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saavedra77After thirteen hours in transit, entailing the usual round of delays and security hassles, I arrived at Philadelphia International Airport just before midnight that Saturday, dog-tired, with another two hours to go before I would be able to put my head to a pillow. Heaving my one checked bag from the luggage carousel, I slogged out of the air conditioned terminal into the twenty-four-hour outdoor sauna of a Deleware Valley August. The temperature was eighty degrees in the middle of the night, without even a hint of a breeze, the air heavy, immersive. My body took awhile to adjust, but the feeling was distantly familiar, not altogether unwelcome.
Forty tedious minutes later, I was behind the wheel of a car for the first time in a year and a half, following unfamiliar MapQuest directions deep into the South Jersey suburbs, from interstate to state highway to a succession of half-remembered lesser roads. Equally depressing strip malls, dimly-lit subdivisions, opaque summer fields slid by. I pulled up outside my Carmen's place at about 2:00 A.M. There were no stars, no streetlights, just one bulb in the yard, casting its yellowy circle of light against my sister's white McMansion, making me think of the foreground of Magritte’s “Empire of Light.”
Anticipating my late arrival, Carmen had left a key under the doormat for me. I slipped off my shoes and crept inside as quietly as I could manage, depositing my luggage in the upstairs guest room. Before succumbing to unconsciousness, I left Carmen a note on the kitchen counter, warning that I might sleep in a little. At around 2:30, I fell gratefully into the guest bed, pulling the sheets over my head.
I woke at around 10:00 AM, not nearly late enough, and sank down the stairs to find Carmen and my brother-in-law Gil sitting in the kitchen, having coffee. Carmen and I exchanged groggy hugs, Gil and I shook hands. I responded to polite questions about how my trip went.
And then we got down to talking about what we would be doing for the next two days.
We were going to bury my mom. And we were going to navigate the awkward reunion two groups of people who had neither seen nor wanted to see one another in over thirty years.
**********
My mother and I were never particularly close. She came from a family with roots in the Deleware Valley going back three hundred years, as of a few days ago down to my mom's two brothers, Les and Wayne, and their spouses, children, and a few grandchildren. I remembered them as unhappy, sullen, even angry people, but the truth was that I hadn't spent any time with them in going on ten years, myself.
Carmen's and my dad had come to the U.S. mainland from Puerto Rico in the 1950s, worked like hell at everything from picking fruit to fixing cars to handing glasses over a bar. Over the ensuing couple of decades, Dad started two families. Carmen and my other half-siblings Victor, Ruth, Abey, and Anna were the children of his first marriage. I was the only child of his second.
Due to a series of sad circumstances that followed my birth, I never got to know my siblings, growing up. My maternal grandparents initially reacted to my mom's marriage by disowning and shunning her: they wanted no part of their new son-in-law or his family. Mom eventually won her way back into their house, if not their esteem, by producing an obviously blameless grandson.
Unfortunately living down to expectations, my father soon disappeared from the face of the earth, rendering both former wives single parents. Both lost their homes, lost touch with one another, scrambling to take care of their own kids.
The experience shattered my mom, throwing her into paralyzing depression and illness. She simply couldn't cope. So you can imagine the humiliation of going begging to people who had tried to shut her out of their lives, a few years earlier.
So the family who’d been repelled by my father got me, instead. I grew up in my maternal grandparents' household. Dad's side of the family would rarely be mentioned, there.
Nor would my mom be an integral part of that household: she never totally recovered either her parents' respect or her health, after Dad disappeared. She spent most of my childhood on the periphery, a voice on the phone.
The people I saw every day took decent care of me, even if they were scandalized by almost all of the events which landed me in their house. When I was a kid it was alright; this was our fucked-up kind of normal: People on Social Security having food fights. Grandma gleefully trying to run Grandpa over. Growing awareness of the outside world made it seem a lot less normal. It struck me that every relationship in sight was drowning in depression, ambivalence, resentment, and that this was not altogether normal.
The only relative I knew who didn't seem to some degree bitter or regretful was my mother. Not that this brought us any closer. Mom's passivity embarrassed, her illness depressed me. I didn't find any solace, there; I just thought that she was weak.
