Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace (9 page)

Part One: Noraht

I
n a superhuman show of spiritual maturity, I moved my mother’s ashes not long ago from the back of the closet, where I’d shoved them a few weeks after she died. I moved them twelve inches forward, to the front of the closet, next to the three small pine boxes that the pebbly ashes of our pets arrived in last year, after they were reincarnated as percussion instruments. My mother’s ashes were given to us in a brown plastic box, sealed, with her name spelled wrong: Dorothy Noraht Wyles Lamott. Only her middle name was Norah, not Noraht. She hated the name Norah, which I love, and she didn’t go by “Dorothy,” which she also hated. She went by “Nikki,” the name of a
character on a radio show that she loved as a child in Liverpool.

I’ve been politely angry at her most of my life, even after she died. When I put the ashes in the back of the closet, it was wishful thinking that I could be done with her. A wafting white-robed figure was not going to rise from the ashes and say, “Oh, Little One, my darling daughter, I am here now, finally.”

It was not until after I moved her a foot forward, to the sacred space near the pets, that I began to pray. I prayed for my heart to soften, to forgive her and love her for what she did give me—life, great values, a lot of tennis lessons, and the best she could do. Unfortunately, the best she could do was terrible, like the Minister of Silly Walks trying to raise an extremely sensitive young girl, and my heart remained ambivalent toward her.

So I left her in the closet for two years as I worked on forgiving her for having been a terrified, furious, clinging maw of neediness and arrogance. I suppose that sounds harsh. I assumed Jesus wanted me to forgive her, but I also know He loves honesty and transparency. I don’t think He was rolling His eyes impatiently at me while she was in the closet. I don’t think much surprises
Him. This is how we make important changes—barely, poorly, slowly. And still, He raises His fist in triumph.

I’ve spent my whole life trying to get over having had Nikki for a mother, and I have to say that from day one, it was much easier to have a dead mother than the old living one, the impossible one. I called her Noraht as her
nom de mort
. I forgave her for some things, but not for others; I didn’t forgive her for staying in a fever dream of a marriage, for fanatically pushing us to achieve, for letting herself go from a great beauty to a hugely overweight woman in dowdy clothes and a gloppy mask of makeup. It wasn’t black-and-white: I really loved her, and took great care of her, and was proud of some heroic things she had done with her life. She had put herself through law school, fought the great good fights for justice and civil rights, marched against the war in Vietnam. But she was like someone who had broken my leg, and my leg had healed badly, and I would limp forever.

I couldn’t pretend she hadn’t done extensive damage—that’s called denial. But I wanted to dance anyway, even with a limp. I know forgiveness is a component of freedom, but I couldn’t, even after she died, grant her amnesty. Forgiveness means it
finally becomes unimportant for you to hit back. You’re done. It doesn’t necessarily mean you want to vacation together. But if you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare—which is the tiny problem with our Israeli and Palestinian friends. And I guess I wasn’t done.

I stored her in the closet beside the pets, and her navy blue purse, which the nurses had given me when I checked her into a convalescent home nearby three months before she died. I’d pick up the ashes from time to time and say to them, grimly, “Hello, Noraht.” Then I’d put them back. My life weighed twenty pounds less after she died, and it was liberating to be so angry, after having been such a good and loyal girl. But many months after her death, I still thought of her the same way I do about George W. Bush—with bewilderment that this person could ever be in charge, and dismay, and something like hatred. I decided to see if I could find some flecks of light. Friends told me to pray, and to go slowly, because otherwise, my rage was so huge, how would I be able to see fireflies in the flames? I should try to go as safely, and as deeply, as I could into the mystery of our relationship. I couldn’t scatter the ashes—the box was sealed but good. So I went through her purse.

