Lifesaving for Beginners: A Memoir

One

The phone rings in what must be the middle of the night. When I look at the clock, it’s actually only a few minutes before midnight. It’s not the usual screech of a fax machine mistakenly dialed to our phone line, or the slurred voice of an occasional wrong number. It’s my brother at the other end of the line. I’m strangely unconcerned when I hear his voice, even though I know that middle-of-the-night phone calls from family members can be a bad sign. Ted is calling to say that our mother is dead.

That’s impossible, I say. They’re on vacation in Australia. Or were they still in New Zealand? They’ve only been away for four weeks. They still have another week before they come home. My mother is only sixty-eight years old. She’s always been healthy as an ox, an unstoppable force.

But sure enough as I look out at the silhouettes of the other apartment buildings against the dark sky, a few lights still turned on in the building behind ours, I’m talking to Ted about my mother’s death. It’s impossible, but it’s true. Just like that, my mother’s life has ended, and Ted and I are having the fateful conversation I’ve been destined to have at some point in my life. But it’s nothing at all like what I imagined for my mother’s death. What Ted is saying is not right. And the timing is wrong.

She drowned, Ted is telling me. They were snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef, and she drowned. He keeps on talking and I see a picture of my mother in a state of panic, gasping for air. I can’t take it in.

I watch my husband Roy watching me, as I hold the receiver in my hand, sitting upright at the edge of our bed. Eva is now crying in her crib because we’ve decided again to try the experiment of letting her go back to sleep on her own. Eli, who has run into our room to escape the noise of the crying, has already fallen back to sleep in a mound between Roy and me.

I try to take charge by writing down the long Australian phone numbers Ted is reeling off. It’s already 5:00 p.m. the next day in Australia, he’s saying. Will the official date of her death be March 2, 1998, which is today’s date? Or will it be March 3rd, like it is in Australia? Ted reminds me that because it’s already late afternoon there, people are leaving their offices. He gives me the home number of the social worker, along with her office number in the hospital. There’s also the phone of the local police station, the boating company that took them out into the reef, and the hotel where my parents are staying. I double-check all of the phone numbers with Ted, and then because there’s really nothing else we can come up with to say, we hang up.

I tell Roy what I’ve just heard, the news Ted has just heard from my father, words that sound completely unreal. They were snorkeling. My father was out further. He kept on coming back to find my mother, who was snorkeling closer in, toward the boat, where the water was more shallow. By the time my father found her, she’d already been pulled to shore. Roy nods back at me, like he’s trying to give some validity to what I’m saying.

I try dialing some of the different phone numbers on the list, but can’t get through. Finally I connect with my father at the police station in Cairns, the town next to the Great Barrier Reef. He says he’s waiting to get the results of the autopsy report from the police. They’d been snorkeling under the auspices of a boating company, so an official autopsy is required, he tells me. Besides, the body can’t be released from the country without an autopsy. We specifically chose this boat company because it was safe, my father says. The boat left from a sandy beach. Your mother was wearing a life jacket. She wasn’t out deep. There were other people there, too, from our group.

My father tells me he’d snorkeled back and forth four times, looking for my mother, to bring her out to where he was, where the fish were more beautiful, but he couldn’t find her. The last time a man from the group swam over to him to ask whether he was looking for a woman with gray hair. By the time my father made it to my mother’s side on the beach, they couldn’t resuscitate her.

I tell my father that Ted and I will fly to Australia to meet him. No, I want to come back on my own. He’s firm on this. That would hold me up another thirty-six hours if you came. I want to get home. He’s already spoken to a travel agent, and it’s been arranged. He says he’ll settle things at the police station, go back to the hotel for his bags, and get on the very long flight back to Boston the next morning. And he won’t take the Valium they’ve given him. He wants my mother to be in his thoughts like she’s supposed to be. They had a magnificent trip, he tells me. They held hands the day before when they walked down the streets of Cairns. His voice sounds dreamy, like they were in love, like it was some kind of second honeymoon, which is almost as otherworldly as the fact that my mother has just died in the Great Barrier Reef.

I wonder about whether to call my uncle Nate to tell him right away, or if I should wait until morning. The news about my mother is strange, but my family is used to death. Unbelievably, Nate is now the only one of my mother’s siblings who is still alive. My aunt Cecile died only a year and a half ago from a quick-spreading cancer, my uncle Joe eight years before that when he committed suicide, and now my mother in this mysterious drowning. They’ve all died younger than they were supposed to, my mother the oldest in life and now in death at age sixty-eight. And then there’s the death that has always been the hardest, my brother Danny who was only twenty-two when he died. Shocked as I am about my mother, I see no need to act rashly. It’s 2:00 a.m. so I decide I might as well give Nate the rest of the night’s sleep before calling him to say what’s happened.

I just lie there flat on my back, solitary, Roy having drifted back to sleep. I stare up at the ceiling, trying as hard as I can to imagine it—the figure of my mother in the beautiful, blue sea under a big, bright sky.

