My Parents
"She was no longer wrestling with the grief but could sit down with It as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts." –George Eliot
I write this as I sit in Newark Airport waiting to fly home to Chicago, tense with the expectation of delay and malfunction. I could have written during this hellish week of comforting my mother, sleeping in a strange bed, trying to understand why I had only packed a pair of jeans and a pair of yoga pants. But I didn't. I took endless walks through this town where I was born, watched television with my mother, Law and Order, mostly and answered the door to receive flowers and people. I cooked and shopped and told her to stand up straight ( she asked me to) and worried. But I didn't write. She kept calling my 88-year-old father 'my boy' they met when 18 and I kept thinking of him as my daddy. Because that is who he was to me. Daddy. –Molly Moynahan, written in 2014 just after my father died
Elyas Pasban
Recently several people I know have lost a parent and I find it very hard to say anything helpful. Daily, I miss them both. But I would be lying if I claimed I’d rather they were still alive in the world as it currently implodes, explodes, malfunctions, whatever the hell is happening. Also, life is easier without the constant worry about my mother who lived alone in her house after my father died until something in her brain went rogue and she accused me of kidnapping her and pulled a knife on her caregiver. After that it was a lock-up psychiatric place, memory care, a better memory care, and then she died. All the time she just wanted to go home to the house she had designed for her and my father’s retirement.
And yet, I miss them. I miss the talks I had with my father about books and teaching and the monologues of my mother on topics ranging from back fat to whether our current president is the evilest human on earth. I miss the love. For all their faults, for all their lack of tact and their insistence on their own opinions, the love was something I took for granted as I careened through three marriages, getting sober, many jobs, book deals, and other life events. My father said I was a good mother. Before he introduced me in 2004 before a reading at Princeton University, the town where I was born, we sat in the car and he said my book was excellent. She told me how proud she was of me, how happy I made her, and we both let go of the pain and the anger of my early alcoholism, celebrating my recovery. Through two failed marriages she remained convinced I was nothing but a prize. She adored my husband, Timo, a Chicago ironworker, loving how they could discuss topics I loathed connected with lumber and how things were built.
When my sister and I were fighting during the clearing out of their house, our lawyer, appointed by my mother as she knew we could not manage without an intermediary, took me aside and said my mother told him she was very proud of me. Standing in the driveway, trying to avoid another argument over the division of property, I cried because I knew I would never see either of them again, watch my mother’s face light up when I finally arrived from far away or my father’s quiet joy at my appearance. Like my sister, I will miss them for the rest of my life. But I know how lucky I am to have been loved so well by those two extraordinary, complicated humans.
–Molly Moynahan