It looked like a doctor’s bag, worn and dusty, with two handles, the sort of purse the actor Ruth Buzzi, of
Laugh-In
fame, might hit you with. I opened it and began pulling out Kleenex like a magician pulls endless scarves from her sleeve. It was very distressing. My mother’s Kleenex was distressing to me my whole life. It always smelled like the worst of her, all her efforts to disguise herself, the makeup, her perfume and lotion and lipstick and powder, all gone rancid. Also, she’d swab you with Kleenex to clean you up, with her spit. It was disgusting. In her last years, all she did was fumble for a tissue and, finding it, not remember why she’d needed it. She almost never cried—her parents were English—so it wasn’t to wipe up her tears; she drowned in those uncried tears.

Uncried tears syndrome left my mother hypervigilant, unable to settle down into herself, and—to use the psychiatric term—cuckoo.

She took the purse with her everywhere. It was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away. It was also health and preparedness, filled with anything you might need. For instance, there were a lot of Band-Aids. You never know when you’ll need one, you know only that in this world you will. There were pads of
Post-its; they gave her confidence that she could keep track of things, if only she could remember to write things down and stick them somewhere. And then remember to look at them.

There were house keys, which made me feel such grief that I had taken away her freedom. But my mother had an unbelievable life for someone so sick with Alzheimer’s and type 2 diabetes, and no money, for as long as we could pull it off. We helped her have independence and a great view, and her cat, and her friends, until the very end. When we put her in the home, her freedom was gone anyway. She had only the freedom, when the nurse left at night, to fall when she tried to get up to pee, freedom to lie in wet sheets, freedom to get stuck out on the balcony and not remember how to get back inside.

There were mirrors in her purse, so she could see that she was still there: Am I still here? Peekaboo! There I am. There were a dozen receipts from Safeway, which was right across the street from her retirement community. She was supposed to be on a strict low-carbohydrate diet to help control her diabetes, but every single receipt was for bread and cookies, which she’d sneak out to buy when she escaped, when the nurses or I was off doing the
laundry. I kind of like that in a girl. She also bought dozens of tubes of Crystal Light, that intensely flavored diet drink powder you mix with water. She must have hoped it would fly straight into her brain, like Pop Rocks, energize it like tiny Tinker Bells.

I kept putting off opening her wallet. There would be pictures inside.

There were a number of receipts from our HMO in her purse. Nurses handed them to her over time and told her to hold on to them until she was called, and so she did, because she was a good girl. She loved the nurses, and she loved her doctor, so the receipts were like love letters she’d never throw away. She had a card with the direct line of a nurse who helped her clip her terrible rhino toenails. People always gave her special things, like their direct lines, because she was so eager and dignified and needy, and everyone wanted to reward and help her. People lined up to wait on her, to serve her, her whole life.

There was also a large, heavy tube of toothpaste. Maybe she bought it one day at Safeway and never remembered to take it out of her purse. Maybe she liked people to sneak peeks of it in her purse; it said of her: I may be lost, but my breath is
fresh, or could be. There were three travel-size hand lotions, a tube of lipstick, a compact, and six cards from cab companies—Safe, Friendly, Professional. Just what you need in this world. Plus, she could always get home when she got lost, which she did, increasingly.

Finally I opened her wallet. It was filled with cards. She had library cards from decades before, membership cards to the Democratic Party and the ACLU and the Sierra Club. There were two credit cards, which had expired before her mind did. She had an insane, destructive relationship with money, like a junkie. There was never enough, so she charged things, charged away a whole life, to pump herself out of discomfort and fear. She assault-shopped.

There were photos of my nephew Tyler, my older brother’s son, and of Sam. She loved being a grandmother. And there was an old picture of her, a black-and-white photo from when she was twenty-one or so. She was a beautiful woman, a little like Theda Bara, the white face, the jet-black hair. She had dark eyes, full of unflinching intelligence and depression and eagerness to please. In this photo, she looks like she is trying to will herself into elegance, whereas her life was always hard
and messy and full of scrabbling chaos. Her frog-stretched mouth is trying to smile, but she can’t, or maybe won’t, because then she would look beautiful and triumphant, and there would be no rescue, no one to help or serve or save her.

