My Mother

My mother, Kathleen Joan McMillan, died this weekend on the cusp of the winter solstice, December 23, 2007. She was 75 years old. The tide went out for her when the moon reached fullness in a fever pitch of brilliant silver light. Though we were separated by a continent on the night of her death in Boston, and I had only the barest of information about what was going on at the time, I felt the sense of my mother's spirit joyfully released from her body, freed from a lifetime of suffering, of incalculable physical and mental torment, so much of it self-chosen, yet none of it deserved.

This photograph shows my mother as I would like to forever remember her, as a young woman, her smile full of happiness in a life she must have believed would be an endless unfolding of good. I think this is who she truly was, before alcoholism erased whatever promises and dreams she had for herself, not one of which I ever knew. Perhaps she never even knew them for herself. Traumatized in a few short and terrible years by the suicide of my grandfather (on her birthday) and by the long, lingering death of my grandmother, my mother never returned from the "kingdom of night" and spent the rest of her life succumbing to what I describe in my book as "a series of wake-up calls that only seemed to put her more profoundly asleep."

As far as I know, my mother never fully admitted she had a drinking problem, even after losing family, friends and property, after rejecting efforts by her children to bring her into treatment, after spending more than twenty years with a truly insane man, a boyfriend who supplied her with alcohol, along with physical and mental abuse. My mother's life underscored the immense tragedy of the alcoholic who never really finds the path to recovery.

My mother's mother passed away in the peace of sainthood, in the midst of a vision of the Virgin Mary. I only hope that, at the last, my grandmother came to midwife her child into the world beyond this one, that my mother's last moments were as peaceful as her life was troubled. I do not believe we die alone, that we are surrounded by those who have made this journey before us.

In her final years, wanting to brighten my mother's bleak existence, I began to send her gifts, diving back into the ocean of the past to bring up an occasional pearl. When I learned to crochet, I made her a lap blanket. I bought her a few pieces of the Franciscanware dishes she loved, the Desert Rose pattern I remember her buying with my grandmother--always making sure that the cups and plates I sent were the antique ones, made in California. I sent her a bright red scarf, dusting powder in a scent she loved (White Shoulders), Dresden china figurines of a ballerina and a woman dressed like Marie Antoinette. I found Thanksgiving candles exactly like the ones which had graced our table during my childhood, a Pilgrim boy and girl. I hoped that these things brought her happiness.

I sent her Christmas cards, Easter cards, even Halloween cards, tried to write down my fondest memories in them, praying that her boyfriend, essentially her jailer, would let her have them. On Mother's Day this year, I shared the wealth of photographs I had received from our family in Boston, creating an album just for her, with pictures of her mother and of her grandchildren. I wanted to show her, simply, that she was cared for--that she had given me a legacy I cherish, that the fact of her destructive life circumstances did not mean she was undeserving of love. I found in my own recovery that it was possible to have some sort of relationship with her while preserving my own equilibrium. I told her I loved her, because at the end, only love matters.

The cautionary tale of my mother's life does not subtract from her abiding legacy to me, the fact that our beloved dead are not truly gone. Through the power of story, they live again, over and over, for as long as we have breath to tell. My mother knew that the stories of family are a binding-thread among all families, that to tell a story well is to illumine everything that makes us human and vulnerable. This is the jewel she carried to the very end, hidden at the center of a life burned to ash by unspeakable loss and tragedy.

Kathleen Joan McMillan
July 6, 1932
December 23, 2007