I’m watching The Sopranos. Again. This time I’m watching it with the man I love who loves it when I don’t tell him what’s going to happen next. Unthinkably, he’s never seen The Sopranos.
The only non-book that ever occupied my bookshelves was the Sopranos DVD collection. Apropos that it sat there for years among some of the most compelling stories ever told because, as Gary Shteyngart once pointed out, The Sopranos is “storytelling for the new century.” And, a good story lasts forever.
Once upon a time, at the same time every night, my late husband would come into my office and ask me with a wink “Well? Are you ready for Tony and the boys?” Yes. I was. I was always ready. He’d pour me a glass of something red, and we would tune in to HBO to watch, again, a re-run of an episode, already knowing what was going to happen to whom and why, but lured in nonetheless by the evergreen charisma of James Gandolfini.
Watching again all these years later, in Mexico, courtesy of Netflix and an unreliable internet connection, Tony Soprano persists. He is still larger than life, still flirting with Dr. Melfi, still fighting about money with Carmela, and I’m still telling myself that James Gandolfini didn’t really die in Rome eight summers ago.
Eight. Summers. Ago.
Tony Soprano had been around forever. Years before David Chase created him James Gandolfini was already playing the part of a wise guy. As he said in a 1999 interview, he was growing adept at playing thugs, gangsters, murderers,
… the roles you’d expect a guy who looks like me to get.
Brilliantly.
An avid movie fan, I had also seen the makings of Tony Soprano in Eddie, the hitman hired to keep an eye on Demi Moore’s character in The Juror, and Gandolfini may as well have been auditioning for The Sopranos as Virgil in True Romance, his performance crackling with the kind of murderous intensity that makes Tony Soprano the perfect villain. Vicious and violent, the scene with Patricia Arquette where Virgil meets his end is quintessential Quentin Tarantino. I can only watch by peeking out through my fingers. Although I know Tony Soprano’s capacity for unimaginable brutality, I continue to be charmed by his playfulness, the smiling eyes, the sheepishness. Duped, I suppose, by a kind of vulnerability that makes him relatable and likable. On the TV screen Tony Soprano remains invincible and untamable. Immortal. But not James Gandolfini, with us for the briefest sojourn, and dead at 51.
This past Saturday would have been his 60th birthday. Thinking about him and what he left behind for his daughter, pokes a hole in a well-hidden stash of thoughts about my own mortality and what I’ll leave behind for mine.
She tells me she avoids reading my writing. A grown woman now and wise, she tells me that because we are here for only a short time, her plan is to save my writing for later–– in a digital jam-jar. When I am gone, she will open it. It is a beautiful stratagem, a way to counter the missing of people likely to go before her, and it reminds me of the frail yet fervent 83-year old Maurice Sendak‘s final interview. Perhaps the purest expression of mortality I have ever encountered, I watched it on a September Sunday with my daughter and her dad – who, just like James Gandolfini – would be gone in an instant.
He wouldn’t have to miss us.
Almost certainly I’ll go before you go, so I won’t have to miss you … Live your life, live your life, live your life.
I think Maurice Sendak would have missed James Gandolfini––the man with an appetite for life, the actor whose best––and what my mother would describe as his most heartsome performance–– may well have been as the voice of Carol in the film adaptation of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the story of Max who, after his mother sends him to bed without any dinner, sails off to a fantasy island inhabited by the wild things.
As the disembodied Carol, the range and inflections of Gandolfini’s voice, are as masterful and nuanced as those that flutter across the faces of Tony Soprano and all the ‘wild things’ he has portrayed. Like grace notes. As Carol, however, he is a different kind of monster, the embodiment of the complex figments of a child’s imagination.
In the movie version, Max leaves home, running down menacing city streets until he reaches a waterfront where a waiting boat takes him far away to the land where the wild things roam. At first, the ferocious creatures try to scare him away, but Max remains unfazed. Fearless now, he is the wildest of them all. Emboldened and in charge, he is pronounced king of this kingdom and orders his new subjects to ‘let the wild rumpus start!’ But when he tires of their moonlit shenanigans, he invokes his mother and sends them all to bed without dinner.