From her side, Mom kept trying to keep me close, even during the long periods when my grandparents felt the need to keep her at arm's length. There were always the daily phone calls, and during my teens, after my grandfather died, she actually got to come live with us. Not that she gained any respect or affection by doing so. She'd failed at life. There was just more room, now.
Nor did Mom gain much more respect or affection from me, at this point. Despite the unconditional affection, Mom didn't seem to know me, very well. I felt like I was just this image in her head, and that our relationship was as unreal as all of the rest. I called her Sarah. She let me. There were moments when we connected, going out for Chinese food, etc. I never really knew what to make of her.
I detached myself from that place emotionally years before I could actually leave. The only thing that I looked forward to or really cared about was getting out, getting away to college. Most teenagers want out. I belonged to the subset who never wanted to come back.
Yet there was always my mom, always the phone calls, when I was away at college, when I moved to Seattle. I have to admit that she still made me uncomfortable. She didn't seem to follow my moods or thoughts or aspirations. I felt repelled by her religiosity and what I saw as her sentimentality.
But Mom was also my link to another family, to that past that no one was supposed to talk about. She kept snapshots of my brothers and sisters from the 1960s, when she had occasionally taken care of them. She'd told me their names, little snippets of information about them. She planted the idea in my head that I should try to find those brothers and sisters. But didn’t really know where to begin. And I imagined that any meeting would be little more than an exchange of information: old stories, health information.
In fact, I would later learn that my older sister and her daughter--my niece, although we were almost the same age--had been looking for me for years. They finally found my mom, and me through her. And it wasn’t at all the unsentimental reunion I’d expected: I was amazed and unspeakably grateful for the way that treated like family, from the moment we met.
They of course remembered my mom, too, and reached out to her. They reminded her of times when she was younger and stronger, when she was a real mother--to them as well as me, brightening the last few years of her life.
I was really moved when Carmen and her daughter April offered to help manage Mom's nursing home care. Her always-delicate health had necessitated the transition to the home a couple of years after I moved to Seattle, and I was grateful to have people I trusted there to check in on her, when I couldn't. Carmen was at my mom's bedside after the stroke, and was thus the last family member to have seen her alive.
**********
Mom's older brother, my Uncle Les, called at about 11:00 AM.
I have to admit that I'd never thought much of Les. Looking back over the years when I was growing up, I have to rack my brain for a memory of the man when he wasn't angry, or bitter, or just plain nasty. I don't even remember what he was so mad about. He fought with my grandmother a lot. He had been a great one for caustic comments on other people's--including, for example, my mom's--failings. He had been an unapologetic bigot.
During the past week, Les had really stepped up, however, providing me with more practical help in planning Mom's service than anyone on either side of the family. Les was the one who had made sure that the grass was cut at the family's long-untended cemetery, had helped me recruit a pastor from Mom's church, had overseen the digging of the grave, had bought thickets of flowers for the ceremony. He volunteered to do these things, as I negotiated with my new employer for time off and tried to find a flight back East. And Les'd been genuinely nice, genuinely supportive to me as we discussed these matters over the phone. I didn't quite know how to take it. I supposed he was moved by the solemnity of the occasion, and no doubt some guilt over the hard life that his sister had had--with little enough help from him. And perhaps he'd mellowed somewhat, over the years since I'd seen him.
Les and I had one last detail to work out: finding a place where the families could gather after the service to talk, to remember my mom--where to have the wake. Carmen had generously offered to host this in her home. Les had wanted to suggest a restaurant near the cemetery, but I felt more comfortable accepting Carmen's offer. I agreed to email everyone directions to Carmen's.
**********
That afternoon, I drove out to the cemetery with Carmen and Gil, to show them the place (they'd never been to a funeral on my mom's side) and make sure that all of those details Uncle Les had been handling for me had been taken care of. The place looked exactly the way I remembered it, from a decade earlier: perhaps four acres of newly-mowed grass bordered by cedars and pine, the grass strewn with about 300 years' worth of headstones. We walked through. I showed them the grave of a Scots ancestor who'd come to North America as an indentured servant, a condition he spent his life working his way out of. Then there was the grave of the accidental Revolutionary War hero, killed in a gunpowder accident. Stories I grew up with. Then we came to Grandma and Grandpa's headstones, and the freshly-dug space next to them, where Mom would be buried. I told them about the strange, numb way that the family had reacted when my grandfather had passed away: Grandma made me go to school, that day. (Gil: "I'm sorry, but that's kinda fucked up ...") And I told them how Mom's family seemed to fly apart when Grandma died, twenty years after that.
