Sharon Harrigan

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Enough Said? Maybe not.

enough said

People always talk to me on the plane, except last night. I sat in the middle and ate the roast beef sandwich I’d stuffed into my messenger bag. Then I leaned back, closed my eyes, and imagined no one could see me. Finally, soundless and still, I let the tears fall.

I don’t usually cry in public. It’s one of our last taboos. You can appear to strangers in your underwear, but letting them see you cry feels dangerously intimate. So the two women on either side of me didn’t ask where I was going or where I’d been, as my seatmates usually do. The twenty-something on my left kept typing up revised guidelines for new hires, and the sixty-something on my right paged through her paperback.

I cry every time I drop my son off at college. Normally I hold everything together until no one can see me. This time I was too rushed to dash into the public restroom and lock myself in a stall, where I could let my face redden, then powder the blotches away.

On this trip, I was helping my son move into a new college as a transfer student, far from home. I was leaving him the car, and I hoped he would drive safely. I hoped he would make good friends this time and be happy. I hoped he would be better at keeping in touch with me than I had been with my own mother. I didn’t want to burden him with my hopes and worries. But maybe I was wrong.

A few months ago, my son and I watched a DVD of the clever, quirky romantic comedy “Enough Said.” Julie Louis Dreyfeus plays a single mom whose daughter is about to move away to college. Through the whole movie, the mom complains about how her life will end once her baby abandons her. It will be the worst day of her life. She might have to lock her daughter’s room and never let her go.

At the end of the movie, my son paced and grimaced. “You didn’t like it?” I asked.

“I did,” he said. “It’s just. . .”

“Just what?”

 “It’s just . . . how come you weren’t upset when I left for college?”

 “I was.”

 “You didn’t cry.”

 “I did,” I said. “In the bathroom. In the car once I dropped you off. But I wanted you to think I was strong. I didn’t want you to see me fall apart.”

 “Why?”

Good question. Maybe next time I won’t wait till I get on the plane. I’ll tell him how I feel as he weaves through 70-miles-an-hour traffic on the way to the airport. I’ll think of this passage from John Updike’s story, “My Father’s Tears,” and try to be more eloquent:

 “Come to think of it, I saw my father cry only once. It was at the Alton train station, back when the trains still ran. I was on my way to Philadelphia to catch the train that would return me to Boston and college. I was eager to go, for already my home and my parents had become somewhat unreal to me, and college, with its courses and the hopes for my future they inspired and the girlfriend I had acquired in my sophomore year, had become more real every semester; it shocked me—threw me off track, as it were—to see that my father’s eyes, as he shook my hand goodbye, glittered with tears.

“I blamed it on our shaking hands: for eighteen years, we had never had occasion for this ritual, this manly contact, and we had groped our way into it only in the past few years. He was taller than I, though I was not short, and I realized, his hand warm in mine while he tried to smile, that he had a different perspective than I. I was going somewhere, and he was seeing me go. I was growing in my own sense of myself, and to him I was getting smaller. He had loved me, it came to me as never before. It was something that had not needed to be said before, and now his tears were saying it.”

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Season of Grief

deaf leaves

My blog has been quiet lately. It’s been hard to know what to say at a time like this. I’ve found, when trying to comfort my family, that sometimes silence works best. Just listening.

At first I tried to tell my husband, who lost his father last week: The situation could be worse. A long, happy life and a peaceful end are all any of us can hope for. But those platitudes weren’t helpful. Grief is not like the chicken pox. It’s not something we can inoculate ourselves against. We have to allow the pain of loss to run its course, the pox on our hearts; the mental and metaphysical sores that blister and ooze.

Grief makes us different from our normal selves. My husband wanted me to sit in his office with him the day he heard his father’s end was near. He teared up a little in front of his classes when he told them. And, of course, they understood, some of them writing him sympathy notes afterwards. Even self-centered undergraduates can understand the death of a parent.

My normally happy-go-lucky daughter has been weighed down, too. I don’t tell her not to cry. I don’t say: At least Grandpapa lived a long life. I don’t tell her not to feel sad. She has to. We all do.

I will miss my father-in-law. I am grateful that he welcomed me into the family with warmth and enthusiasm. But my husband and daughter’s grief is more primal, the kind that turns your life into Before and After. You never forget your first experience with death. I’ve never forgotten mine. Losing my father when I was seven was the most significant thing that happened to me. My daughter will always remember when she learned—on a personal and visceral level—that we indeed do not live forever.

In the past month or so, I’ve also lost two aunts on my mother’s side, one as young as fifty-six. My mother is visiting now, and I hope I can comfort her. She brought me photographs and shared my aunt’s “sumo wrestler” hug. I want to pass on that hug to my husband and daughter. To my mother-in-law. To my mother.

What do we say to help absorb the grief of others? When my daughter cries in the middle of a store or a story or a playdate, I hand her a tissue. I try to respond to her questions, but some of them don’t have easy answers.

