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and art he'd saved from creditors went with
him to his girlfriend's high-rise apartment near the
stretch of Michigan Avenue that civic boosters call the
Magnificent Mile.
Christmases and Thanksgivings and Easters I was
invited to her apartment to sit at the table from our
house in Evanston and eat food she prepared in my
mother's hammered copper pots, served on my mother's
china, using my mother's silver—laid on a lace
tablecloth crocheted by my grandmother, who had moved North to live with us when I was born, and died in a
nursing home in Tennessee.
After I began poking around my mother's life, I
wasn't invited over anymore.
"Why are you doing this to me?" my father yelled at
me one sunny day in 1988, when I was a
twenty-nine-year-old reporter following leads,
conducting interviews—researching my mother's life.
"To you?" I said, wondering what he'd buried that he
didn't want exhumed. That was one of the last times we
spoke.
He stayed with his thirty-years-younger girlfriend
until he died at the age of eighty-six, in 1999, more
than a decade after I went looking for my mom. When we
lived in Evanston he was a church usher, dressed in
gray-striped usher's pants every Sunday, a fresh
carnation on his lapel, and that was one tradition he
held on to after family life went belly-up. My father
the lifelong Christian Scientist continued his weekly
religious duties at a church near his girlfriend's
apartment. Yet he battled his own cancer with the help
of doctors at one of Chicago's best hospitals. And he
died at home, in his girlfriend's bed, with her at his
side tending him with morphine from an eyedropper.
My mother spent her last months at a Christian
Science retreat in San Francisco called Arden Wood. A
hotel, basically, with the gospel of Mary Baker Eddy
piped into the rooms. Fifteen years after I was told my
mom was going to California "on vacation," I found out
about Arden Wood, and rented a room there. I walked its
eucalyptus-shaded grounds and the hilly streets in the
Bay-view neighborhood. I went to the dining room at dusk
and sat among aged, infirm guests. That night, in the
bathtub, I tried to imagine my mother passing her last
painful days without medicine, without family or
friends, without hope. My mother was a lifelong Baptist
of the deep-rooted Southern variety, born and reared and
married and buried by Baptists. She was a
church-on-Sunday, church-in-a-church-hat Baptist. Dying
in the loveless embrace of Christian Science.
There's an angle.
I'm forty-six now. I've lived with my husband for
twenty-three years. Like my mother I had a son first,
then a daughter. On my birthday I count my mother's
years along with my own. Four more birthdays and I'll be
as old as she ever was.
It's common to hear new moms and dads say things like
"Now that I'm a parent, I see what my folks had to deal
with!" Through ecstatic, sleep-deprived weeks with a
newborn, and on into the real work of raising
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