Searching for Tommy and Rosie
NOT LONG AFTER MY MOTHER DIED, one of my students gave me an Italian leather notebook with leaves embossed on the cover. It was thick and had a substantial feel to it. Cupping it in my hand, smelling the oaken leather, I wondered, as I opened and closed it for weeks, what I could put in it that would be worthy of it. Finally, I wrote the first sentence, a bold commitment: “I’ll use this book to talk to my mother, to have her help me figure out how to live the rest of my life.”
My father died many years before her, when I was a teenager. But when my mother died, I felt strongly what I have since heard others describe: that recognition—almost a physical awareness more than a thought—that I really am on my own in this world, alone, no one reaching that far back in my life who is also standing out in front.
My mother was sick for a long time. Congestive heart failure and a lot else. Her last year was awful; her doctor said she hung on through sheer determination. Rosie never backed away from anything. During the final week, she went in and out of consciousness, couldn’t talk because of the tubes. But when she was alert, I would talk, and she would nod and even smile when I held her gaze. Finally, the nurses tilted her bed backward to give one final bit of aid to her failed heart. But her systems shut down, and she died swelling with fluid. The nurses removed all the tubes and IVs and disconnected the monitors. They moved her into a resting position and smoothed out the sheets and let me stay with her for hours, the door closed, everything quiet except me talking to her.
The loss of his wife was so painful for my stepfather, Bill, that he couldn’t bear to have any reminders of her around him. She had piles and piles of photograph albums, for she rarely missed a chance to grab onto a memory. (During my cousin Bobby’s wedding she, honest to God, walked up on the altar close to the priest to get a better shot.) If I didn’t take the albums, Bill was going to throw them away. The same with three or four scuffed boxes filled with her memorabilia, some going back to her 20s: my baby clothes folded in with jewelry, old wallets, snapshots, and most valuably her diaries.
The second entry in my notebook comes a month after the first and is telling: “I thought I’d be able to sit with this book and write to Mom, or take it to the gravesite maybe, leaning my head against the crypt—an awful word.” As it turned out, it was a whole lot harder than I thought to write as though I were talking to my mother. The sentences I formed in my head felt artificial, forced, as though whatever I wrote had to be weighty. If nothing else, it was awkward trying to keep the notebook open, standing in front of her grave, attempting to write something … lofty. Talking with Rosie could be funny (my cousins loved being around her), exasperating, heartrending, and you’d be taken with her wily gumption. But lofty? She’d think you were a bullshitter.
For much of my adult life, I’ve been interested in my family’s past, maybe because we knew so little about my father, whose life before he met my mother is obscure. And maybe it’s because I grew up hearing stories about the grinding poverty of the life my mother’s family had lived during the Great Depression in the industrial city of Altoona, Pennsylvania, giving up bedrooms to take in boarders, working dangerous jobs in the railroad yards. I never