Why did Grandpapa have to die? Why? Why? She pulled a dictionary off the shelf and read aloud the definition for death. She flipped further and read the definition of love. Don’t we all wish we could find the answers to life’s mysteries in the dictionary?

I like to interpret her gesture as this: Love is what comes after death. It’s what doesn’t die.

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The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

This could be a test. Multiple choice: A, B, or C.

You get a text message. You barely know how to use the feature, owning not only a dumb phone, but a keyboardless one. The message has only this text: “Response?”

The picture to be responded to is a tattoo, which is actually text, too: “Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo.” Whose tattoo is it? The message is from your son, but the arm couldn’t be his; he just turned eighteen, doesn’t speak Italian, and is squeamish around needles.

You don’t speak Italian, either, so you plug the words into Google and read: “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” A Sergio Leone film you’ve watched with your son, one of his favorites. Now you know the arm is his, but you text him back anyway, because you have to say something: “You got a tattoo?”

The words appear almost immediately, his thumbs so much faster than yours:

“Possibly.”

Your stomach starts to ache. You want to ask: Does it hurt? You can almost feel the pricks on your own skin. You want to ask why. You want to say: Are you OK? You try to think of all the things he could have done that are more dangerous, more permanent, more painful. You tell yourself you’re glad he wanted to show you.

Finally, you write back: “If you like it, I like it, too.”

“I know you must be freaking out, but I appreciate that you’re trying to act cool,” he texts. How does he know you so well? Maybe he can almost feel your stomach clench the way you can almost feel his skin prick.

“I freaked out for five minutes but now I’m cool,” you text.

“U da best,” he responds. “Love you.”

“Love you back,” you write. And you do. Of that you’re sure.

You remember being eighteen, when you vowed to always remember what it was like to be eighteen. But have you?

Possibly.

You wish you could take a phone picture of this rite of passage, this getting-under-your-skin rebellion that ended with a love note. You wish you could text it to all your friends who have parented eighteen-year-olds or been eighteen themselves, so they could tell you if you guessed the right answer to this test. You would send a picture of this milestone, or write a blog post about it, with this text at the end: “Response?”

 

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Paris Journal: Super-Chouette


It’s happening already. We’re still in the one-month countdown before our year in Paris, but the humbling has begun. I don’t expect sympathy, since every time I tell people I’m moving to Paris for a year I cede the right to complain. Everything is “super-chouette.”

My daughter started using that phrase after returning from her two-week French immersion camp. From what I can tell, it means “awesome.” She used to admire my French-speaking abilities so much, she’d say, “I wish I were you.” Now she says, “My counselors were more fluent” and corrects my accent. She was born dressing like a French girl: in skirts, not shorts; with leather shoes, not sports sandals. Her instinct for chic is as mysterious to me as how to use the subjunctive.

Last week I met Lisa, a woman who recently spent two years in Paris. She is fortyish and pretty, svelte and blonde, and a snappy dresser. “You look cute,” I said, admiring her skinny boots and skirt with a bird on it (this was Portland, after all). “You do, too,” she said, “but neither of us look cute enough for Paris.” It wasn’t an insult, just an in-joke.

My husband and I have started receiving invitations for events at our daughter’s new school. The first fundraiser will be a champagne-tasting party at the Czech Embassy. “What fun!” my husband said to me. “What in the world can I possibly wear to that? I said to myself.” I’ll have to ask my daughter, whose French will soon be better than mine—and whose fashion sense already is.

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Mother’s Day and Other Things I’ve Been Utterly Certain Yet Completely Wrong About

Last Sunday, we reprised a tradition we’ve been keeping every year since we moved to Charlottesville: breakfast at La Taza on Mother’s Day. This year, only two other people were at the restaurant. I wasn’t offered a complimentary mimosa, unlike all the other years. The server didn’t even wish me a happy Mother’s Day.

We brought the New York Times and the local paper’s Sunday funnies. Not one mention of Mother’s Day. What was the world coming to?

You get where I’m going with this. Something was wrong. But it didn’t occur to me that that something was me.

Not until after lunch, when I telephoned my mother. “Happy Mother’s Day!” I said, with enough enthusiasm to make up for everyone else’s seeming indifference. Then came a long, uncomfortable pause, not my mother’s usual effusive response. What was going on?

Finally, she said, “It’s next week, Sharon.” Another pause. “But thanks for the flowers.”

After that, the signs were everywhere. Literally. At the mall, every surface was covered with these words: “Mother’s Day is May 13th.” How had I missed them?

I’m not telling this story because I revel in exposing my every embarrassing gaffe (although I do). I’m telling this story because I was so certain yet so wrong that Mother’s Day was May 6. What else am I sure but deluded about? Sometimes we hold beliefs so stubbornly we ignore every hint that contradicts what we already think. Let’s not even start with politics and religion. Those are divisive topics, inappropriate on the holiday that unites our whole country. Mother’s Day.

Which is today. Right?