She’d kept all of her cards from the years she spent practicing family law in Hawaii, a Hawaii State Bar Association card, and her Hawaii driver’s license, which expired in 1985. In the license photo, she’s brown from the Hawaiian sun, soft and rosy, as if she has risen through warm water, but her eyes are afraid, like she may be about to sink to the bottom again. And she did, and clung to our necks to save her.

Her purse says, “I’m a liberal, and a grandmother, and I keep my teeth clean, and my skin soft. And in case I can’t remember something, I can write it down beforehand. If I get a cut, I’ll bandage it right away.” Her purse made my heart ache. I threw most of the contents away—the Kleenex, the lotions, the toothpaste, and the purse itself. It was like a dusty navy blue organ she didn’t need anymore. I kept the things in her wallet, even the old library cards. I glanced in one of the mirrors. It scares me how alike we look. I wear glasses now, as she did. I look tired—I am tired. Also, I have
a pouch below my belly, whereas I’d always had a thin waist before. Now there’s this situation down there, low and grabbable. If it had a zipper, you could store stuff in there, like a fanny pack.

When I was done, I put my mother’s wallet back in the closet, next to her ashes. I said a prayer. I said to Jesus, “Here. Could you watch her a while longer?” I left the wallet there for another six months.

There was also deep happiness during that time, because I fell in love. Several months into my new relationship, I went to Hawaii with my boyfriend, even though I got
very
worried beforehand about how I’d look in a swimsuit. My therapist suggested that I rub delicious, healing lotions into my thighs, so they would feel soft and cared for, and decorate them with flower tattoos. This laying on of hands changed my life, let alone that first day in the sand. While I did not feel like Brigitte Bardot when I stepped out of my beach cover-up, I did feel prettier, which on a beach is right up there with Lourdes and Medjugorje.

One morning some time later, for no particular reason I remembered that first day on the beach—the lotion, and the paper rose tattoos. And something shifted in my obtuse and grudgy self. Maybe
I stopped resisting the truth, that I sprang from the bone of my mom’s bone, only a symbol of which remained. I went and got the brown plastic box of ashes from the closet. I couldn’t very well rub lotion onto it, but I sat with it in my lap for a few minutes. The pouch on my belly is nice for holding children, so I let my mother sit there. Then I decided to wrap the box in birthday paper, lavender and blue with silver stars, and I taped a picture of a red rose on it. I got a little carried away—hey, Happy Late Birthday, Noraht—because the thing was, I didn’t fully forgive or accept her. I’m not wild about my stomach, either; but I get along with it better. Besides, only part of a day had passed, and I was definitely not hating her anymore. Grace means suddenly you’re in a different universe from the one where you were stuck, and there was absolutely no way for you to get there on your own. When it happens—when you stop hating—you really have to pinch yourself. Jesus said, and this is not an exact quote, “The point is to not hate and kill each other today, and if you can, to help the forgotten and powerless. Can you write that down and put it by the phone?” So I picked up my mother’s ashes and put them on a shelf in the living room, and stood beside them for a while.

Part Two: Nikki

M
y mother’s ashes sat on the shelf in the living room, wrapped in festive paper, for a few weeks longer. I passed her many times a day, until at some point I was occasionally able to smile at what a handful she had been. I had long ago given up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother. She was a mix of wrathful Old Testament opinion, terrified politeness, befuddled English arrogance—Hermione Gingold meets the dark Hindu goddess Kali. And God, she was annoying. I mean this objectively. You can ask my brothers, or her sister. I used to develop Parkinson’s-like tics in her presence. But over time, my heart softened, and then my mind hitched a ride. Most of who I have become
is the result of both having had her as a foil and having her profound and neurotic intelligence inside me: as DNA, as memory; as all the weird lessons she taught, and the beautiful lessons, too—and they are the same.

