Watersheds

Someone asked me a while ago, as he was looking to resolve a dilemma of his own, if I had ever been in love. Well, actually, what he asked was if I had ever been in love with more than one woman at once, to which I must confess that I have never been that ambitious. Or suicidal, for that matter.

Yet the basic question itself intrigues me and, the closer I am drawn to my own mortality, the greater the compulsion I feel to examine it. Like iron filings pulled inexorably to a magnet, I find myself pulled, in some ways unwillingly, back to the notion. I have, I suppose, been in love many times in my life; certainly, at the time I was with them, I have loved every woman I have dated. Yet I can not say that any of them was the one. If I were going to be completely honest, I would have to admit that, in the truest sense of being in love, of two individuals forming a complete whole in a union of two souls, I have only really been in love once.

Her name is unimportant. She was who she was, and to me she was my first love, the first girl I ever dated seriously. It would be easy, I suppose, to dismiss the whole thing as an idealization, as all first loves are idealized. But I know myself well enough, and I knew her well enough, to realize that wasn't the case, that there was a connection that can only truly be made once in a lifetime.

They say that intense circumstances can forge equally intense connections between people, and the circumstances under which she and I were dating were nothing if not intense. Perhaps that is why I find myself drawn back to this, even though it has long been over and I know that it can never be again. I suppose, in its own way, that is an idealization, but the truth of what was remains nonetheless.

When we first met, we were both in the 8th Grade and, yes, I know, but this isn't a story about puppy love. She had hair the colour of summer wheat and, despite the old saw about boys never making passes at girls who wear glasses, she was beautiful, sculpted by the finest artist who ever lived. She was new to the school and, at first, it really was an example of the awkward, self-conscious flirting that thirteen-year-olds go through. I was the football jock and she was the cheerleader and, by late Fall when football season had ended and basketball season had begun, we were past the tentative hesitancy and considered a pair by ourselves and our peers. Little did we know, at the time, what the rest of the year held in store for us.

For a lot of reasons, a few good and many not, I always carried myself as if I were older than I was. She, too, had a self-possession that was beyond her years, and perhaps that was a part of the attraction. There was an inner peace and strength about her that defied description, that even allowed her to survive unscathed that embarrassing moment when my parents met her and my mother informed her that her breasts were too large and her butt was too big. Mom certainly had a way with words, but she managed to brush that off with no more than a laugh about it later. And perhaps that, too, was also part of the attraction.

All things considered, the 8th Grade was not a good year. My 14th birthday coincided with our Spring Break, which meant the annual pilgrimage to Palm Beach with my mother and brother. I will never forget, near the end of the break, receiving that phone call at the hotel informing me that two of my friends had been killed in a stupid accident. Both of them were two classes ahead of me, and they and a third kid had been drag racing on the Outer Drive. The kid driving had lost control of the car, bounced off the car he'd been racing, jumped the median and slammed head-on into a third car. Not only was the entire family in that car wiped out, but my two friends had been ejected from their car and into the pavement. The only survivor was the kid who had been driving.

Aside from the deaths of my uncle and my grandparents, which I had been too young to understand at the time, this was my first experience with death, not to mention violent death. Unfortunately, though I was yet to know it, it would be far from my last. But she was there for me when I rushed home, to comfort me, hold me, tell me it would be okay. It wouldn't be, but neither of us knew that yet. It was only the end of March; there were two more whole months for disaster to strike.

In April, my father and I were in a car accident in Ohio, on our way to visit my brother in college. I was very nearly thrown through the windshield - which was when I learned the very important lesson of always wearing your seatbelt - and my father, attempting to cover my body with his, broke his knee on the dashboard. A minor injury that would prove to have consequences far out of proportion to the damage inflicted.

She didn't come to my house that May morning when my father died, even though I lived two bocks from the school. Unlike my best friend, who did ditch school the moment he heard, that was something she just wouldn't do. She was a good girl, and she wouldn't leave school before the day was over. But it didn't matter. In my haze and, finally, unable to stay any longer in that house on that day, I left. And, in my aimless wandering, driven by something I still have no words for, my best friend and I found ourselves at the school, just as classes were letting out for the day.

And she was there. I caught her as she was leaving the building, finally heading for my house. She was halfway down the entranceway stairs when I saw her and she saw me, and it was like the world stopped. The throng of people on the stairs parted, like a curtain drawn back by invisible hands, and she was there, a shining beacon in the afternoon Sun. Suddenly, I found that I could not move, could not speak, that I had become as immobile and mute as the bricks of the building. But it didn't matter, there were no words needed at all, and she came to me, a study of effortless grace in motion. She put her arms around me, drew my head to her chest, saying nothing at all but freely giving me everything she had, and the more I cried, finally, the harder she held on to me. Among all those silent, hushed people standing around us, we were alone, just the two of us in a world to ourselves. She took my pain onto herself and, while she couldn't bear the unbearable for me, she could share it, and she never even hesitated.

