March 2007

As I write this, over a month has passed since it happened, but I still find it almost impossible to say: my son, my first born, my Peter is dead. He died on February 9, 2007. The word is so final, so absolute.

For the first time in my life I understand the euphemisms so popular for death . . . passed over, passed on, departed, even we lost him, as though this person, despite all our love, has been temporarily misplaced.

My dear daughter-in-law, Katy, was with him when he died. That consoles me, that she was with him. His oldest son, Connor, said good bye the evening before. The younger two boys stayed at home, struggling to remember their father whole. And I waited, hundreds of miles away, for the news. When it came, we had all been waiting for so long that at first I could locate no tears.

I have never been a mother who lived through her children. My life has been too complex—and, frankly, too interesting—for that. Nonetheless, I cannot help but feel now that only half of me remains in the world. I had a son and a daughter. Only the daughter remains. As she wings across the world on one business trip after another—she was in China when news of her brother came—I find myself overwhelmed by a sense of fragility . . . my own life, hers, the lives of my beloved grandchildren, the life of this planet.

Peter was not the perfect son, if there is such a thing. (Surely in some mothers’ eyes there is.) Nor was I the perfect mother for such a boy as he. To say that he was oppositional when he was young is to apply a neat word to a messy reality. At home he was loving, inquisitive, energetic, and he generally had one foot over the line. In school he was bright, bored, pretty much non-functioning, despite—or perhaps because of—his family’s strong bias toward education.

After the first day of first grade, he gave thanks in his bedtime prayers for his beginning reader. The second day he got into trouble for reading to the end of it. In the third grade he discovered that he had the amazing power to make perfectly nice lady teachers walk up walls and across the ceiling without ever being a bad boy. All he had to do was not do his work.

Instead, he sat with a book on his lap all day and read. (When he turned it back to the library he would give the librarian a report: “Throw this one out. It’s no good.” Or “This was great!”) I struggled beside him and behind him, year after year, trying to find the magic that would plug him in to the system. For Peter, no such magic existed. The only thing that helped, finally, was years . . . lots of them.

He grew into a good man, one who gave generously of himself to his community, one who involved himself deeply in every corner of his boys’ lives from changing their diapers to coaching their teams. With a wife he adored and those three boys between us, he and I found a peace with one another that we hadn’t had since he was very small. He even found his way back into the educational system he had fought so efficiently; he discovered a degree program he was excited about, and he plugged in.

And then the sickness began.

The neurologist who finally diagnosed Peter with Lewey Body Dementia said, upon examining the PET scan that showed how thoroughly his brain had been invaded, “He has been much sicker than anyone knew for much longer than anyone knew. Only pure willpower has kept him functioning for so long.”

By that time, Katy and I were watching him shuffle into the bathroom off his hospital room and stand staring at the wall, unable to locate the sink. Or he would stand in front of the refrigerator in the hospital common room—somehow he could always find his way to the common room where ice cream was kept—unable to open the door.

“There are babies in there,” he would say. Once, as I sat beside his bed, he burst into tears and said, “I want my mommy.” I had never felt so helpless.

While we watched and waited, a sweetness I had always known in him, rose through the dementia and the terrors of psychosis the illness brought on. In the nursing home, when he was still mobile, he would go to the nurses’ station and ask to help. They would give him a rag and he would, with great concentration, dust the hand rails up and down the halls.

My brilliant, obstinate little boy!

During these last weeks, the loving response from people all around me has “held me in the light,” as the Quakers so aptly say. Many have offered the consolation of their own conviction of eternal life. I have been warmed by the care in their words, but the conviction I don’t share.

I haven’t since I was a little girl. That was when I discovered my cat where, after being mangled by a neighbor’s dog, she had crawled under our porch to die. “Do cats go to heaven?” I asked my mother. She replied, “They say they don’t. They say heaven is only for humans.” And I thought right then and there, “They just make up heaven in their minds, and they keep cats out with their minds because they don’t want them there.” And I was done with it.

I spent years struggling to embrace and be embraced by a church, but I have never, since that moment, believed in life beyond death.

Except that I look into the bright, lively, sometimes oppositional eyes of those three boys, and I know Peter lives.
And, of course, he lives in me, too. Our love for one another and our long struggle with one another transformed us both. I will never know entirely what I gave Peter, beyond some of his genes and a love for reading and, I hope, some of his ability to love others.

For my part, knowing Peter made me more open, more tolerant, more able to love beyond my own preconceived notions of who another person should be.

I apologized to him once for all I was unable to give to a bright, oppositional boy. He was a man then, and he answered with a man’s grace.

Mom,” he said, “you tried. You always tried.”

For the rest of my life, I will hold that answer close.