And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all
Bitterly disappointed, raging at Max for no longer wanting to be king, Carol chases him, lunging at him in one of the scariest scenes of the film, “I’ll eat you up!” he roars. Undaunted, Max refuses to stay, eventually returning home to a happy ending, where dinner is waiting and still hot. Thus, the heartbreaking farewell, as Max sails away from the solitary giant on the shore, howling its grief in the voice of James Gandolfini, a voice silenced too soon.
Far away from my own childhood and from my child, I suspect we all know where the wild things are. Over fifty years later, I can still hear my mother’s voice telling me not to let my imagination run away with me as I fretted over the dark, or disappointments, big and small. Fueled by those wild things, I sailed off by myself many times. I always found my way back home––some journeys were longer than others.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
Flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms to touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001. The 9.11 memorial in Tempe, Arizona, is heartbreakingly beautiful, each one of its 2,996 flags signifying a life taken on that horrific autumn morning.
My daughter and I first visited the memorial in 2012. I remember watching as she walked away from me, a somber and solitary figure cutting a new path deep into that Healing Field of red, white, and blue, undone by the sheer enormity of the memorial and her diminished stature within it. I had to force myself to look away to recollect the way we were that September morning when I dropped her off at pre-school, to remember the color of the sky.
In that blink of an eye, she vanished into the field of flags. Out of sight. Gazing up at that big desert sky above me, I knew my daughter was not lost. And, I know the very thought is still what scares me most.
In 2001, September 11th arrived on a Tuesday and for a little girl only a few months older than mine, it began with her boarding United Airlines Flight 175. Just four years old, little nature-lover Juliana Valentine McCourt, and her mother, an Irish immigrant from Cork, were on their way to Disneyland, to the happiest place on earth.
Juliana and her mom were best friends, close as sisters. They were traveling together to California.
Close. Like my daughter and me on our numerous trips from Phoenix to Newark, Newark to Belfast, and back again.
Close. Even when rendered illogical and unreasonable, she by raging adolescent hormones, me by the effects of cancer treatment, I recall we were – and still are – as two peas in a pod.
We have the same hands. We love dark chocolate-covered almonds, pancakes, and the smell of books. We love two little chihuahuas that compete for her attention. We follow each other on Facebook and Instagram and I refrain from gushing too much in ways that will embarrass her. We binge-watch Netflix originals – me on Ozark, she on re-runs of Law and Order. We love each other and we know we once filled the heart of the man who died when we were far away from him and home one November.
We know anything can happen, but sometimes we forget.
Juliana and her mother died on September 11, 2001, on the plane that plunged through the South Tower of the World Trade Center with horrifying velocity. In Washington, D.C., Dana and Zoe Falkenberg died too. Just 3 and 8, they had boarded American Airlines Flight 77 with their parents, beginning a dream trip to Australia. And then when terrorists hijacked their plane and crashed it into the Pentagon, they were gone too.
So many dead, so many names:
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart
Reminders that terrorism is an awful equalizer, colorful tulle butterflies are attached to the flagpoles in the Healing Field and stuffed bears sit on the grass. Reminders that children, parents, grandparents, and those without names or families or homes or good health – it matters not – in a terrorist attack, they are all legitimate targets.
In the Field there are shows of patriotism and silent prayers for the dead. That morning, a mournful “Taps” pierces the desert air and then Amazing Grace.
Yellow ribbons wrapped around and around those flagpoles encircling the field represent the valor of those “first responders,” those sworn to protect and serve those within. Ribbons as blue as that September morning sky are wound around flagpoles in the heart of the Field, for the flight crew members who perished. And, on the grass, for all the veterans who perished that day, pair after pair of combat boots.
In cities here and across the globe, wreaths are laid, bells ring out, and names are rubbed in pencil on cherished scraps of paper.
We say their names.
Juliana Valentine McCourt. She would have graduated from college by now, Disneyland days with her mom perhaps less appealing than thoughts of a new car or a promotion. Such a trajectory is only in my imagination. For Juliana, there was no Disneyland, no first day of school, no soft place to fall.
