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On a bright blue January day, after the taillights of my mother’s car had disappeared down her driveway, I walked through the empty house she’d left behind and acquainted myself with her absence. I’d never been there alone before (although I wasn’t alone - my new puppy trotted along behind me). It was unexpected, this solitary exploration. She had just been driven away to travel back East for Gerald Ford’s funeral service, and the housekeeper hadn’t yet arrived. Secret Service agents are always there, but in a separate area, so the hush of the house and what it could teach me was all mine. I walked back across the threshold like a pilgrim about to undertake a journey.
This is not the house I grew up in; it’s the one my parents moved to after the White House years - the house they thought would be home to the winding down of their lives together. And it has been . . . just not in the ways they expected.
My father sank into Alzheimer’s here. Eventually, the only room he knew was the one that had once been his study and had been transformed into what we simply called “his room” . . . with a hospital bed, an armchair, a small television set for whichever nurse was on duty, and a table full of medical paraphernalia. He died in that room. Our last good-byes still linger like cobwebs in the corners - light as gossamer, strong as wire. For months afterward I would whisper, “Hi, Dad,” every time I passed the doorway. It’s now been turned back into a study. My mother sits at his desk and answers mail, with photographs of him all around her.
I still feel my father here, but the house is full of my mother. Her careful, precise decorating - small Limoges boxes arranged in concentric circles on an antique mahogany table, vases of artistically arranged flowers, polished silver picture frames containing images of another time. A large oil painting of a sad-eyed man is as familiar as a family member. He watched me from above the fireplace in my childhood home, and he watches me now from above the fireplace in the den. One wall in this room is lined with books, many of them old and rare, leather spines cracked and worn. Their pages haven’t been turned in years. The house smells like my mother - the Kiehl’s bath oil she likes to soak in and the mysterious scent that every individual has. Houses hold on to people’s scents for a long time; I wondered how possessive this house will be of hers.
I walked from room to room, trying to memorize and absorb the feeling of her not being there. When one parent has died and the other is in her 80s, absence has a different weight to it. It feels like a glimpse into the future, and it invites you to study it . . . and study it well.
The house will be empty one day. This is what it will feel like, sound like, I told myself. I walked so slowly that my dog began running in circles around me, confused by my snail’s pace. I didn’t want to miss anything. I wanted the quiet and the emptiness to seep into me; I wanted every floating memory to stop me in my tracks.
The living room is rarely used these days. The couch and matching armchairs are tightly slip-covered in floral fabric; I searched my memory for how old they are. Old was all I could come up with. I can’t remember when they weren’t there. When I lived in New York and my mother visited my apartment, she was baffled by my loose “shabby chic” slipcovers. (It was years ago, at the very beginning of the phenomenon.)
“Those slipcovers don’t fit,” she said, mildly horrified.
“They’re meant to not fit,” I explained. “The style is called shabby chic, and everything is loose and slouchy. . . .”
“But they don’t fit,” she insisted.
Months later I was with her in California at a Malibu house that friends of hers were renting. There on the coffee table was Rachel Ashwell’s first book, simply titled Shabby Chic.
“Oh, Patti has some of this furniture!” she exclaimed delightedly, apparently thrilled that I wasn’t really the style flunky she’d judged me to be.
I’ve teased her about this, and she’s laughed at the memory, acknowledging that, yes, we do have different styles of decorating and she had been a bit quick to judge. Every once in a while, she’s asked me if I’d like a particular piece of furniture to be passed down to me; wisely, she’s never offered to leave me the living-room couch.
My mother’s bedroom has, sadly, been hers alone for years now. The room on the other side of the wall became my father’s when a hospital bed and round-the-clock nurses became necessary. Mom had the king-size bed removed and a queen-size one brought in, hoping to feel less of his absence in the bed they’d shared for nearly 50 years.
But she still sleeps on her side of the bed. The side that was always my father’s is smooth and unwrinkled - not even a dent in the pillow. When I was a child, I’d tumble into their bedroom on laundry day, when bedclothes were piled on the floor, and I’d be able to tell which pillow was my mother’s and which my father’s by the scent they’d left behind. Now there is only my mother’s.
In her dressing room, two robes hang neatly on hangers on the back of the door. I know she has probably half a dozen others in her closet. My mother loves robes - or, generationally speaking, perhaps I should say “dressing gowns.” I suddenly have an image of her in our old house, decades ago, pregnant with my younger brother, Ron:
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She’s standing at the screen door that leads to the backyard, and she’s wearing a long pink robe. She has basically been confined to bed for the first trimester so she won’t miscarry, and she wears that pink robe a lot, the sash loosely tied over the bump that will become my brother. She’s smiling at me as I go back and forth on the swing set, my feet aiming for the sky.
***
I don’t know how long I walked through the empty rooms. Probably not long, but it felt like I was traveling through space, backward and forward between the past and the future. The house was still, hushed as a church, and it was asking me to give it that same reverence.
By breathing into my mother’s absence, I knew I was also inhaling her presence - a presence that would never die, not even when she does.
Our mothers slip between our heartbeats. They live in our wombs, our blood, the reflections we see in the mirror. When we’re younger, we think they’ll move farther away from us; when we’re older, we know they never can.
I imagined my mother long before I was able to really know her. When I was a child, I imagined having long, easy, freewheeling conversations with her, the sort of talks friends might have in late-afternoon sunlight over cups of tea.
The reality was far different. I tried her patience, and she intimidated me. More than that, she was one half of a starlit relationship that seemed to exist in its own galaxy. My parents were fused together - hearts, souls, minds. They loved us - my younger brother and me - but when they looked at each other, the rest of the world fell away. The years of tension with my mother that piled up between us like bricks in a wall are well known. Occasionally, even a stranger will say something to me like, “It’s great that you and your mother are getting along now.” It’s almost always a woman who says this, her own story simmering in her eyes.
As daughters, we bounce off our mothers in ways that are both mysterious and ancient. Even in anger - maybe especiallythen - we’re tethered to them. My mother and I have never been mild with one another. Whether we were miles apart and blaming each other or strongly and lovingly bonded together, our emotions burned up the color chart. Nothing was ever gray.
We do have a friendship now - not that dissimilar to the one I imagined so long ago. But it’s been hard-won. At some point, I stopped looking back at the journey and just enjoyed where we’ve ended up. Apparently, so did she. One day on the phone she said, “I just don’t really think about those years anymore.” (I think I’d made a passing reference to what I call our “war years.”)
***
The sound of a car pulling into the driveway made me realize that my pilgrimage through the empty house was over. As I went into the entryway to open the front door, I remembered standing there with my mother two days before my father died. I was on my way out, and she broke down and wept in my arms. My mother is tiny, and I tower over her; her tears streamed down my shoulder and caught in the crook of my arm. “Nothing is ever going to be okay without him,” she sobbed.
It’s startling and heartbreaking to feel how small our mothers are - to wrap our younger, stronger arms around them and memorize the fragility of their spines beneath our fingers, the softness of their muscles under the weight of our hands. I was holding on to time slipping away; I was holding on to a lifetime of memories, feeling her weep with a sorrow that would never truly heal. I was holding on to the woman who had given birth to me and who was losing the love of her life. But I was finding more of the daughter I wanted to be; and in the end, that’s the best we can do.
This article was excerpted from the book THE LIVES OUR MOTHERS LEAVE US: Prominent Women Discuss the Complex, Humorous, and Ultimately Loving Relationships They Have with Their Mothers by Patti Davis. It is published by Hay House (April 2009) and is available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com
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