**********
I decided on a graveside service for Mom. I couldn't bear the thought of a formal viewing--sitting there with her body for hours alongside two sets of relatives who hadn't spoken for three decades. Members of the two families were thus told to gather at the funeral home early Monday morning and form a procession to the cemetery.
I arrived at the funeral home early Monday morning, exchanging polite hugs and handshakes with my two families as they trickled in. One of my uncles--who hadn't seen me in ten years--said that I looked like a doctor, now.
And then they left me alone with Mom, for a few moments. She really did look like herself in life. She looked peaceful. But I knew it wasn't her anymore, didn't know how I felt about the relationship that we'd had over the years or about the end of her life. I placed a hand on her forehead, bit my lip, and turned away.
The hearse got under way a few minutes later. I fell in behind it, and everyone fell in behind me. The funeral procession took us through neighborhoods where Mom and other family members had lived throughout the past eighty years: we passed the beaten-down old Victorian where the family had lived when Mom and her brothers were small children, the stucco apartment building where Mom and I had briefly lived just after Dad walked out on us all (the site of some of my earliest memories), the stone-and-brick house where my grandmother, Mom and I lived in the early 1980s.
The procession then wound out into Medford, the town where my grandparents had grown up. Despite a twenty-five-year development boom in South Jersey, this place still looked the same as it had when I was a kid: swampy woods, farm fields, scattered ponds and lakes. I imagine that it looked a lot much like this when my grandparents were young.
As people got out of their cars and congregated near the cemetery gate, I called for pallbearers. My brothers Victor and Abey stepped up, immediately: "Right here!" "I'm here for you, man." So did my maternal cousins Chuck and Jeffrey (Les' and Wayne's kids, respectively). My brothers had never seen my cousins, before.
A hand on my shoulder pulled me aside before I could join the pallbearers: Uncle Les. Les looked unimaginably older than I remembered him, bent over a cane, an unfamiliar, actually gentle smile on his face. He pressed a battered little book into my hands, explaining that this had been my grandfather's Bible. Les had already bookmarked the passage that we'd asked the pastor to read during the service: First Corinthians, chapter 13, verses 1- 7.
I thought that the chosen verse would have appealed to Mom for both confessional and personal reasons: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal... Charity bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." My mother had endured a long succession disappointments and losses, years of debilitating illness. No one would blame her for bitterness or regret. But I never heard anything like that from her. She was if anything charitable to a fault. She forgave people who probably didn't deserve it. I know: this is the part where I'm supposed to say "maybe she was happier for it" and "bitterness and regret ruin lives." I won't argue. But that wasn't the point. The point of is that we honored her character and aspirations.
**********
After the service, I headed back to Carmen's--hoping to get there ahead of the other relatives and help her set up. When I arrived, she was already laying out food. She joked that we would have to work to keep my Uncle Les and our brother Victor apart, during the wake--judging that these two were the most likely to act inappropriately.
The two families drifted in, over the next half-hour. I did my best to facilitate interaction between them: I played majordomo, introducing everyone as they arrived.
Unfortunately, people rapidly self-segregated in familiar circles: the Puerto Rican side congregated in the kitchen, talking and gesticulating; the Anglo side settled into the living room--and even divided by gender, with my aunts sitting close together on the couch and my uncles and nephews huddled around a table a few feet away, talking quietly.
The only reason that we were all there was my mother, and I don’t think that there was even a shared vocabulary for talking about her. The years when my siblings knew Mom were precisely the same years that she’d been alienated from her brothers and parents.
I wasn’t really much help. I’d organized this awkwardness. Even if they’d all come to the service without me telling them about it, my presence brought them all into the same house afterward.
And I was the embodiment of why and how much they’d rather not be in the same house.
One side had preferred not to see me as having anything to do with the other, out of what I’m sure that they would have considered generosity. The other one considered me family even though they hadn’t seen me since I was three.
To make matters worse, I’d taken sides. I left the people who brought me up in favor of the ones who’d been looking for me.