So we will remember her. We will remember them all, as we lower our flags and watch again the footage of the World Trade Center’s final moments on television retrospectives. Keyboard warriors will wax conspiratorial about missing footage of what they think happened at the Pentagon. Politicians will pay their respects after which some of them will resume campaign trails that are not always respectful. Family members of 9/11 victims will gather on the Memorial plaza in New York to read aloud the names of those killed in the 9/11 attacks and in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Others will plan personal observances.
9.11 is history.
My daughter told me that in her final year of high school not one of her teachers remembered 9-11 out loud. Ostensibly, it was no different than the day before, no different than September 10, 2001, when Ruth McCourt was packing for a trip to Disneyland with her daughter, Juliana.
Some of us will look up and remember the sky under which we are all connected. Some of us will say her name.
A Poet Laureate of the United States, Billy Collins, is one of those brilliant poets who uses words and rhythms to cut through with clarity and compassion to the heart of a matter, right when we need it most:
The Names – Billy Collins
Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened, Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name —
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner —
Kelly and Lee, Medina, Nardella, and O’Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening — weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds —
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory. So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
The best year of my life was the one spent at home after the birth of my baby girl. For twelve idyllic months, with her daddy off at work, our girl was mine – all mine – and I inhaled. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, I danced around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison – when I liked Van Morrison. I spent interminable hours just looking at her.
Just. Looking. At. Her.
I examined every feature, every furrow, every flicker across her tiny face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, all the while marveling that two imperfect people had made this perfection. Unbothered by my hovering, or maybe she was, this was before she had a cache of words or discovered those beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We called it hand ballet.
Mostly, our darling girl bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or maybe just to let me know she was right there in front of me. I couldn’t bear it. In spite of criticism from well-meaning friends who thought they knew better, I was one of those mothers who refused to her ‘cry it out.’ As soon as I heard the tiniest whimper, I bolted to her bedroom to pick her up and comfort her. My mother encouraged me, reminding me the way only Irish mammies do, that there would be plenty of times down the road when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. She was right. Of course she was. It has been on such desperate nights that I have found myself wishing we mothers could have banked all those hours spent holding and comforting our infant children and built a rainy day fund to help us help them weather the waiting storms.
When the time came for me to return to work, I was unprepared for the crying – mostly mine – that preceded and continued after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, the cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school. Most of the other mothers didn’t appear to have jobs outside the home. In their comfortable cargo pants and Birkenstocks and (this was pre-Starbucks) with mugs of coffee brought from home, they chatted in the parking lot. I like to think I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with my Anne Klein suits and hair on the verge of sensible. As a school administrator, I was hell-bent on impressing on someone – most likely myself – the notion that I was “A Professional Working Mother,” that I could do it all or have it all, all at the same time.
In spite of my grown-up job, I did not impress Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I would hand to her my wailing, flailing girl. Unflappable, Bonnie would attempt placating me with reassurances that the writhing child in her arms would be just fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . .
Although she had to say it more than once, Bonnie showed restraint, never once rolling her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. Irrational and crazed, I wanted my child to have Bonnie’s undivided attention. I wanted Bonnie to spend hours staring, like the Madonna – mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes – at my beautiful girl, cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when she did something – anything – for the first time. I was sad that I would miss the first time she watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or cracked a nut or blew bubbles. I would miss telling her daddy, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that Sophie had experienced another developmental milestone as when she had spoken her first word, or clapped her hands for the first time, or let go of my hand and stood straight like a little warrior to my ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”
It’s true. I was madly jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie – not me – with a magic trick up her sleeve that would charm my inconsolable daughter and make the crying stop. Walking away from the little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I would pretend to leave but then remain in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, torturing myself as I listened to the unmistakable sound of my child’s crying. At the same time, all the other mother’s children were crying. How, out of that early morning cacophony, could each of us pluck out the unique sound of our children’s specific anxiety?
Daily, I waited until the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and a final shuddering stop. Then I would reapply the makeup that I had wept away, and when my face matched the boring business suit with no hint of guilt-stricken working mother, off I went – to work for other people’s children.
Around this time, I discovered Kathi Appelt’s book, Oh My Baby Little One. Like me, Appelt knew this anguish of leaving her child, and she relived it when her twelve-year-old son went off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he prepared to go off to college and inspired by the lovely Sweet Sorrow in the Wind sung by Emmylou Harris, she wrote the book I would find on the discard table in a Borders when we still had a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday.
