Our Mothers' Spirits: Great Writers on the Death of Mothers and the Grief of Men – An Anthology of Themed Poetry and Short Stories from Notable Contributors - Softcover

Blauner, Bob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060987316 ISBN 13: 9780060987312

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks, 1999

Synopsis

An anthology of poetry and short stories about men's mothers. Subtitled Great Writers on the Death of Mothers and the Grief of Men, contributors include John Updike, Russell Baker, Kirk Douglas, Art Buchwald, Martin Duberman, John Cheever and Henry Miller.

Writings are grouped into themed chapters with introductory comments by editor Bob Blauner.

About this title

About the Author

Bob Blauner is currently professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches sociology. He lives in Berkeley with his wife, Karina.

From the Back Cover

An anthology of poetry and short stories about men's mothers. Subtitled Great Writers on the Death of Mothers and the Grief of Men, contributors include John Updike, Russell Baker, Kirk Douglas, Art Buchwald, Martin Duberman, John Cheever and Henry Miller.

Writings are grouped into themed chapters with introductory comments by editor Bob Blauner.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Our Mothers' Spirits

Great Writers on the Death of Mothers and the Grief of MenBy Blauner, Bob

ReganBooks

Copyright © 2004 Bob Blauner
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060987316

Before Death:

The Aged Mother
When a mother is in her eighties and nineties, like the mothers of this chapter's three authors, death is a reality whose imminence cannot be denied.
In advanced old age, change can come rapidly, without much warning. At eighty, John Updike's mother was active and vigorous, but two years later, after a bad fall, the author senses a striking decline in her vital energy. Each time he's with her there's always that unspoken question: "Which visit will be my last?"
The mother of Russell Baker has already left this world, at least on the mental plane. But despite her senility, her son has learned how to be with her, to accompany her on her journeys to a distant past, and to enjoy her sometimes irascible company. Zaroohe Najarian, on the other hand, remains completely lucid at ninety, active and independent, the picture of happiness as she digs in her garden, a return, as her son Peter sees it, to her peasant roots. Knowing that their time together is limited, he spends as many weekends as possible with her, drawing strength from her simplicity and "groundedness."
W. D. Ehrhart's "Secrets," the poem that opens the chapter, suggests other realities in the life of an aged mother. Ehrhart is writing about his own mother, but her fate is a universal one: the aloneness of having outlived a husband, the silences of empty rooms in a house filled with memories. The poet-son regrets the still unknown spaces between them, her secrets, especially how she reckons the balance sheet of "hopes and disappointments" that "make a life."

Secrets
W. D. Ehrhart
Each room except the room you're in
is empty. No need to check.
How many times in forty-five years
did you wish for such a silence,
just a moment to collect yourself
amid the chaos of a life too full
with other people's needs?

And now you've got more silence
than you'll ever need, more time
than anyone should ever have
alone, each memory another moment
in a world where time holds
nothing but the past
and someone else's future.

What do you dream of?
What do you fear each time
you turn to hear Dad stirring
and you realize that what you hear
is just the silence of an empty house
an absence permanent as stone?

Surely such a silence turns
the heart back upon itself.
Do you find your husband there?
Four sons and four grandchildren?
Some little Brooklyn girl
in pigtails skipping rope
that once was you.

Mother, does it all come down
to empty rooms and half-imagined sounds
of someone familiar? So many hopes
and disappointments make a life.
What were yours? I'd like to know.


Which Visit
Will Be My Last?
John Updike
Men succeed, Freud tells us, because their mothers love them; men become homosexuals, some lesser psychologists have theorized, because they cannot bear to betray their mothers with another woman. Such a powerful personage must shoulder, like God, a lot of blame. Prince Hamlet greatly resents that his mother is anything but a mother, and feels entitled to scold her and commit murder in her boudoir. The largeness of our mother-myth has a paradoxically dwindling effect upon the women concerned: they must be in all things motherly and become therefore natural processes rather than people. Few things are harder, in this era so preoccupied with the monitoring of human relations, than to get to know one's mother as a person--to forgive her, in effect, for being one's mother.
My own is now eighty. She has just renewed her driver's license and has upwards of twenty cats to feed--to feed and to kill, for, motherly enough, her responsibilities toward her adopted dependents are conflicted. She began feeding a stray cat to spare the birds around the place; more and more cats appeared at her back door; and now the perplexities of mercy ask that she keep their feline herd thinner. It is a bind, and not the first she has been in. She was, for the twenty-one years in which she and I shared the same address, not only a mother but a daughter. We lived, my mother and father, her parents and me, in a household with a strong undertow of Depression, a historical event that had happened to hit both my father and grandfather hard. One lost his job, the other his money. She helped out by working in a department store three miles away, in the fabrics department, for fourteen dollars a week. Later, in the war, she worked in parachute factories. But most of the time she was home writing, sitting in the front bedroom, with its view of horse-chestnut trees and telephone wires, tapping out pages to send to New York magazines in brown envelopes. The brown envelopes always came back. Ours was a big white brick house but much cramped by worry and need. At its center, squeezed from all sides, my mother held forth and held out, and pulled us through. Or maybe we pulled her through. In any case, she and I are now the only survivors of that five-sided family; and these last twelve years, in which she has been a widow, have been pleasant ones for me, of getting to know her, of tuning her in without the static of kindred broadcasting stations.
Her intelligence and humor, as she fends off the perils of old age, are startling. Though with a son's luck I have reaped most of the benefits, it was my mother who made the great leap of imagination up, out of the rural Pennsylvania countryside--German in accent and practical in emphasis--into the ethereal realm of art. I glimpse now how bright that little girl must have been to skip all those grades in her one-room schoolhouse and head off to normal school so painfully young. At college, she was four years younger than her classmates, of whom my father was one. This simple brightness comes in handy, as in solitude she calculates her taxes, administers her acres, operates her machinery, retypes her manuscripts, and entertains her grandchildren as they breeze in, not always unaccompanied, from their strange new world. She and I used to write letters; now, grown spendthrift and lazy, we talk on the telephone, and I hear how festive and limpid her wit is, and with what graceful, modest irony she illuminates every corner of her brave life. All this for decades was muffled for me behind the giant mask of motherhood.
Continues...

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Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060987316
• ISBN 13: 9780060987312
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352