Mourning (Becomes) Joan

Remembering my fierce, funny and flawed mother.

Me and my mother, Joan.

I always say my mother grew up in a Eugene O’Neill play. It’s a good laugh line, if you know anything about O’Neill, the great chronicler of Irish-American pain.

Joan spent her early years in a large mansion in Detroit, Michigan, presided over by her grandfather. Born in Ireland, he was one of 18 children. He came to the US to make his way, and make it he did, all the way to the US House of Representatives and the Michigan Supreme Court. He took in my mother’s family, mother and three daughters, following her parents' divorce, an event that happened just after my mother was born. All her life Joan believed her older sisters held the divorce against her. Everything was fine until she came along, as the meme says.

Grandfather championed Joan, however. A story she loved to recall was how, when a neighborhood dog bit her, Grandfather got his pistol and shot the dog. Gruesome, yes, but she cherished the sense of protection he offered, for her alone.

The household included various uncles, failing at one thing or another, dependent on the beneficence of Grandfather, and on alcohol too. They drank, a lot, hiding bottles in my mother’s doll carriage. So perhaps her own drinking was preordained.

The house held magic for her. On Christmas eve, after they’d gone to midnight mass at the Catholic church, the adults would stay up and dress the tree. Real candles, not electric lights. Come Christmas morning, an uncle would impersonate Santa, using the house intercom to tell the kids that he’d arrived with toys. There were servants, too, come over from Ireland, who sang songs from the old country to soothe my mother to sleep. When she sang the same songs to me as a child, I asked her to stop. They were too sad.

This kingdom of childhood came to a sharp, sudden stop when Grandfather died. Joan and her sisters and mother were left without resources. Her mother became the society page editor of the Detroit Free Press. Her oldest sister married a Ford executive, and her middle sister became a secretary for the Catholic Diocese of Detroit. Joan was artistic, though, and won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York.

For two years she lived the Bohemian life there, running with a fast crowd – Jack Kerouac seems to have made some walk on appearances. She lived in Greenwich Village, loved jazz and dancing and eating and painting. She made friends easily and kept them for life.

But obligation called. Her mother’s health was failing, it was her turn to take up the duties. Who was she to think she could be an artist anyway? She married, had a son, divorced, met my father, married again, and had three more kids, boom boom boom, mid-century style, me the caboose on the train.

That’s when the drinking started in earnest. My mother would start in the afternoons and by the time night had rolled around, the old records came out, and I could hear the music and her tears rise up through the floorboards of the house and into my tiny bedroom. That sorrow permeated the walls like mold.

Years later, after my parents divorced, I was in my father’s office going through an old box of papers with him. In it were several years’ worth of small pocket calendars that he kept to remind himself of things that he often forgot (birthdays, appontments). He had written “JD” on certain days, clearly a code of some sort. I asked him what it meant. "Joan Drunk," he told me, sheepishly. It was, I think, the only time we ever glanced at the topic as adults, and I felt a wave of compassion for him. Documenting these instances of destruction – to herself, to their marriage – seemed exactly like him. He put it outside himself, a notation in a book. Worth mentioning, for sure, but then you could turn the page.

Eventually, my mother got sober. She and my father divorced, and she became a substance abuse counselor. For the rest of her working life, she helped people give up the juice. I imagine she was very good at it, having such a big heart coupled with her fierce righteous anger, and her own experience to draw on.

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Mommy and me, circa 2004 I think.

I didn’t go home for years, I was so angry at her. As only someone in their 20s can, I blamed her for everything. The divorce, certainly. Plus my own failings – if she’d had healthier ways to express her anger, I’d be able to vent mine. If she’d pursued her dreams it would be easier for me to pursue mine. On and on the deposition went. I’m not proud of any of this. But one of the things I am most grateful for is that we both lived long enough for me to outgrow the anger and for us to talk about it.

Not that I wanted to. She made it happen.

One of her strengths was that she wanted to know. Whatever it was, however hard the conversation, she wanted to have it. So finally, when I lived in San Francisco and she was visiting, I agreed to tell her. We went to a diner and, while eating their perfect pancakes, I told her about my anger. And she simply listened. The grace of that moment, born from her desire to have a true relationship, gave us a reset, apart from those childhood ghosts.

  But the thing about ghosts is that they hang around until you acknowledge them. And with the new opening in our relationship, the ghosts wanted their say. After giving up drinking, her failure to be a “better” mother was a frequent theme in her lamentations. I rebutted her endless refrain by pointing to the present moment. One daughter was married with two beautiful children; one son was a doctor and married; the other had found work he loved, a good woman and had a daughter. And while I was always a wanderer, at least wandering was what I wanted to do. Judge the tree by the fruit. Her fruit was good.

This logical presentation of facts, of course, did not dissuade her from her angst.

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Joan in her happy place - the beach.

In her later years, I called her every day on my way home from work. When she asked me what I did that day, I’d tell her, “Oh, just  bossed people around.” This always made her laugh, which made me happy to hear. She loved to laugh and could find humor in the darkest corners. One game we used to play, while driving, was “one bomb.” We each had one bomb to drop on something that we deemed ugly, a force making the world worse than it should be. The bomb would do no harm to humans or animals – that was a given, especially the animals. Strip malls were frequent targets of our destructive musings.

On those daily calls, before we’d hang up, she’d say, “Don’t work too hard.” I still puzzle over that koan.

After Joan had a series of heart attacks and a major stroke, we moved her to a nursing home. The stroke left her short term memory impaired, so we had some of our hardest conversations over and over again. She couldn’t believe that her own children would not take her into our homes. Her worst fears confirmed. And then she’d forget that we’d just talked about it, and we’d talk about it again.

When I visited, we would go to a park close to the nursing home. First these were short walks, and later, they became rolls, when Joan became confined to a wheelchair. She liked to look at the light on the river and the ducks paddling in the current, ever the artist, seeing the world as shape, color, form, and line.

On one of these walks she told me that she was worried she would go to hell. I tried not to laugh, because, while she was no saint, she wasn’t much of a sinner.

But she was clearly very anxious about this. I asked her why she thought this was possible.

“I’ve been divorced. Twice.”

Growing up in the Catholic Church, it was ingrained in her that this was a was a grievous sin. While she had fallen away from the faith, the teaching of her youth was easy to summon when death hovered nearby. I assured her that she would not be going to hell.

“But how do you know,” she asked me, such pain and hope in her voice. I had to think about that.

First, there was her love in action. She took in her kids whenever we needed a safe haven, no questions asked. She fought for causes she cared about. She transformed her struggle with alcohol into a way to heal others. She was, in fact, a wonderful, moral, and very fun person to have in the world. And besides, the sin that weighed so heavily on her was not one that merited eternity in the fiery furnace. Hitler yes. Joan, no.

She nodded but I could see she was not entirely convinced.

I, however, remain confident that she is running on the long beach in heaven, trailed by at least seven dogs, possibly more, and five or six cats as well. All the animals we ever had – and there were many – loved her for the same reason I do. Because right away she saw your beauty. She wanted to know your story. She had a large and whimsical imagination and used it to literally make fun. And no one, no one would fight harder for you.

There are many things I wish I could ask her now. It’s my turn to want to know. But those conversations will have to wait.  

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Jean Shields Fleming is founder and editor of Certain Age. Her novel, Air Burial, was published by Carroll & Graf. Read an excerpt of her new novel, All the Reasons Why.