Every night, I read aloud the story of Mama Bird, who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love – a little red heart – would still be with him. Magically, this love would slip inside his lunch box or sit on his shoulder during playtime or nestle on his pillow at nap-time. At the same time, it would curl around Mama Bird’s coffee cup as she went about her daily business.
And every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask my sleepy girl, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper, as though it were a secret:
All around, mama. The love is all around.
It eased those morning goodbyes when I left her with Bonnie and numerous other teachers throughout the years. There were too many of them. Never satisfied with them because they never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I knew best what was best for her, I kept switching schools. They never seemed to get it, that I was sending them the very best child I have. So by the time she was in the third grade, my daughter had become a veritable tourist in the public education system, hopping from school to school, becoming ever more resilient, while I kept searching for the one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine.
On her last first day at school, I packed a lunch for my girl – now a high school Senior, a young woman – and slipped a note inside the brown paper sack the way I used to do. Watching as she strode to the car her daddy used to drive, my heart cracked open – another milestone without him.
But I pulled myself together and gave into the day – the way I had to do – knowing as it released us to our respective distractions and mundanities, that it would unfold, providing delight or difficulty or both in unequal measure.
Some days still, in an unguarded moment, between emails and zoom meetings, in the middle of things that matter and things that don’t, I wonder what she is doing, and find myself recalling my three-year-old darling, fighting sleep with all her might to search once more for the love so cleverly hidden on each page of Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations.
And I will remind myself – as I will again today – that the love is all around.
Home is where I want to be Pick me up and turn me round I feel numb – born with a weak heart I guess I must be having fun The less we say about it the better Make it up as we go along Feet on the ground Head in the sky It’s ok I know nothing’s wrong . . . nothing
Lyrics: David Byrne
I am supposed to be in Phoenix, but like many of you, I am not going anywhere. This Mother’s Day weekend coincides with what has been projected as the peak of coronavirus contagion here in Mexico, and we are being urged to stay at home. There have been social distancing measures in place since mid-March, but they have intensified this week, in an attempt to keep crowds from gathering to celebrate Día de las Madre in the traditional ways. This year, health officials are urging the people of Mexico to reimagine those time-honored tributes that define Día de las Madre and to cherish mothers and grandmothers from a distance. To that end, most restaurants, flower markets, and plazas will be closed on Sunday. To prevent people from visiting their mother’s graves, even cemeteries will be closed. Hopes are for a quiet Sunday, more likely now with a ban on in-person serenades of “Las Mañanitas” in the states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Zacateas, and here, in Guadalajara, Jalisco, the heartland of the mariachi.
Where we can no longer reach out with our hands, we must now reach out with our hearts.
I understand all of this, having availed myself of technology-enabled engagement to remain connected while physically distant. The only journeys I have planned for the foreseeable future are virtual, daily Brady-Bunch style Zoom meetings with my colleagues at 9:30AM, WhatsApp calls with my parents, still isolated at home in Northern Ireland, and the celebration of my only child’s college graduation on Monday. The right thing to do, her university has announced that due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus and its attendant public health recommendations, Arizona State University will move its 2020 Spring commencement to a virtual, online ceremony temporarily turning upside down my plans to be there to cheer wildly with her tribe as my darling girl strides across the stage to receive her diploma and to reflect quietly on this accomplishment in our Phoenix home, the place where she learned to walk and talk and read – the place where she first knew love. In addition to the online ceremony, graduates like Sophie can also participate in an in-person ceremony in December. She has opted for the latter, preferring to postpone rather than participate in what might feel like just another Zoom meeting. I know she is doing this for me. After so many months of social distancing, I will be ready for an in-person and personal party on the patio to celebrate all she has accomplished. There will be handshakes and hugs and high-fives, won’t there? Or maybe there won’t. I remind myself we are only four months into a global pandemic, and my fifty days in a house in Mexico may be but a drop in the bucket.
