from "Witnessing" • I think Mom really started to die when her oldest friend Dot died a couple of years ago.
“But you didn’t really like Dot all that much, toward the end,” I remind her.
“She’d turned into a real pain in the ass,” Mom agrees. Dot had never been a contented person – what made her fun was her vivid, creative and stylish complaining – but age had withered her wit and all that was left was the bitterness. “But she was the only one who remembered what I used to be like.”
Dot and her husband Al were almost as much a part of my childhood as my own parents. All four of them were avid card players – bridge, hearts, gin – and my lullaby for many nights was the sound of gin-and-tonic-soaked laughter, bickering, point-counting and bid-reviewing in the brightly lit living room down the hall from my dark bedroom.
When my family moved across the country in my early teens, we didn’t see Dot and Al for a while. Then Al died young, Mom and Dad divorced, and Dot began making her annual winter pilgrimage out of New Jersey slush to my mother’s sunny southern California home.
“Dot was the last person left alive who ever saw me shoot,” Mom says wistfully. That isn’t true, really – my sister and I spent most of the summer weekends of our childhoods watching Mom and Dad trapshooting, and we were even there a few of the many times that Mom won ribbons and trophies. But I was only seven or eight at the time, and my sister even younger, so we don’t count. And Dad has gone on to a new life and is a little creeped out by the idea of reminiscing with an ex-wife he divorced three decades ago, so he doesn’t count, either.
What Mom means, I think, was that Dot was the person who remembered her at a time when her marriage hadn’t yet turned sour, when her children were still young and unquestioning, when she could inhale a Jungle-Red-tipped Pall Mall with sensual gusto.
In the last twenty years of Mom’s life, she won awards for her work as a marriage and family therapist, saved countless relationships, was beloved by her clients and colleagues alike. She married Alan, a tall broad-shouldered bicyclist nearly a decade younger than she, who adored her and let her boss him around as much as she wanted. When her disease made it too difficult for her to see clients any more, she turned her attention to writing, teaching creative writing classes for senior citizens and publishing several short articles about issues in relationship counseling.
But none of that apparently feels like her essential self. Unless you saw her when she was raven-haired, red-lipped, squinting into the sun, shouting “Pull” and taking aim and firing as the clay pigeon exploded into yellow powder against the blue sky, you don’t really know her. And fat old Dot, bitching away in her smoker’s croak while Mom coughed and coughed and coughed, seemed like the only one left.
photo courtesy Rachel Kramer-Bussel