After awhile, though, Carmen had the nerve to sit down with some of my uncles. Nobody every accused Carmen of being shy: She sold houses for a living, had to win the confidence of strangers every day. And she was their host. What Carmen really had going for her, though, was memory. She had been a teenager when the father we had in common (and whose absence we had in common) married my mother. She remembered it all very clearly, had dozens of stories. I’m sure that she used that to connect. Within a few minutes, she actually got them laughing. I was amazed. I shot her a slight smile and nod.
After everyone had left but Carmen and Gil and I, she took me aside and asked me: When my time came, would I want to be buried in that cemetery, with my mother and grandparents?
Forty tedious minutes later, I was behind the wheel of a car for the first time in a year and a half, following unfamiliar MapQuest directions deep into the South Jersey suburbs, from interstate to state highway to a succession of half-remembered lesser roads. Equally depressing strip malls, dimly-lit subdivisions, opaque summer fields slid by. I pulled up outside my Carmen's place at about 2:00 A.M. There were no stars, no streetlights, just one bulb in the yard, casting its yellowy circle of light against my sister's white McMansion, making me think of the foreground of Magritte’s “Empire of Light.”
Anticipating my late arrival, Carmen had left a key under the doormat for me. I slipped off my shoes and crept inside as quietly as I could manage, depositing my luggage in the upstairs guest room. Before succumbing to unconsciousness, I left Carmen a note on the kitchen counter, warning that I might sleep in a little. At around 2:30, I fell gratefully into the guest bed, pulling the sheets over my head.
I woke at around 10:00 AM, not nearly late enough, and sank down the stairs to find Carmen and my brother-in-law Gil sitting in the kitchen, having coffee. Carmen and I exchanged groggy hugs, Gil and I shook hands. I responded to polite questions about how my trip went.
And then we got down to talking about what we would be doing for the next two days.
We were going to bury my mom. And we were going to navigate the awkward reunion two groups of people who had neither seen nor wanted to see one another in over thirty years.
**********
My mother and I were never particularly close. She came from a family with roots in the Deleware Valley going back three hundred years, as of a few days ago down to my mom's two brothers, Les and Wayne, and their spouses, children, and a few grandchildren. I remembered them as unhappy, sullen, even angry people, but the truth was that I hadn't spent any time with them in going on ten years, myself.
Carmen's and my dad had come to the U.S. mainland from Puerto Rico in the 1950s, worked like hell at everything from picking fruit to fixing cars to handing glasses over a bar. Over the ensuing couple of decades, Dad started two families. Carmen and my other half-siblings Victor, Ruth, Abey, and Anna were the children of his first marriage. I was the only child of his second.
Due to a series of sad circumstances that followed my birth, I never got to know my siblings, growing up. My maternal grandparents initially reacted to my mom's marriage by disowning and shunning her: they wanted no part of their new son-in-law or his family. Mom eventually won her way back into their house, if not their esteem, by producing an obviously blameless grandson.
Unfortunately living down to expectations, my father soon disappeared from the face of the earth, rendering both former wives single parents. Both lost their homes, lost touch with one another, scrambling to take care of their own kids.
The experience shattered my mom, throwing her into paralyzing depression and illness. She simply couldn't cope. So you can imagine the humiliation of going begging to people who had tried to shut her out of their lives, a few years earlier.
So the family who’d been repelled by my father got me, instead. I grew up in my maternal grandparents' household. Dad's side of the family would rarely be mentioned, there.
Nor would my mom be an integral part of that household: she never totally recovered either her parents' respect or her health, after Dad disappeared. She spent most of my childhood on the periphery, a voice on the phone.
The people I saw every day took decent care of me, even if they were scandalized by almost all of the events which landed me in their house. When I was a kid it was alright; this was our fucked-up kind of normal: People on Social Security having food fights. Grandma gleefully trying to run Grandpa over. Growing awareness of the outside world made it seem a lot less normal. It struck me that every relationship in sight was drowning in depression, ambivalence, resentment, and that this was not altogether normal.
The only relative I knew who didn't seem to some degree bitter or regretful was my mother. Not that this brought us any closer. Mom's passivity embarrassed, her illness depressed me. I didn't find any solace, there; I just thought that she was weak.