The President of ASU is saying the right things, encouraging graduates like Sophie to deal with the disappointment and this departure from tradition by tapping into “the same resourcefulness” that has guided their journey to earn a degree at ASU. He tells them they have “demonstrated an ability to adapt and to persevere. That is what makes a Sun Devil.” This is also what makes Sophie.
Home is were I want to be.
Overly sentimental today, I am remembering her high school graduation ceremony, the small Senior class filing into the auditorium to the sound of the Talking Heads – “This Must be the Place (Naive Melody). An appropriately hip processional at an artsy school, it was one of her dad’s favorite songs, five fabulous minutes of toe-tapping polyphony. (He liked a tune that would inspire ‘happy feet,’ a fact that prompted me, one St. Patrick’s Day, to take him to see The Chieftains perform a particularly joyous show in Scottsdale). I had never been so utterly happy to hear the Talking Heads, or so utterly lost. By the time Sophie reached her seat on the stage, I had brushed away memories of David Byrne dancing in his big white suit, and instead was back where she started, asleep and swaddled, six pounds of potential, snug in the space between the crook of her daddy’s arm and the tips of his fingers, safe and secure. Certain sure.
Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there.
I stayed home with my daughter for a year after she was born. For twelve idyllic months, with her father off at work, it was the best year of my life. Our baby girl was all mine. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, there were mornings when I danced just like the sign says – like nobody’s watching – around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison. Some days I made it out of my pajamas, but that was only if I felt like walking out to the mailbox. Other days, I might even have showered, but mostly, I was a bit like the imaginative little girl I once was, the one who had to be reminded to wash her face or brush her teeth because she was so absorbed in play and a world of pretending. How I loved playing with my very own baby girl, feeding her, dressing her in miniature clothes with impossibly tiny buttons, brushing what little hair she had with a soft toothbrush, and bathing her in the kitchen sink.
I spent interminable hours just looking at her. Just. Looking. At. Her. Examining every tiny feature, every furrow, every flicker across her face, for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, all the while marveling that two imperfect people had made this perfection. Maybe my hovering bothered her the way it would later in her life. I’m not sure. This was before she had found words or discovered those beautiful hands that fly with expression today, a magical milestone in her development. She was surely the first child to ever make such a discovery, those slender fingers in constant motion. I remember we called it hand ballet. Transfixed, as though under a spell, she paid rapt attention, staring intently, unblinking, at the dancing fingers that would too soon cooperate to clap hands, tie laces, make music, whisk eggs, and wipe away tears.
Mostly, Sophie bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or perhaps just to let us know she was there. In spite of criticism from well-meaning friends who were convinced they knew better, I refused to let her “cry it out.” I picked her up the instant I heard her begin to cry at night. From afar, my mother encouraged me, reminding me the way Irish mammies do, that there would be plenty of times as an adult when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. It has indeed been in such desperate times that I have found myself wishing that we mothers could somehow bank all those hours spent holding and comforting our infant children in a rainy day fund to help us help them weather whatever storms await them.
When the time came for me to return to work, I was unprepared for the crying – hers and mine – that preceded and continued after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, the cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school. Most of the other mothers didn’t appear to have jobs outside the home. In their cargo pants and Birkenstocks with big mugs of coffee brought from home – this was pre-Starbucks – they were usually still chatting in the parking lot as I left for work. I like to think I left them with a vague impression of adulthood, in my boring Anne Klein suits and my hair on the verge of sensible. I pretended (mostly to myself) that I had evolved into “A Professional Working Mother,” that I could do it all or have it all – impossible, I know now, to achieve at the same time.
In spite of my grown-up job and my navy suit, I did not impress Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I handed over my wailing, flailing girl. Coolly, she placated me with reassurances that Sophie would be just fine as soon as I was out of sight. Although she had to say it more than once, she showed restraint, never once rolling her eyes in response to my wild-eyed fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. Irrational and crazed, I know, but the unspoken truth was that I wanted the unflappable Bonnie to lavish on Sophie her undivided attention. I wanted her to spend hours staring, like the Madonna (mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes) at my beautiful girl, cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing the moment Sophie did anything for the very first time. I was sad that I would miss the first time she watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or cracked a nut or blew a bubble and the ceremony that followed when I would immediately notify her dad, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that Sophie had experienced another developmental milestone as monumental as when she uttered her first word – daddy – or clapped her hands for the first time – just in time for daddy’s birthday – or let go of my hand to stand erect, like a little warrior, to our doting ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”
I was madly jealous that it was this magnanimous pre-school teacher – not me – with the right kind of magic up her sleeve to charm my inconsolable daughter and make the crying stop. The daily choice to walk away from the little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I would pretend to leave but then sit in my car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, torturing myself as I listened to the sound of my child’s crying distinct from the simultaneous crying of all the other mother’s children. How, out of that early morning cacophony, could each of us pluck out the unique sound of our children’s specific anxiety?
