Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
There's no question it took patience to be with her, really with her. This was true for
me as a son—I didn't always have that patience, I'm sorry to say—but I want to add a
word about my family and how proud I am of their endurance as well.
My brother and I complained together about Mom and Dad, siblings do that, but
I've always admired Robert's open affection for them both, and his ability to talk to my
mother at length and to encourage her participation in family conversation; he had the
unflagging instinct never to leave her out. My brother's wife, Lynne, has become someone
I adore, in part because of how easily, naturally, and lovingly she accepted my mother
beyond her limitations. My mother's sister, Claire, often confessed to me her anguish at
her little sister's troubles, but around my mother she was never anything other than up-
beat, honest, and intimately bonded in a way that only sisters—I'm guessing here—can
know; she buoyed my mother enormously with the joy of their complicity.
As for my father, he has spent far too much time regretting the times he lost patience
with Mom; she not only forgave him for it, she understood. She knew to her bones that
what he gave her—more than fifty years of companionship, partnership, caretaking, and
love—was the greatest gift of her life. Maybe she didn't tell him—she told me—that she
knew how lucky she was. She was grateful to him beyond expression, as am I.
In her last few days, my mother talked a great deal, though not much of it was aud-
ible or intelligible, and as I watched her try to get her final thoughts into the world I
took the effort as a message in itself, a metaphor; this was her life. And I'm delighted to
report the final words I did hear her say. They were ridiculous, tenacious, hopeful.
She said: “I feel pretty good.”
My aunt Claire used to say all the time, “Your mother is a pip.”
Her name was Eileen.
“Just remember: A stiff prick has no conscience.” That's what she said to me before I
went off to college.
For two nights before her funeral I stayed up until dawn writing and rewriting the
eulogy. I was forty-seven, and I'd never written anything with a greater sense of urgency.
That's one reason I decided, after all, to come to Billy's funeral. I guess I was never not
going to. In fact, before I left New York, I packed a suit, a white shirt, and black shoes
and socks, and gave them to Bobby Ball just in case, so he could bring them to L.A. for
me.
I flew here yesterday and since then I've been holed up in a shitty motel on the Pacific
Coast Highway—where, at the moment, cops are questioning one of my fellow guests in
the parking lot—working on what I want to say at the funeral tomorrow. I've been hav-
ing trouble, though in a phone conversation a friend of mine just pointed out that Billy
died on Mick Jagger's birthday, and that strikes me as a promising idea to begin with.