From her side, Mom kept trying to keep me close, even during the long periods when my grandparents felt the need to keep her at arm's length. There were always the daily phone calls, and during my teens, after my grandfather died, she actually got to come live with us. Not that she gained any respect or affection by doing so. She'd failed at life. There was just more room, now.
Nor did Mom gain much more respect or affection from me, at this point. Despite the unconditional affection, Mom didn't seem to know me, very well. I felt like I was just this image in her head, and that our relationship was as unreal as all of the rest. I called her Sarah. She let me. There were moments when we connected, going out for Chinese food, etc. I never really knew what to make of her.
I detached myself from that place emotionally years before I could actually leave. The only thing that I looked forward to or really cared about was getting out, getting away to college. Most teenagers want out. I belonged to the subset who never wanted to come back.
Yet there was always my mom, always the phone calls, when I was away at college, when I moved to Seattle. I have to admit that she still made me uncomfortable. She didn't seem to follow my moods or thoughts or aspirations. I felt repelled by her religiosity and what I saw as her sentimentality.
But Mom was also my link to another family, to that past that no one was supposed to talk about. She kept snapshots of my brothers and sisters from the 1960s, when she had occasionally taken care of them. She'd told me their names, little snippets of information about them. She planted the idea in my head that I should try to find those brothers and sisters. But didn’t really know where to begin. And I imagined that any meeting would be little more than an exchange of information: old stories, health information.
In fact, I would later learn that my older sister and her daughter--my niece, although we were almost the same age--had been looking for me for years. They finally found my mom, and me through her. And it wasn’t at all the unsentimental reunion I’d expected: I was amazed and unspeakably grateful for the way that treated like family, from the moment we met.
They of course remembered my mom, too, and reached out to her. They reminded her of times when she was younger and stronger, when she was a real mother--to them as well as me, brightening the last few years of her life.
I was really moved when Carmen and her daughter April offered to help manage Mom's nursing home care. Her always-delicate health had necessitated the transition to the home a couple of years after I moved to Seattle, and I was grateful to have people I trusted there to check in on her, when I couldn't. Carmen was at my mom's bedside after the stroke, and was thus the last family member to have seen her alive.
**********
Mom's older brother, my Uncle Les, called at about 11:00 AM.
I have to admit that I'd never thought much of Les. Looking back over the years when I was growing up, I have to rack my brain for a memory of the man when he wasn't angry, or bitter, or just plain nasty. I don't even remember what he was so mad about. He fought with my grandmother a lot. He had been a great one for caustic comments on other people's--including, for example, my mom's--failings. He had been an unapologetic bigot.
During the past week, Les had really stepped up, however, providing me with more practical help in planning Mom's service than anyone on either side of the family. Les was the one who had made sure that the grass was cut at the family's long-untended cemetery, had helped me recruit a pastor from Mom's church, had overseen the digging of the grave, had bought thickets of flowers for the ceremony. He volunteered to do these things, as I negotiated with my new employer for time off and tried to find a flight back East. And Les'd been genuinely nice, genuinely supportive to me as we discussed these matters over the phone. I didn't quite know how to take it. I supposed he was moved by the solemnity of the occasion, and no doubt some guilt over the hard life that his sister had had--with little enough help from him. And perhaps he'd mellowed somewhat, over the years since I'd seen him.
Les and I had one last detail to work out: finding a place where the families could gather after the service to talk, to remember my mom--where to have the wake. Carmen had generously offered to host this in her home. Les had wanted to suggest a restaurant near the cemetery, but I felt more comfortable accepting Carmen's offer. I agreed to email everyone directions to Carmen's.
**********
That afternoon, I drove out to the cemetery with Carmen and Gil, to show them the place (they'd never been to a funeral on my mom's side) and make sure that all of those details Uncle Les had been handling for me had been taken care of. The place looked exactly the way I remembered it, from a decade earlier: perhaps four acres of newly-mowed grass bordered by cedars and pine, the grass strewn with about 300 years' worth of headstones. We walked through. I showed them the grave of a Scots ancestor who'd come to North America as an indentured servant, a condition he spent his life working his way out of. Then there was the grave of the accidental Revolutionary War hero, killed in a gunpowder accident. Stories I grew up with. Then we came to Grandma and Grandpa's headstones, and the freshly-dug space next to them, where Mom would be buried. I told them about the strange, numb way that the family had reacted when my grandfather had passed away: Grandma made me go to school, that day. (Gil: "I'm sorry, but that's kinda fucked up ...") And I told them how Mom's family seemed to fly apart when Grandma died, twenty years after that.