I spent my whole life helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks, like a bitter bellhop. This great load was lifted only when she died, little by little, day by day.

For a long time, I did not miss her at all, but that damn crematory box that held her ashes remained. Slowly time softened my heart, and at some point I discovered that I had forgiven her for more and more things, although none of the big-ticket items—like having ever existed, for instance. And having lived so long. Still, the mosaic chips of forgiveness were a start. I saw snippets of progress: one day when I passed her box of ashes, I said nicely, “Hi, Mommy.” I’d find myself smiling at her when I passed, as if she were sitting there in person, reading. Here is what happened next.

America went to war in Iraq, and my pastor, Veronica, gave a brilliant sermon about how, with the war raging in the Middle East, now was not the time to figure everything out, like who was to blame, or whom we would vote for. It was not the
time to get a new plan together and try to push it on through. It was time to be still, to get centered, to trust what we’ve always trusted in: friendship, kindness, helping the poor, feeding the hungry. So, having felt scattered for much of the past two years, I took Veronica’s words to heart, and began to get quiet whenever possible, to go for longer walks on the mountain, to sit in beggy prayer and fretful meditation. My mind kept thinking its harsh thoughts, but I’d distract myself from them gently and say, “Those are not the truth, those are not trustworthy, those are for entertainment purposes only.” Eventually I started having quieter thoughts about my mother, to see her through what the theologian Howard Thurman called “quiet eyes.” Not quiet eyes, yet, in my case. But quiet for me, and then quieter still.

Gerald May wrote, “Grace threatens all my normalities.” I tell you. It had taken two years for me to bring her to the light of the living room, out of the dark, dusty closet. Now I felt that it was time to scatter her ashes with the family, to honor her. The problem was, I didn’t honor her. I meant to, but all I really felt was sorry for how hard her life had been, and glad she had finally passed. This is what the elders of our church call dying—“She
passed,” as in, She aced her exams, or turned down the offer to renew her lease. “Oh yeah, she passed,” they reassure you, and I believe, theologically, they are right on both counts.

That was where I was when Veronica urged us to be still. And when I did, I found out once again how flexible and wily the human spirit is. It will sneak out from behind the bushes like a cartoon cat and ambush you if you’re not careful, trick you into giving up a teaspoon of resentment, get you to take one step back from the frozen ground. Mine was lying in wait for me the day I found a photo of my mother when she was sixty, and while my heart didn’t actually leap, it hopped, awkwardly, like its shoelaces were tied together.

In the photo, she is wearing her usual bizarre mask of makeup, which I have always believed was a way of maintaining both disguise and surface tension; it had humiliated me. But in this one picture, instead of feeling humiliated, I could finally see what she was shooting for: to appear beautiful and worthy, a vigorous woman on this earth. She is posing in front of a vase of flowers, clasping one wrist with her other hand, as if trying to take her own pulse. She had been divorced for eight years or so by then. One of her eyebrows is arched,
archly, as though one of us had once again said something dubious or socially unacceptable. One-third of her is in darkness, two-thirds of her is in light, which pretty much says it.

You can see what a brave little engine she was, even though she’d lost everything over the years—her husband, her career, her health. But she still had her friends and family, and she stayed fiercely loyal to liberal causes, and to underdogs. And I thought, Well, I honor that, so we’ll start there.

The next thing I knew, I had called my relatives, most of whom still live in the Bay Area, where we all grew up, and invited them to dinner on my mom and her twin’s birthday, to scatter her ashes. Those ashes of hers were up against a lot—that our lives were better since her death—but I believed that if we released her, this would release us; and she could release herself. Releasing her would crack my hard shell, and some of the Easter-egg dye of my mother might remain, in beautiful veins. Or else I would have a complete breakdown and start to drink again, and Sam and I would have to go live at the rescue mission. What I knew was that it was the next right thing to do.