At 5:30 a.m. when I hear Eva’s cry, I take her to the other side of the apartment where we can be quiet and alone. Together on the living room couch, her body falls back to sleep on top of me. The early sun begins to light up the room. I look out at the Hudson River, wide and gray and almost stagnant this morning. My mother is now dead, I tell myself.

Eva, very much alive, sleeps peacefully on my chest, her warm breathing delicious. For a few moments it makes sense, there’s an order to this picture. My mother, with her plush body that once gave birth to me, is on one end. Eva, a year-and-a-half-old perfect bundle of life, is at the other. And I’m in between. But then the logic is lost. My mother, whose life has forever been entangled with mine, has just drowned on the other side of the world.

Danny, the closest touch I’ve had to death until now, was six years younger than me. He committed suicide when he was only twenty-two in what still, fifteen years later, seems like an impossibly painful way, with a knife. There have been other suicides in the family, too. It was five years after Danny died when my uncle Joe sealed off the windows and doors in his apartment and turned on the gas in the oven. Way before that my grandfather took a lot of pills and died in the men’s baths on the Lower East Side, but that happened before I could remember, when I was only a newborn baby, and I didn’t even know about it until I was twenty-five. My uncle Joe used to say that our family had a history of violence. But even after living through Danny’s death, I didn’t really understand what he meant. Maybe I was just used to it, so I didn’t see the point of giving it a label.

It’s already clear that my mother’s death is completely different from Danny’s, and it’s not only because it’s my mother. For one thing, my mother never would have chosen to die. She hated suicide. When Danny died, she refused to talk about it, for fear that people would pity her, she said. Even outside the family, when the husband of one of her closest friends attempted suicide a few years ago, she was angry, not sympathetic in the least. With Danny’s death there had been the intense pain of it, not only what must have been his own unbearable pain but the pain we all had to live with afterwards. And there had been the ongoing spookiness behind his decision, the unyielding quest for answers that could never be known. My mother died in the ocean, with fish all around her. Maybe that’s what makes it seem so impossible, that it might have been peaceful and that it happened halfway around the world.

It’s a good sign that my mother died at the beach, I reason. I know how much she loved the beach. And if there was one place where my mother and I ever managed to unite, it was by the ocean. We’d had a lifetime of struggle between us—of me trying to get her to understand who I was, of her not listening, of me never wanting to be anything like her, but still wanting to know for sure that she loved me. But our long walks on the beach could be soothing—the texture of the sand, sometimes hot and dry, sometimes wet and grainy between our toes, the sound of the water lapping up next to us. It was the edge of the ocean that had the power to create a bond between my mother and me, to quiet our differences. I picture it to be beautiful where my mother died, and that gives me a little peace.

My mother retired from her longtime position of Hebrew school principal just before they took their trip to New Zealand and Australia. I want to leave before people want me to leave, my mother had said repeatedly. I never want people saying it’s time for her to retire. My mother’s reputation was crucial to her. I always wished she’d care more about me than about how she appeared to others. But if appearance was what she was after, she was a success. Right up until she died, she was well-known and admired all around Boston for her work in Jewish education. For seventeen years she’d been the principal of a prominent religious school, something she wore as a badge of honor. Ever since I was twelve, my mother taught Hebrew school and she talked about her work incessantly. My parents, my teachers, even my children was how she referred to the people at her Hebrew school. It would really get on my nerves. "Aren’t we her children?" my brothers and I would joke. But strangely, now that my mother has died a day ago, I’ve tipped into a newfound appreciation for her public accomplishments.

It surprises me, but unquestionably I want to say something at my mother’s funeral. I know there will be all kinds of rabbis and teachers and mentors speaking about her, and that they will have all kinds of praise for my mother. But it turns out I have plenty to say myself. I begin to plan a speech, and lots of images surface right away. I can distinctly see the sparkle in her eye. There’s a kind of strength to her solid constitution that always propelled her and allowed her to accomplish all that she did. It dawns on me that even though she could be unaware of people’s feelings, especially mine, as she plowed through life, I respect her. In leafing through the volumes of poetry collections on the shelf, I find the right poem by Louise Glück. It’s called Gemini, coincidentally the same astrological sign as my mother, and it has beautiful images that stir up the way my mother and I are connected. It will be my personal prayer, a way for people to understand that it was my mother who died on the other side of the ocean.

It was only six months ago, what I now know to be just in time before she died, that I began to feel a distinct shift in feeling towards my mother. It was right after I saw the Woody Allen movie, Deconstructing Harry. The Woody Allen character wasn’t anything like me, and his father wasn’t anything like my mother. But after seeing that movie, the wastefulness of a lifetime of antagonism between me and my mother, the only one I would ever have, became inescapable. It was then that I’m sure something changed between us, almost like the flick of a switch.