**********
I decided on a graveside service for Mom. I couldn't bear the thought of a formal viewing--sitting there with her body for hours alongside two sets of relatives who hadn't spoken for three decades. Members of the two families were thus told to gather at the funeral home early Monday morning and form a procession to the cemetery.
I arrived at the funeral home early Monday morning, exchanging polite hugs and handshakes with my two families as they trickled in. One of my uncles--who hadn't seen me in ten years--said that I looked like a doctor, now.
And then they left me alone with Mom, for a few moments. She really did look like herself in life. She looked peaceful. But I knew it wasn't her anymore, didn't know how I felt about the relationship that we'd had over the years or about the end of her life. I placed a hand on her forehead, bit my lip, and turned away.
The hearse got under way a few minutes later. I fell in behind it, and everyone fell in behind me. The funeral procession took us through neighborhoods where Mom and other family members had lived throughout the past eighty years: we passed the beaten-down old Victorian where the family had lived when Mom and her brothers were small children, the stucco apartment building where Mom and I had briefly lived just after Dad walked out on us all (the site of some of my earliest memories), the stone-and-brick house where my grandmother, Mom and I lived in the early 1980s.
The procession then wound out into Medford, the town where my grandparents had grown up. Despite a twenty-five-year development boom in South Jersey, this place still looked the same as it had when I was a kid: swampy woods, farm fields, scattered ponds and lakes. I imagine that it looked a lot much like this when my grandparents were young.
As people got out of their cars and congregated near the cemetery gate, I called for pallbearers. My brothers Victor and Abey stepped up, immediately: "Right here!" "I'm here for you, man." So did my maternal cousins Chuck and Jeffrey (Les' and Wayne's kids, respectively). My brothers had never seen my cousins, before.
A hand on my shoulder pulled me aside before I could join the pallbearers: Uncle Les. Les looked unimaginably older than I remembered him, bent over a cane, an unfamiliar, actually gentle smile on his face. He pressed a battered little book into my hands, explaining that this had been my grandfather's Bible. Les had already bookmarked the passage that we'd asked the pastor to read during the service: First Corinthians, chapter 13, verses 1- 7.
I thought that the chosen verse would have appealed to Mom for both confessional and personal reasons: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal... Charity bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." My mother had endured a long succession disappointments and losses, years of debilitating illness. No one would blame her for bitterness or regret. But I never heard anything like that from her. She was if anything charitable to a fault. She forgave people who probably didn't deserve it. I know: this is the part where I'm supposed to say "maybe she was happier for it" and "bitterness and regret ruin lives." I won't argue. But that wasn't the point. The point of is that we honored her character and aspirations.
**********
After the service, I headed back to Carmen's--hoping to get there ahead of the other relatives and help her set up. When I arrived, she was already laying out food. She joked that we would have to work to keep my Uncle Les and our brother Victor apart, during the wake--judging that these two were the most likely to act inappropriately.
The two families drifted in, over the next half-hour. I did my best to facilitate interaction between them: I played majordomo, introducing everyone as they arrived.
Unfortunately, people rapidly self-segregated in familiar circles: the Puerto Rican side congregated in the kitchen, talking and gesticulating; the Anglo side settled into the living room--and even divided by gender, with my aunts sitting close together on the couch and my uncles and nephews huddled around a table a few feet away, talking quietly.
The only reason that we were all there was my mother, and I don’t think that there was even a shared vocabulary for talking about her. The years when my siblings knew Mom were precisely the same years that she’d been alienated from her brothers and parents.
I wasn’t really much help. I’d organized this awkwardness. Even if they’d all come to the service without me telling them about it, my presence brought them all into the same house afterward.
And I was the embodiment of why and how much they’d rather not be in the same house.
One side had preferred not to see me as having anything to do with the other, out of what I’m sure that they would have considered generosity. The other one considered me family even though they hadn’t seen me since I was three.