Two weeks later, three aunts, an uncle, half a
dozen cousins, my brother and sister-in-law, Sam’s six-year-old second cousin, Dallas, and Gertrud, my mother’s lifelong best friend, came to dinner at my house. I adore these people. I have also had fights with some of them over the years, have said terrible things, have been accused by one of them of great wrongs, for which I would never be forgiven. We’ve had the usual problems: failed marriages, rehab, old resentments, miserable lumpy family secrets, so much harshness and intensity. But if I had the time, I could tell you all the ways we have loved and cared for one another over the years. We’re just another motley American family, still enduring. At holiday time, my friend Neshama’s father-in-law used to look around at his family, shake his head, and say, “We are a bum outfit.” I love that.

After dinner, we hiked up the hill to the open space closest to my house. One of my aunts, who told me to say she is fifty-four, totters when she walks now, and needs arms to hold on to. Dallas glommed on to Sam, who dragged him along like carry-on luggage, rolling his eyes but pleased. The wind was really blowing, and the sun was starting to go down. Sam and Dallas tore to the top of the
hill, while the rest of us took one another’s arms, blown and buffeted by the wind, walking in a doddering procession the rest of the way.

The sun was setting behind a ghost cloud, illuminating it, imposing a circle of light over it, like a cookie cutter. There were eucalyptus trees in a circle around us at the edge of the grass, looking like they were holding down the earth, like bricks on a picnic tablecloth in the wind. The trees were the only things between us and the horizon. We could see 360 degrees above fleecy trees, golden hillsides, small towns. The wind made us feel even more exposed than usual. It was so gritty that it flayed us—but lucky us, someone pointed out, with bodies to be assailed. Dallas tore around the periphery having goof attacks, flirting with Sam.

“Does anyone want to see my fireworks?” he kept calling out. “Will anyone come and see them?”

“When we’re done,” his mother told him sternly. “Now leave us alone.”

We stood in a circle for a few minutes. “I knew that if I asked you to come tonight, you would,” I said. We all cried a little. My cousins really loved my mother. She had a sweet voice, one of them said, and was always kind to them. Gertrud said, “The nature of life is harsh, and Nikki got some terrible
breaks. It wasn’t fair how things turned out for her. But she did a lot of good in her life, and we will always miss her.”

“Yes, we will,” a couple of people said responsively, the way we do at church. My heart was suddenly heavy with missing her, even as I felt the old familiar despair that she had been my mother. I just tried to breathe.

The reason I never give up hope is that everything is so basically hopeless. Hopelessness underscores everything—the deep sadness and fear at the center of life, the holes in the hearts of our families, the animal confusion within us; the madness of King George. But when you do give up hope, a lot can happen. When it’s not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens like one of those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm. This almost always seems to happen in community: with family, related by blood or chosen; at church for me; and at peace marches.

Then my brother Stevo walked away from where we stood, and began to pry open the plastic box with a knife. “Want to see my fireworks?” Dallas cried, and his mother shushed him again. He raced about on the hillside. It was distracting, like
having a puppy in church, but the sun defused my annoyance, and I remembered C. S. Lewis’s wonderful observation, “We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it.” Except for Sam and Dallas, we were as big and slow as herd animals at a watering hole. We watched Stevo take out the bag of ashes and open it into the wind. He flung Nikki away from the sunset, and the wind caught her and whooshed her away. Of course some of the ashes blew back onto my brother, and onto Gertrud, who stood beside him scattering flowers into the plume. Ashes always stick and pester you long after you have scattered them; my brother looked like he’d been cleaning a fireplace.

Then Dallas called out again, “Want to see my fireworks now? Doesn’t anyone want to see my fireworks?” We all turned back toward the sun, where he stood, and gave him the go-ahead. He reached into his pockets, withdrawing fists full of something, and looking at us roguishly, he flung whatever he held up into the air. It turned out to be tiny pebbles, but because he tossed with such ferocious velocity, as high as he could manage in the wind, when they rained down on us in the very last of the sun, they shone.