Not that it made what happened before entirely go away. I could still sometimes get that clenched feeling when I spoke to my mother on the phone, something that would probably never disappear completely. In all of those many years since I’d left home, when I’d talk to my mother every couple of weeks, mechanically reporting on whatever events I could come up with, I had to be careful not to reveal too much. I knew that she could be unpredictable, that sympathy could quickly turn into criticism. Almost from birth, it seemed that we’d never mesh. A therapist once told me there was actually a term for it: mismatch, and there wasn’t anything I could do to change that. I was used to keeping my guard with my mother. But every once in a while I’d still slip and regret it, like the time when I gleefully told her I was pregnant with Eli. Are you fat yet? was what she said in response. Not the happiness I was looking for, the excitement about my having a baby, the grandchild she had supposedly been aching for me to have more than anything. There was just that voice of anxiety, with a small insult to go with it. I vowed never to make the same mistake again. I’d never have the mother I hoped for. And I never did mention the ongoing nausea that persisted through most of my pregnancy, or for that matter my excitement when the unborn Eli began doing flips inside of me.

Way before I was pregnant with Eli, I never mentioned to my mother my strong desire to have children, something I’d felt as far back as when I’d played with my dolls. Even back then, I knew to be careful, to keep those feelings to myself about how I would someday be a mother, nothing like my own mother. First of all, I told myself, I’d always try to understand my children. I also instinctively understood that before bringing a new being into the world, I had to know more than just that I wasn’t anything like my mother. And as the years passed, I sometimes wondered if I’d ever figure out what that was. Remarkably, life ran its course and turned out as I wished, and I’m now the mother of two magnificent children.

Even though I’m certain that my mother and I turned a corner in those months before she died, we still had a long history dividing us. Growing up, it seemed she would take just about anyone else’s side except for mine, even people she barely knew. There was the time in kindergarten when the teacher yelled at me for talking to my best friend and made me cry. I was embarrassed and wanted the teacher to feel really bad, so I took a small piece of red thread from the hem of my dress and put it in the corner of my eye, to make her think her yelling had made my eye turn red. When the teacher called my mother suggesting that maybe there was some trouble at home and that she should consider taking me to a psychiatrist, my mother immediately sided with the teacher, agreeing that I might be seriously defective. It was my grandmother, who happened to be visiting from New York, who came to the rescue. That teacher’s the crazy one! my grandmother said, getting my mother to give up on the psychiatrist plan. Still, my mother didn’t stop leaving me stranded when authorities were involved. When I turned sixteen and was struggling to pass my driver’s test, even managing to do a three-point turn on our clunky manual shift car, my mother allied herself with the department of motor vehicles man. Do you really think it’s OK to give her the license? she asked him. It was with a heavy heart that he was willing to let me pass, he said, as my mother nodded in agreement.

And there were all of those times when my mother would scream at me for not being happy. The most outrageous was the Thanksgiving right after Danny died, when we were driving around Washington, my father looking for a parking space, me sitting painfully silent in the back seat. Why are you so unhappy? she yelled, her voice sharp and accusatory. Or possibly she even dared to use the word depressed over my wretched condition. Maybe you should get some help! she berated me. Or, she grew louder, some medication! The fact was that I couldn’t have been more miserable. Probably depressed was the most accurate description, but how could I not be? I’d just experienced the brutal loss of my brother only a month before, and here we were at our first family reunion afterwards. Didn’t it have to be unbearable for her, too?

When your own kids are born, you’ll understand her better, friends would say. But the fact was that when Eli came into the world, my distance from my mother seemed all the more definite, and sadder. The fundamental depth of love I felt for my own child just didn’t seem to be in my mother’s sphere. I no longer just felt sorry for myself, but I felt sorry for her, too, for all that she must have missed in being a mother.

But in those last months something had stirred in me, maybe in both of us. I came to see what I’d always taken to be my mother’s compulsion to undermine, as her own frazzled version of protection, disconnected as it may have been. We had definitely started talking to each other differently on the phone, I was sure of it. That nervousness about imparting some new piece of information had begun to disappear. When I saw her in person, just before they went on their trip to Australia, I was positive something had changed. She and my father came to babysit that weekend as an anniversary gift to Roy and me, so that we could stay in a hotel for a couple of nights on our own. I’d insisted to Roy that we rush back that morning after breakfast, thinking my mother would be tense and ready to leave. But when she greeted us, she was kind and happy. And the kids seemed happy, too. That was the last time we saw each other.

This clean white apartment, with its high ceilings and sweeping views of the Hudson, has been my home for five years now. That’s almost as long as I’ve lived anywhere, and it’s still remarkable to me. When it comes to real estate, Roy has incredible talent. He doesn’t have to think about what makes a life stable, he just knows what a good and comfortable home is and how to find it. My approach is much less expansive. If it were just me, I’d probably still be in some small apartment downtown with a view of nothing much. True, it would be perfectly arranged according to my own taste, pictures hung just right, and the pattern of each fabric carefully selected. I do know from having moved from place to place how to make a new location my own.