To make matters worse, I’d taken sides. I left the people who brought me up in favor of the ones who’d been looking for me.
After awhile, though, Carmen had the nerve to sit down with some of my uncles. Nobody every accused Carmen of being shy: She sold houses for a living, had to win the confidence of strangers every day. And she was their host. What Carmen really had going for her, though, was memory. She had been a teenager when the father we had in common (and whose absence we had in common) married my mother. She remembered it all very clearly, had dozens of stories. I’m sure that she used that to connect. Within a few minutes, she actually got them laughing. I was amazed. I shot her a slight smile and nod.
After everyone had left but Carmen and Gil and I, she took me aside and asked me: When my time came, would I want to be buried in that cemetery, with my mother and grandparents?
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-03 04:45 am (UTC)Welcome home.
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Date: 2006-09-04 03:38 am (UTC)And I know that dance of the family divisions, flitting from group to group making polite talk and trying to wear down stone hearts with a breath of conversation. My mother has always been the peacemaker in her own family and does what she can with my father's; I tink her career in diplomacy was less difficult than being diplomatic with her in-laws sometimes.
As her child, as one of only a few precious children in my generation, I was a sort of peace offering myself; stubborn old men and women may repulse an adult, but find it more difficult to do so when a small child toddles carefully over with a plate of snacks. And being a sort of neutral exception to many of the family lines, and these days a sympathetic figure on canes or in a wheelchair besides, I try to follow my mother's lead and do everything I can to smooth the waters and encourage politeness. If nothing else, they don't like to argue in my presence.
But I must say I'm grateful that my father, after years of appeasement of his brother, has said we will do so no longer, and has even contemplated suing for his stolen inheritance and his sister's. It is a relief to think I shall not have to bite my tongue many more times in their presences.
You were, I think, very right to decide against a viewing. When my maternal grandfather died, my grandmother did not want one, but felt pressured into it by her peers and community - after all, the funeral is partly for other mourners as well. But it was dreadful. An open coffin is undignified, especially for a man in his eighties wasted and withered by cancer, painted orange with makeup to hide the ghastly pallor of his skin and looking nothing like the man we loved. And people stood around for hours chatting and talking and some of it was pleasant, but nothing I or Mom could do would make my grandmother agree to sit down during that four-hour ordeal of smiling at near-strangers, and even ingrained diplomacy wore thin. I deliberately stepped on the foot of an elderly woman - and then apologized as if it was an accident - because I was furious at her for having dared to say something nasty like "We haven't seen you in church lately" to my mother's favorite cousin. I frequently ducked out of the crush for more cups of coffee and tea and endless boxes of tissues, and cigarette breaks I didn't want but needed badly, nauseous with coffee and repressed anger and tears. It was dreadful. And this is my mother's family, who for the most part get along fairly well aside from occasional bits of snide gossip or mild arguments about baseball. I cannot imagine four such hours with my father's family without violence.
The graveside service was peaceful and dignified as the viewing had not been. But I recall that both my parents mentioned afterwards that they, like my dad's beloved father, planned to be cremated and have the ashes scattered off the Golden Gate.
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Date: 2006-09-04 04:45 am (UTC)We have that in common. My birth literally paved the way for my mother's return to her own family. The whole circumstance reminds me of how marriages, and particularly child-producing marriages, cemented family alliances in the ancient world. Unfortunately, Mom's family's ingrained biases prevented it from ever becoming an alliance: they preferred to think of me as though I weren't my father's son, and had nothing to do with those other people. That's more or less how they lost me, though--making my background a taboo subject, discouraging me from finding my brothers and sisters. But I'd still like to see them grow to accept Dad's family--to honor my Mom's memory and to resolve all of this ugliness. Still, I think it's mostly on them, at this point.
Well-said. I've never been reluctant to call my paternal relatives on their prejudices--even as a kid I did this, because I knew that it had something to do with me. I never really got the sense that I was getting through to them, then, but I'm not likely to become any more reticent on this point, in the future. Maybe it'll mean more, now that I'm an adult and they've grieved alongside my brothers and sisters. Maybe.