Every day, I waited in the parking lot until those wails gave way to worn-out sobs and a final shuddering stop. Then I would reapply the makeup I had cried away, and when my face matched the boring business suit with no glimmer of guilt-stricken working mother remaining, off I went to work – for other people’s children.
Around this time, I discovered Kathi Appelt’s book, Oh My Baby Little One. Like me, Appelt knew this anguish, and she relived it when her twelve-year-old son went off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he left for college and inspired by the lovely Sweet Sorrow in the Wind sung by Emmylou Harris, she wrote the book I would eventually find on the discard table in a Borders when we still had a physical bookstore where I could also get the print edition of The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday. Every night for a long time, I read to Sophie the story of Appelt’s Mama Bird, who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love would still be with him. Magically, it would slip inside his lunch box or nestle on his pillow at nap-time. At the same time, it would curl around Mama Bird’s coffee cup as she went about her daily business.
Every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask Sophie, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper, as though it were our secret:
All around, mama. The love is all around.
This refrain would become the salve that soothed those morning goodbyes for both of us, when I left her with Bonnie and other teachers who never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I was sending them the very best child I have. Dissatisfied, I switched schools so much that by the time she finished high school, Sophie had become a veritable tourist in the public education system, becoming ever more resilient, while I kept searching for the one teacher who might change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine.
You have demonstrated an ability to adapt and to persevere. That is what makes a Sun Devil.
The President of ASU has never met Sophie, but if I could sit down with him, I would share with him examples of her Sun Devil spirit. I would tell him about the time before her fourteenth birthday when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I would invite him to stand in a hospital hallway outside the ICU, where she, impersonating “strong and stoic,” is leaning on her beloved daddy and he on her as they wait for surgeons bearing good tidings. Neither of them feels safe nor secure. Squaring up with a false bravado, she is at once confronting the wild fear that I might die yet balking at the notion of wearing the “kid with the sick mom” mantel. She did not want her teachers to know all she did to help during my recovery, in case they felt sorry for her and awarded good grades out of sympathy.
Remember fourteen? A time for rebellion, for rolling your eyes at your mother’s taste in clothes or music because she was your mother for God’s sake and therefore “so embarrassing.” Fourteen was for pushing boundaries and buttons; for experimenting with make-up; for discovering myriad ways to style your hair or sign your name – with hearts instead of dots above “i’s”. For my Sun Devil, this rite of passage was marred by my breast cancer diagnosis, before which she didn’t have to feel as guilty about perfectly acceptable and anticipated acts of rebellion. It was unforgivably unfair. But that’s the nature of the disease, isn’t it? Unfair.
You have demonstrated an ability to adapt and to persevere. That is what makes a Sun Devil.
And then, like a Dickensian ghost, I would take the university president to another time, two years later, just before her sixteenth birthday. Sophie is with me in my mother’s kitchen, far away in rural Derry. She is concentrating on a sketch, and I am on the phone, trying to reach her dad in Phoenix. He does not answer, and the silence from the other side of America on the other side of the Atlantic troubles me so much that I text my best friend to please drive from Chandler to our house in Central Phoenix just to make sure all is well. Sophie is still drawing when my friend calls to tell me that both our cars are in the driveway, that our little dog, Edgar, is sitting on the couch, staring out the window at her. Sophie is still drawing when I hear my friend call out my husband’s name once, twice, and then a third time to no response. He is gone. We stop the clocks.