I can say, truthfully, that she saved me, and she did it willingly and without complaint. In all honesty, I became something of a son-of-a-bitch in the next two years, and beyond. Not that I was mean, but I learned a lesson that morning that no child should ever have to face, and it resulted in my pushing the limits to test my own mortality. I had been quiet and moody before, but I was moreso after. All teenagers, I suppose, are rebellious to one degree or another, but to say that I would find situations in which to push things to an extreme would be an understatement. Not all the time, mind you, but there would come the day where I would just kind of snap and give in to the blackness that always lurked in the back of my mind since that day.

And she would always pull me out of it, would snatch me back from the abyss I wanted to hurl myself into. She was, in truth, the only one who could, who could dispell the night and calm the storm with a word or the touch of her hand. She was the sunlight that follows the tempest, my anchor and sanctuary and the promise that there were still good things in a world that cared nothing for nor particularly noted anyone. Her love was unconditional and she freely gave to me the strength I did not have, and the only thing she asked for in return was me. I know it now and I knew it then, but I owe her a debt I can never repay and that, too, is perhaps why her memory still casts such a spell on me.

We were inseparable for the next two years, to the point that our friends would joke that we should just exchange rings and get it over with. In retrospect, because of her, some of the worst years of my life were also some of the best. I would be a lesser man had she never been in my life. But all good things inevitably come to an end, and no good deed ever goes unpunished. Because of her father's career, she and her family moved to southern California just before the start of our Junior year.

That last Summer we spent together was bittersweet beyond measure. As much as we tried to pretend that the inevitable wasn't looming closer with every day, the more we became aware of it. I'd say that she didn't want to go, but that would be a conceit and untrue; rather, she didn't want to leave me behind. She was fully aware of what my home life was like. After all, she'd picked up the pieces, put me back together, and insisted that I stay at her house often enough. There were plenty of times that Summer that she would plead with me, tears in her eyes, to break my ties to Chicago and go with her to California. But that was just a fantasy, a pleasant one, to be sure, because no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn't. Whatever held me here then holds me here to this day, a sense of unfinished business and, no matter where I have roamed since, I always find myself drawn back here.

And that, too, is perhaps why she is still such a siren's call for me, the idea of what could have been but was not, an ending that came before it was meant to be. Except for one brief moment years later, something else that was unexpected and ended all too soon, that Summer was the last time I saw her. I have no idea what happened to her in the decades since, but to me she will always remain as she was in those years we were together. While I grow old and wither, she shall always be in the flower of youth, wise and strong beyond her years, the woman who saved me from myself. She was, in truth, magic in the purest sense of that word, and I can not ever forget her. If there is, indeed, a God and if He is just, then I can only hope that He has seen fit to reward her with the kind of life she tried to give to me. I certainly know that the world is a better place for her having been in it, and that my own life has been lessened without her.

Promises to Keep

My mother and I had, if I were being charitable about it, what could be described as a strange relationship.

Granted that the Cleaver family only ever existed on television, I would be hard pressed to find exactly where my relationship with my mother fit on the spectrum covering the normal to the abnormal. Really, my only frame of reference is my own experience, which hardly makes for an objective analysis. It has, in fact, taken me a lifetime to reach the realizations that I have, and still there are things that elude me. Perhaps those things I still don't understand, or only understand dimly, will always remain as they are, unaswered mysteries. Yet I still feel compelled to examine those things, to try and impose some sense of meaning, for there is nothing quite as sad as questions without answers.

Like my father, my mother was a psychologist, which perhaps explains some, if not all, of my own quirks. Trust me on this one, there's no education quite like being raised by two shrinks. There's psychology, and then there's psychology as practiced on one's children.

My mother didn't work when I was growing up, her time being occupied with the important duties of being a socialite. In a very real way, I was raised in my formative years by a succession of maids, nannies and au pairs. But even that admission is a distorted view, for it wasn't like either of my mother or my father were absentee parents; they were both there when I needed them, for the important things and for the milestones.

Yet, more often than not, my mother was far more distant than my father was. I'm not sure, exactly, when that happened, but memory seems to fix that at some time between my being six or seven. There developed a routine where, when I returned from school, I would be greeted at the front door by the family dog, who would escort me to my parents' bedroom and a report on my day would be given to my mother. Other than that, however, our interactions were limited pretty much to Wednesday and Sunday family dinners.