Yeah, we had much the same experience with my grandmother: she looked horrible, profoundly unlike herself after months of illness, and no amount of mortician's art was going to change that. I also disliked the social awkwardness of the occasion--I didn't want my mom's service to be marred by any of that.
It's hard to think of a better place: I never even lived in the city, but the prospect is an attractive one. But perhaps it'll be Puget Sound or the Outer Banks of North Carolina (my family has a lot of fond memories of that place) or even the N.J. Pine Barrens, in my case. :)
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Date: 2006-09-04 04:50 am (UTC)Sigh: Of course, that should have read "maternal relatives" ... The same would be true of the other side, of course, but puertoriqueños are such a mix of everything, I'd be surprised to hear anything like that. There's almost nothing we could criticize that's not a part of our own backgrounds.
Of course, sometimes ignorance makes people blind to their own spots ...
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Date: 2006-09-04 06:42 am (UTC)On the whole, my parents' families didn't dislike each other terribly; but my father's family developed this dreadful schism around my tenth birthday when my grandfather died, and the roots of it has always been there. My paternal grandmother was insane since long before my birth, and her eldest son had tendencies towards being a spoiled, self-centered jerk - and unfortunately married a nasty, manipulative woman. They and their descendants are barely speaking to my dad's sister at all, and only with careful politeness to myself and my parents. My mom's been biting her tongue around them since shortly after her wedding; my uncle's "jokes" about the integration of women into "his" fire department had my mom wishing for a fire ax at least once.
His wife has a tendency to refer to some of us as "not really family", with a pinched smile, when she's looking for an excuse to not acknowledge, say, her sister-in'law's husband, distant cousins, or old family friends she dislikes. And unfortunately I suspect that your mom's relations will always think of yours as "not really *family*, you know". But I know who acts more like a family.
I don't think anyone should have an open coffin funeral these days; it's barbaric.
I reserve the right to change my mind and donate my body to science or be buried on Mars, for instance; but barring great change, I plan to have my ashes join those of "my real family" where the sun and water and land meet. I hoped to find my father's family when I moved here, among other reasons formoving here; I found a lot of bitterness and ugliness I wish I hadn't. But my dad's sister is very dear to me; the memory of my grandfather is as well; and although I suppose it's silly to care about a lot of dead relatives I never knew, it comforts me to know that my great-grandparents are buried here. I never had roots before; a bit of personal history in a place made me feel like this might be a good place to grow some.
(Where the heck did my SF icon go, anyway? Must fix that.)
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Date: 2006-09-04 02:49 pm (UTC)Amazingly nasty, that: in a way, the pinched smile makes it worse--like she's straining to be polite to people she shouldn't have to even interact with. Dealing with someone like that would certainly raise my blood pressure.
Yes, I'm afraid that will likely be so, at least in most cases. But if they want a relationship with me, I'm going to require that they acknowledge the other family. In a way, that's what the funeral and wake were about: both families had to be there, and Mom's family had to learn to deal.
I do have one ray of hope: my cousin Jeff actually went out of his way to talk to my sisters and brothers, during the wake. This makes a world of sense, actually, since Jeff is something of a black sheep, himself: He's gay. When Jeff was little and obviously fey, the men on Mom's side liked to joke about it; now that he's an adult, out of the closet, living with a long-term partner, no one to want to talk about it.
This is one area where I'm not sure that my brothers can be relied upon to be particularly enlightened, but my sisters have gay friends, so I don't think that'll be a problem.
It'll be interesting to see what happened: when my sister found out that Jeff was local and worked in interior design (she's in real estate, you see), she started networking with him ...
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Date: 2006-09-04 06:19 pm (UTC)I hope your cousin Jeff and your sister form a lovely and lucrative business partnership. Money can help soothe some of those inter-family feelings.
Of course, if you ever have kids, that will help as well. Very little prejudice can stand in the face of a cute baby relative. A distant scandal on my mom's side involved a sixteen-year-old having a mixed-race baby far out of wedlock; the old folks especially muttered darkly about such behavior, just like her wayward mom, and so on (and I have to admit it didn't sound like the smartest decision in the world to me either). But at the next reunion, even the crankiest mutterers were won over or at least silenced by the cute baby girl. (at least, this worked in a family that wasn't breeding much. One more baby amongst a huge crop might not be so quickly forgiven.)
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