“When the rain is blowin’ in your face
And the whole world is on your case
I could offer you a warm embrace
To make you feel my love.
“When the evening shadows and the stars appear
And there is no one there to dry your tears
I could hold you for a million years
To make you feel my love.”
Bob Dylan
I had no right to take my mother for granted, but I did it anyway. I knew she would die one day, but I refused to think about it and even worse, I carefully concealed the fact of my avoidance from myself. That way I did not struggle. No conflict. You can’t be ambivalent about an issue you successfully pretend does not exist.
I am who I am because she loved and believed in me. When I was a kid, I looked like Ernie Douglas, the geeky little brother with the black-rimmed glasses on the ’60s sit-com, My Three Sons. I was a shy, insecure and sensitive child but my mother thought I was amazing. She believed in me and eventually taught me to believe.
Through her, and other women who admired me and my gifts, I grew up believing I possessed something of value. Because I was seen and affirmed, I became visible to myself with a clarity that could never be erased. I carried that knowledge with me always. I knew a secret about me that few could see. But because she saw it and showed it to me, I never lost faith. If I am an open window, her love is the reason.
My dad died more than 20 years ago, and even now his absence stings. Still, what I remember from that time is something my brother said. He predicted something worse was coming. He said it as if he was talking to himself, letting a truth slip out and kind of float in the air between us. It was something like, “If we think this is hard, imagine what it will be like when mom goes.”
Like a judo master, my self-protective denial kicked in automatically as I quickly convinced myself he was wrong. I easily and effortlessly deflected his message like it was a gift-wrapped bomb that I could make disappear by focusing my gaze on more pleasant thoughts.
And it worked. Avoidance works every time. Until it doesn’t.
My mother wasn’t sick. Not really. Thanks to my father’s smoking, she suffered with asthma all her adult life but we were used to that. And sure, in recent months, she had become more anxious and forgetful, but we took that in stride. She turned 87 last May, but so what? My sister got her moved into a warm, homey “facility” that seemed to suit her like a soft, cozy bed.
I was concerned with her mental decline, but not her life. The youthful sparkle in her eyes, her warm and easy laugh and her reliable and generous love assured me we had time. Lots of time. Years of joyful connection. I knew it. I never doubted. Everything would be the same.
On November 6, 2014 I was sitting in row 22, seat F on United flight #3381 from Chicago to Sacramento and wrote these words:
My mother is slowly losing herself and as she loses words, memories, perspective and sometimes sense, I too am less. I am less happy, less whole and less secure.
Just as we were once joined physically and have always been spiritually connected, her ebbing is my flow; her dissolving triggers emotional earthquakes in parts of me I thought were protected from assault.
I remember once as a small child creeping into her bedroom to kiss her on the lips as she lay sleeping, the most beautiful woman in my small world at the time. It was meant as a secret expression of my love, a stealthy symbol of my deep, wordless affection that I could offer without her knowing. But the feel of my lips on hers startled her awake and her sudden, wide-eyed rising frightened me as much as I had frightened her.
When my 43-year-old dad volunteered to go to Vietnam in 1968, he left my mother alone for a year to raise three teenagers, sell a house and move our whole family from Virginia to Ohio. I watched her struggle with the strain but gather strength and power over time.
Five years later, my dad left for good and for two years it was just my mother and me, at 17, struggling to learn the lessons of lost love amidst the destitution of betrayal and divorce. All we had was our emotional bond; a kind of psychic ‘holding’ that filled the empty space when words are wispy, worthless things.
The more you love someone, the more it hurts when you find yourself facing their decline. My mother is becoming small and yet her love is still big, her divine light radiant and bright.
My mother died four months later on March 5, 2015. I didn’t see it coming until it arrived in the form of phone call no one ever wants.
A dear friend recently expressed her sorrow at my loss and wrote, “It’s all very sad. I don’t like the notion of growing old. I think we should not—grow old.”
And I wrote back, “I don’t mind the growing old part. It is the suffering and death part I don’t like. I am having trouble accepting not seeing or talking with my mother. It is really hard. When I think about it. So I try to not think about it.”
And then I told her about a dream I had the previous night. “Someone had cut down a humongous tree and it was being hauled down the street on the back of a huge, flatbed truck. The branches spread so wide that the driver had to keep stopping to cut them off so he could proceed without running into buildings, light poles and other trees that stood along the side of the road. I focused on one fat limb that had been cut off and wrestled it into the trunk of my car.”
I explained, “I think that tree was my mother. She and her love were a huge presence in the world and now she’s been cut down and has been hauled away leaving me lost and desperately scrambling for broken parts of her former self to hang onto, something solid to cling to and cherish and fool myself into feeling like I still have her with me.
I have photographs and letters and objects she once possessed and none of it is her and all it does is remind me she is dead and gone. Nothing lasts. But her love remains. I still have her love. That was her essence and I still have that. I guess that is enough.”
“I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue
I’d go crawlin’ down the avenue
No, there’s nothin’ that I wouldn’t do
To make you feel my love.
“I could make you happy, make your dreams come true
There’s nothing that I would not do
Go to the ends of the Earth for you
To make you feel my love.”
Doug Craig graduated from college in Ohio with a journalism degree and got married during the Carter administration. He graduated from graduate school with a doctorate in Psychology, got divorced, moved to Redding, re-married and started his private practice during the Reagan administration. He had his kids during the first Bush administration. Since then he has done nothing noteworthy besides write a little poetry, survive a motorcycle crash, buy and sell an electric car, raise his kids, manage to stay married and maintain his practice for almost 25 years. He believes in magic and is a Sacramento Kings fan.
