sun.
CHAPTER THREE
{the particulars}
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal. My grief, I know, has been shaped by the particular person my mother was to me, and by the fact that she died at fifty-five. Then, too, I was bound up with her in ways that stretched beyond our relationship: I live a mile from where I grew up, in a neighborhood in Brooklyn where, when I walk down the street, I always see a store or a house that reminds me of her.
Iâm not sure that I buy this, but psychologists theorize that grief is sometimes connected to your general level of anxiety and the kind of attachmentsâsecure, insecure, avoidant, ambivalentâyou have to others. My anxiety level has always been high. As a toddler, I hated the feeling that my socks were wrinkling under my feet, and in the morning would ask my parents to take my shoes off and put them on over and over until I felt my socks were not, as I put it, âscrabbled.â The world frightened me: when there was lightning outside my window, I took it personally. It seemed that everything was here only to be lost. The world was beautiful and it would be taken from me; I would die, and so would everything I loved. People seemed loud, drunk, violent, unpredictable. (Of course, it was the 1970s, and in many ways they were.)
I adored my mother, but I also thought, as a teenager, that I was closer in temperament to my fatherâan Egyptologist, who, in addition to teaching, worked part-time at the Brooklyn Museum and who, I sometimes like to joke when Iâm mad, can speak every dead language and none of the living. When we were children, he was a conjurer and storyteller, the one who could tell you what card you were going to pull from the deck, the one who recounted extravagant five-minute jokes, his wild red hair standing out around his head. But beneath the bonhomie, he was anxious, too, beholden to routineâperhaps why he studies ancient cultures and painstakingly translates old texts. Whenever my brothers and I wanted to take a trip somewhere new, we would plead with my mother; she would turn to my father and he would say, âWhatâs wrong with Vermont?â My mother was more even-keeled and, as my father later put it, always present.
And yet she could be demanding of us, and sometimes I thought she was hardest on me, since I was the oldest child and the only girl. She and I occasionally clashed subtly. One way to put it would be to say I was nervous and my mother wasnât, and sometimes my neuroses were difficult for her. I was a picky eater, yet she would insist that I eat what was on my plate. I would slip into my bedroom and sulk, hungry but unable to comply. Eventually, she would cave and come in with a sandwich. The standoff usually lasted an hour or more, during which period I hated her. (Or, as a motherless little girl writes to her grandmother in Tove Janssonâs novel The Summer Book : âI hate you. With warm personal wishes, Sophia.â) There was nothing special about those fights except that I was so thin-skinned that they translated for me into the potent suspicion that my mother and I were profoundly different from each other.
I was a secretive child. I remember once looking up from an elaborate imaginative game in my notebook at my brother, who was playing with horses and trucks out loud as my mother and father walked through the room. This horrified me; when I played alone, I played in my head. And yet for years my mother was able to see into my head; she was the person who lightened its occasional darkness. (It makes a strange sense that whenever I got uptight or impatient, she would say, âLighten up, Meg.â) When I was in first grade, my class put on a play about the myth of Finn MâCoul, the Irish hero who battles the warrior Cuchulain. I was excited until I got cast in the role of Cuchulain. For reasons now obscure to me, I was embarrassed by the idea
CHAPTER THREE
{the particulars}
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal. My grief, I know, has been shaped by the particular person my mother was to me, and by the fact that she died at fifty-five. Then, too, I was bound up with her in ways that stretched beyond our relationship: I live a mile from where I grew up, in a neighborhood in Brooklyn where, when I walk down the street, I always see a store or a house that reminds me of her.
Iâm not sure that I buy this, but psychologists theorize that grief is sometimes connected to your general level of anxiety and the kind of attachmentsâsecure, insecure, avoidant, ambivalentâyou have to others. My anxiety level has always been high. As a toddler, I hated the feeling that my socks were wrinkling under my feet, and in the morning would ask my parents to take my shoes off and put them on over and over until I felt my socks were not, as I put it, âscrabbled.â The world frightened me: when there was lightning outside my window, I took it personally. It seemed that everything was here only to be lost. The world was beautiful and it would be taken from me; I would die, and so would everything I loved. People seemed loud, drunk, violent, unpredictable. (Of course, it was the 1970s, and in many ways they were.)
I adored my mother, but I also thought, as a teenager, that I was closer in temperament to my fatherâan Egyptologist, who, in addition to teaching, worked part-time at the Brooklyn Museum and who, I sometimes like to joke when Iâm mad, can speak every dead language and none of the living. When we were children, he was a conjurer and storyteller, the one who could tell you what card you were going to pull from the deck, the one who recounted extravagant five-minute jokes, his wild red hair standing out around his head. But beneath the bonhomie, he was anxious, too, beholden to routineâperhaps why he studies ancient cultures and painstakingly translates old texts. Whenever my brothers and I wanted to take a trip somewhere new, we would plead with my mother; she would turn to my father and he would say, âWhatâs wrong with Vermont?â My mother was more even-keeled and, as my father later put it, always present.
And yet she could be demanding of us, and sometimes I thought she was hardest on me, since I was the oldest child and the only girl. She and I occasionally clashed subtly. One way to put it would be to say I was nervous and my mother wasnât, and sometimes my neuroses were difficult for her. I was a picky eater, yet she would insist that I eat what was on my plate. I would slip into my bedroom and sulk, hungry but unable to comply. Eventually, she would cave and come in with a sandwich. The standoff usually lasted an hour or more, during which period I hated her. (Or, as a motherless little girl writes to her grandmother in Tove Janssonâs novel The Summer Book : âI hate you. With warm personal wishes, Sophia.â) There was nothing special about those fights except that I was so thin-skinned that they translated for me into the potent suspicion that my mother and I were profoundly different from each other.
I was a secretive child. I remember once looking up from an elaborate imaginative game in my notebook at my brother, who was playing with horses and trucks out loud as my mother and father walked through the room. This horrified me; when I played alone, I played in my head. And yet for years my mother was able to see into my head; she was the person who lightened its occasional darkness. (It makes a strange sense that whenever I got uptight or impatient, she would say, âLighten up, Meg.â) When I was in first grade, my class put on a play about the myth of Finn MâCoul, the Irish hero who battles the warrior Cuchulain. I was excited until I got cast in the role of Cuchulain. For reasons now obscure to me, I was embarrassed by the idea
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