Well . . . sort of. Every Spring, there was the obligatory two-week trip with my mother and my brother to Palm Beach. Before that, before her brother died, it was a family trip to Los Angeles. I still remember the night my Uncle Mike died, my mother wailing inconsolably in my parents' room as my father futilely tried to comfort her. We lived, at the time, in a Victorian brownstone, and there was a tree in the front yard who's branches brushed up against the windows of my bedroom. That night, as my mother gave vent to a breaking heart, the wind outside played among those branches and they tap-tap-tapped against the panes. For some reason, as I huddled under my blankets in child-like fear at my mother's pain, I made the connection between those branches and my uncle, not really old enough to understand the concept of death and convinced that he was tapping on my windows, trying to reach out to me. If I had been more self-aware, I would have remembered the lesson of that night years later.

My mother was never one to praise me, at least not when I was present, at any rate. Nothing I ever did was apparently good enough for her, and any success I had was almost invariably greeted with the admonition that I could have, should have, done better. The first story I ever wrote, when I was in the 4th Grade, which was endorsed with enthusiastic praise by my teachers, was critiqued by my mother with the comment "Who did you copy this from?" When I was a Senior in high school, and took Third Place in the National Merit Scholars in the Arts for creative writing, that achievement was greeted with complete silence.

And yet, to her friends, to other people, my mother did nothing but brag about me. What she could say to others about me she would not say to me, and it took me years to realize the purpose behind that. It wasn't that she was disinterested, that she didn't care; she did care, and very deeply. But the things she didn't say to me, as well as the things she did, were designed to challenge me, to force me to exceed what I saw as my own limits. A form of "tough love," if you will, and it worked. Still, it would have been nice to occasionally hear those things first-hand rather than second-hand. But if wishes were fishes, as they say, I'd be hip-deep in trout.

The years between when my father died and I left for college were the worst years in my relationship with her. At the time I most needed my mother to be an adult, to be a parent, she failed to be there. Everyone has their own tragedies, and mine was to grow from a child to a man in the space of an hour. Fate dictated that I would be the one to discover my father's body. My mother's collapse that morning dictated that I would have to be the one to call the paramedics, to call my school to excuse myself for the day, to make the other calls that would start the chain of notification for family and friends. No fourteen-year-old should ever have to bear that burden, should ever be thrust into a situation in which the role of child and parent are reversed, but what can you do? It was what it was.

Life became a brittle pretense of normalcy, and again it took me years to understand just how much my parents loved each other, just how devastating my father's loss was to my mother. Nor, in truth, did I help matters much. Driven by my own demons, I had little time or consideration for hers.

Of all the things my mother was afraid of, her greatest terror was reserved for being alone. She was supposed to grow old with my father, to have his comfort and presence as the years drew on and they passed into oblivion together. But she was cheated out of that and instead faced a future in which her oldest son had already left and her youngest son was on the verge of leaving. On the one hand, she had a sense of pride and accomplishment that I was going to college in California, but it was tempered by the knowledge that I was not only leaving, but moving all the way across the country, leaving her all alone. Not only that, but I was going to college on an NROTC scholarship which, to her, was perhaps the most frightening thing of all. My mother had always said that the worst thing that could happen to a parent was to outlive their child, and my decision to take a commission raised that as a very real possibility in her mind. That last Summer I spent at home before leaving for college and the Navy was the worst Summer of my life, and it took me years to realize that the root cause was her fear that I was leaving for good, that she would, indeed, be all alone.

There were those things that she could never say to me; maybe they should have been assumed, maybe they shouldn't have been. But Fate is a funny thing, and a few years later her fear of outliving me almost came true and, next to my father's death, must have been shattering for her. My separation from the service, though, at the time neither desired by myself nor by the Navy, is really a mundane tale, but it came at what would turn out to be a fortuitous time for her.

Rocky relationship or not, that old saw about Irish sons and their mothers is true. I was released from the service at a time when my mother's life entered a downward turn, an event that would, in the end, prove to be fatal. I came back home intending to be there only until I got my feet back under me, until I could make the transition from military life to civilian life, but whatever powers that be had other plans. Diabetic since shortly after I was born, that disease and it's complications attacked her with a vengeance, and her health quickly deteriorated to the point that it became obvious she could not care for herself on her own.

As far as my brother was concerned, he would have been happy enough to pack her off into a nursing home and not be bothered, but I couldn't do that to her. Whatever else she was, my mother was a beautiful, proud, independent woman, and I couldn't, wouldn't, take that away from her. After all that had happened, she deserved her own home, some measure of her old life and happiness, even if it were just an echo of what once was. So I stayed at home to take care of her and, yes, bowed to the inevitable and took up the family biz, becoming a shrink just like her and my father, helping her run her practice. And as she became sicker, child once again became parent an care-taker, but what else is a son supposed to do? She was my mother. I could not, would not, abandon her.

