Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
revulsion in it at the slouching, sullen, alienated know-it-all with long unkempt hair and
ratty sneakers that she was sending of to school as a representative of her family. She
was already in a wheelchair by then, and she rolled it up close to me, her mouth contor-
ted into a grimace. Without referring at all to the shirt—the foreshadowing had already
been accomplished—she said, hurtfully but again accurately: “Get out of here, you look
like you just rolled out of a garbage can yourself.”
Now the reason I tell that story, the reason I love that story, the reason I've re-
membered it for more than thirty years is that it was, of course, anomalous. This was a
mean little scene, and my mother, as all of you know, was deeply, thoroughly, profoundly
not mean. “Sweet” is a word I've heard often applied to her. “Kind” is another. So is
“lovely.” My friend Rick said to me the other day that he thought my mother was the
most sentimental person he's ever known.
These are the qualities her disease couldn't hide, and everyone in my family is grateful
that the multiple sclerosis that robbed her of so much never touched the part of her that
treated other people with respect and affection and a joy in their company. She loved
everyone here. I say that even though you all know it because she made it perfectly evid-
ent.
But as a way of honoring her, and her courage, I want to speak about what wasn't so
evident. Because of her illness, it was easy to miss a great deal of what my mother was,
and I don't mean to suggest that she wasn't sweet or kind or sentimental, just that those
things ended up so defining her that it feels to me almost diminishing to remember her
only that way.
That's why I relish that moment of anger from thirty years ago; she had it in her to
be convincingly brutal. That she wasn't that way often was a great strength, but that
she showed me it was there was one of the many reminders I had that she was deeper,
more complicated, and more present than she was always able to show.