When we return to our home in Arizona, it is to a space we no longer recognize. The trees her dad planted especially for her no longer make any sense, casting elegant shadows on blades of grass that will never again flatten under his footsteps. The mailman continues to deliver letters bearing his name. We don’t know what to do with them? The hummingbirds flit about the honeysuckle waiting for him to feed them. Disoriented and uncertain, we get lost in our own home, no longer confident about what might happen at three o’clock or seven o’clock. Before, there was no doubt. Now we have to adapt. We persevere. We are becoming Sun Devils.
Today, my daughter is 22. Named after my mother, who has unhelpfully responded to so many of my predicaments with the same question, “What would the wise woman do?” Sophie Elizabeth has earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Family And Human Development, with an emphasis on child psychology, her goal ultimately to work in counseling, to help children who have lost parents or been frightened by the prospect of losing a sick parent to cancer. She has adapted to life without the man who was her first word and who took her for ice cream to a local Dairy Queen, since demolished, every Friday after school, the man who loved the Talking Heads and who would have loved being surprised by that high school graduation processional. He would have tapped his feet and by the end of it would have brushed away a tear, because by then he would have grown sentimental, contemplating the significance of the milestone and the prospect of so many more on the horizon. I like to think he knows somehow that she has navigated every one of them, with an independence and vulnerability that takes my breath away.
He would be so proud of her. He always was, from the first time she spoke right up to about a month before his death, when, unbeknownst to me, he had taken her to a workshop for teen drivers, designed to help her pass her Learner’s Permit test. She needed twenty-one correct answers in a row. Once accomplished, she looked out to where he was waiting and gave him a thumbs-up that prompted the wink and proud-as-punch smile she knew so well. It was still there on his face when I came home from work that day – “Look what we did today!” – and he beamed as our baby girl pressed her new Learner’s Permit into my hand. That was the last milestone our family shared – ordinary yet momentous.
I would also tell the university president that, on one of the six anniversaries of her father’s death, this Sun Devil told me it was beyond her grasp that one day it would be ten years, twenty years, forty years, since her dad last held her hand in the frozen food section of the grocery store – to keep her warm. I would emphasize that she is no longer undone by this fact. It is not a sadness that envelops her on these red-letter days. In fact, she sometimes faces the reality of these fatherless moments with a humor that others may find irreverent. The daily reminder that he is not here, that the saddest thing that could ever have happened has already happened reminds her that whatever happens today or on any day could not be worse. No fender-bender or unfair grade or postponed commencement ceremony could be any worse. This is how my Sun Devil rolls, going about her days, working, drawing, laughing, loving, singing, studying, seeking out and finding joy and hope, pausing during our texting the other day to don a pair of oven gloves to help catch and gently usher out the frightened woodpecker that had flown into the kitchen.
Unlike so many of us, who are in this very moment and the next and for who knows how long, struggling to find their way within an extraordinarily altered world, and seeing in front of us only what’s missing, my Sun Devil is focused on the present and the opportunities it presents – “keeping going.”
Raised by a mother who invoked Seamus Heaney to deliver all the most important life lessons – because there really is nothing better than a Heaney poem to explain us to ourselves – Sophie would expect nothing less than advice from our poet on the occasion of her graduation from university. I am here to deliver it. The year before she was born, and coincidentally on Mother’s Day, Seamus Heaney gave to the graduating class of 1996 at Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, a commencement speech in which he shared what he described as the essential rhythm of not only survival but achievement: “getting started, keeping going, getting started again.” Our history – collectively and individually – depends on this rhythm, starting and starting over. Now more than ever perhaps we all need to be reminded of this. I know I do . This pandemic is a stepping stone, a place to pause and contemplate the distance covered and – this is important – to find another one. As Heaney told those graduates, it is the next move that is the test for all of us.
Here’s to your next move, Sophie. I am immeasurably proud to be your mother. Congratulations, graduate.
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. But there is a pride and joy also, a pride and joy that is surging through this crowd today, through the emotions of your parents and your mothers particularly on Mothers Day, your families and your assembled friends. And through you yourselves especially. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.
I’m watching The Sopranos. Again. This time I’m watching it with the man I love who loves it when I don’t tell him what’s going to happen next. Unthinkably, he’s never seen The Sopranos.