I know for a fact that my mother felt a tremendous sense of guilt, that she felt I was putting my own life on hold because of her. I wasn't, of course, I was still doing all the things that someone in their twenties was supposed to be doing, but still she felt like she was being a burden, like she was somehow holding me back. Yet the alternative was unacceptable. As I tried to explain to her, it hadn't even been ten years since I lost my father, I wasn't about to lose my mother while I had the ability to prevent that.

Perhaps that was pure selfishness, perhaps it was merely the due a child owes the parent, I know what her answer to that was. So many things that were never said, so many promises to keep that, in the end, were all in vain. Actions, they say, speak louder than words, but I never told my mother that I loved her. As sick as she got, I was always there to pick up the pieces, to try and make her as comfortable as I could, to make her life as normal as I could, but those words just never would come.

That last weekend she was alive, I think she knew that time was running out. She'd had another TIA the week before, a kind of mini-stroke, one of many that she'd been experiencing, and a friend and I had once again packed her off to the hospital. The day before I brought her home for the last time, we'd had a long talk, a good talk, and she finally told me how proud she was of me, that she loved me. And all I could say was that I knew, had, in fact, always known, even as she tried to apologize for all those things that had gone wrong. But those words themselves would not come to me, I could not tell her that I loved her. She knew, of course, but in the end I cheated my mother out of hearing me say them just one last time.

I couldn't save her, not when it counted, and that, perhaps, is the worst kind of hell to consign yourself to. My mother died of a massive G-I bleed, a rupture of an artery in her gastro-intestinal tract. It would have been like popping a balloon, one moment she was there and the next she was not, and even if she had been on an operating table with the finest surgeon in the world attending her, he could not have saved her. Intellectually, I know that, but crisis has always spurred me into action and, ever since I was in the Navy, at such times I have found it impossible to separate myself from the Officer they trained me to be. For every problem there is always an answer, and if solution A doesn't work you move on to solution B, or solution C, and so on until the crisis is resolved.

And I couldn't save her, no matter what I tried. That the paramedics couldn't save her, or the doctors in the Emergency Room, doesn't matter. I had a duty and an obligation, and I failed. Not just as a man, but as a son, and while she may have known, she died without hearing me say that I loved her as my mother. The crisis came and I failed the ultimate test. That may be a fair burden to bear, or it may not be, but it is mine to bear. And, again, I know what her answer to that would be; my mother always said that you shouldn't die with any regrets. But living with regrets is another proposition entirely. I could have been a better son, I should have been a better son, but what now is lies beyond my power to change.

"The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep."

Echoes

There are times when it feels like everything has been said, the tale told in full, and there is nothing left to do but wait for the end. Just words on a page, stripped of the urgent immediacy of the now, empty symbols on a paper that yellows and fades with time. A persistence of vision, perhaps, but only for a time, and in truth only really meaningful to the man who wrote the story. But when the man passes, so does his tale, leaving behind nothing but a kind of voyeuristic show-and-tell that, like its narrator, is doomed to be consumed by the darkness. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, or so the liturgy goes, and all things that begin must eventually, inevitably, end. Never, like forever, is a long time, but the good news is that you won't be there to see it.

One man's tragedy is another man's comedy, a journey from the base to the sublime. It's only a tragedy when it happens to you, when you are the one who has spent a lifetime travelling through the blood and wreckage of other peoples' lives in search of redemption for the blood and wreckage of your own. But the blood on your hands reminds you, with a damnation that can not be denied, that you can't expiate your own guilt by trying to correct the mistakes of others. God forgives but you don't, most certainly not yourself, but where else can redemption come from? In the end, it is all nothing but an illusion, waiting on the yawning emptiness to put an end to the voice that whispers in the back of your mind, the memories reminding you of just who and what you are.

Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs, what can you do when there are no more wars to fight but refight those wars? The story always ends the same way but, in truth, you never felt more alive than when the battle raged, when your life balanced on the knife-edge of Fate. Everything else is just a terrible ennui, bereft of the startling clarity induced by your own imminent mortality, even as you would futilely deny that mortality. Echoes of sound and fury, a morality play that somehow lost its morality as you drifted from disaster to disaster and pretended you were master of your own destiny.

There is no comfort, no haven in her arms, no refuge in which to hide from yourself. You look in her eyes and see a reflection of yourself, but it's a twisted vision, incomplete, for she can see only what you allow her to see. You can't lie to the dead, it's impolite, and they are beyond your lies anyway for they know the truth of what you are. But the dead don't judge, they just bear witness and leave you to judge yourself.

Echoes of the past, the memories give you meaning but, when you are gone, perversely lose that meaning and become nothing more than a forgotten curiousity. They can have no meaning without the person who created them, and perhaps they are, after all, best forgotten. There can be nothing more to say necause it has all, indeed, been said, been done, and there is nothing left to do but put it all down on the page as a testimony to what was.