Marian, July 17, 1926 – April 27, 1997

My mother, Marian, would have been 94 today, but she only made it to 70.  A lifetime of two packs a day had the predictable result.

As I was writing the memoir of my father, The Ghost of Tenth Street, I frequently noticed that Marian, despite being the dominant presence in my life as I was growing up, figured little in the story.  Oh, she’s there all right, showing up in passing and even as the main character in a couple of chapters, but as I moved through the project I knew I was avoiding the difficult task of grappling with my relationship to her in the ways I did throughout the book with my father.  I would tell myself that maybe this was another book or a series of poems or something.  But I couldn’t help feeling not only that I was giving her short shrift but that the book ended up being less than honest in its account of my childhood.

Marian died 24 years ago, and I wasn’t with her when she did.  We had said our goodbyes a few weeks earlier in the apartment we’d shared for so many years.  She was on her last legs, I was weeping, angrily frustrated there was no time left to repair our relationship, which had always been rife with conflict and failures of courage on both our parts, failures to say what needed to be said.  Desperate to connect in the brief time we had, I blurted out, “This may be the last time we see each other.”  My mother, thin and depleted, looked up into my eyes and said, in her gnomic way, just two words: “I know.”

And that was all.  Was it enough?  Did we finally arrive at some kind of understanding in the final days of her life, an understanding conveyed not by words but by a sudden shared awareness of our deep love for one other?  I don’t know, I go back and forth.  But I can say that Marian is with me still, has been for all my life, in good ways and bad, yet also in the realest sense, where “good” and “bad” are meaningless, irrelevant, where pain and joy merge into some gestalt we can’t describe but know is there at the root of our being.  I am mindful of the priceless gifts as well as the countless woundings that slough off like snakeskin in the passage of time and reveal a new skin, a truer one.  

We give birth to lives that will follow their own unforeseeable trajectory, and the birthing occurs not in one agonizing moment but is constantly unfolding, in countless births, moments where we’re suddenly given to see things as they really are, as they really were, not as the mere projection of all our fears and a handful of consoling stories.  And if I’ve managed to have a few of these moments along the way, it’s in large part because I’m Marian’s son, because at her best – and she was often at her best – she modeled for me a kind of fearless, rebellious compulsion to find the heart of things, not simply their appearance.  

So today and always, Marian is alive, and I celebrate her on her birthday, not for the goodness or badness of her mothering, but because her birthday is my birthday.  No one really knows what “I” means, but I know this I that writes would never have been if she hadn’t been.

Happy birthday, Marian!  I love you and always will.

(And somewhere, maybe, she is saying, “I know.”)

My mother and me, Washington Square Park, 1956.