdly dead?

I lay there and I thought of all this, wondered what I would do, tried to stop trying to make sense of the senseless. No good, of course, because we’re terribly ambitious creatures when the time comes for new survival tactics. Oh, I will build a fire every day in your honor, mother, and it will keep me warm and it will provide me with the means to grill the deer that I’ll have hunted during the day, and I will fall asleep by your light and wake up covered in ash. Stupid thoughts like that. Everything takes on a certain importance when you feel you’ve lost the biggest part of the world. You are forced to adjust your eyes and see the little things. Feel your way through the impalpable black.

I thought of the plane ride home, while everything was uncertain, before they’d told us what was going on. I’d held my sister’s hand, looked out the window, blank-blank-blank mind and a weird tenseness in my muscles, let this be over soon, I don’t care if she lives or dies as long as I don’t have to guess the truth. They hadn’t said, your mother is dying, they’d said get over here straight away and expect the worst and that was when I realized it was going to be bad, no simple operation, a major kind of thing. And quietly, on that plane journey, I resented each of them, resented them for not having told me before that my mother had fainted and been taken to a hospital where her life could end at any second. I’d tried to call her on the phone the day before and she hadn’t answered so I tried again and no answer and soon I began to think something was wrong, but what do you do when something’s wrong in Portugal and you’re in England and all you have is a telephone? You call someone else, someone close to her, and that was her boyfriend, who spoke little Portuguese and no English, and in his rudimentary way he told me my mother had had an explosion in her brain, and I said what do you mean? An explosion in her brain, he said, I don’t know what’s going on, and I said where is she and he said the hospital and I said who’s with her and he told me my grandmother was with her and nobody else was allowed in there. Heart pounding, sweating, all the symptoms, I tried to call my grandmother. No answer. So I called my grandfather and he said my mother’s brain was being operated on, right now, he was flying in some doctor from New York and he would keep me posted, and he hadn’t wanted to worry me by telling me earlier, and I wanted to say that it had only worried me even more but what can you do, everyone is a little different in dreadful circumstances.

But yes, I was lying in bed and thinking of all these things the night my mother died. One image in particular, one strange and terrible image, lingered above all in my head. The tubes were awful, and the beeping of the machines, and the brain-dead specimen on the bed, but the worst part was the nipple. When I arrived at the hospital they led me into the room where my mother was taking her last breaths. They left me alone there with my sister and my father, who’d come from another town to support us, the children, and to see his ex-wife one last time. I looked at that