That Thanksgiving morning Mom was also upset that she had neglected to write a condolence note to a church friend whose father had died.
“Mom, I’m sure she understands. She knows you’re not well.”
“Well, I wrote one just now. Not feeling well is no excuse for forgetting that there are other people in the world.”
Mom got worse during Thanksgiving Day—but she insisted that my father go with me and David to our friends Andy and Tom for their celebration. She would stay home and have some soup. That was another set of tea leaves one had to read—when did her go mean “go,” and when did it mean “stay”? On Thanksgiving, her go meant “go.”
At the end of a lovely evening at our friends’ apartment—in which everyone ate and drank too much, maybe a bit more too much than usual—David and I poured my father into a cab back to his and Mom’s apartment, and then we walked the few blocks home. The whole meal had lasted under two hours, and Dad went back to Mom with a full set of leftovers. Still, everyone was trying to deny that it felt like a rehearsal for the first Thanksgiving when Mom wouldn’t be alive anymore. When we got home, David went to sleep, and I sat in the living room for a while with the lights off.
I hadn’t really allowed myself time for sadness. I’d been keeping busy with my job and also the bills and the dry cleaning and the emails, all the mundane tasks that fill my life. So I tried to just be still and sad—but I couldn’t. I could be still. And I knew I was sad. But waiting for the dawn to come up, I found myself unable to focus on my sadness for more than a minute or two at a time, as much as I thought I’d wanted to. I’d cried far more over David Halberstam’s death than I had over my mother’s terminal illness. I’d cried more over the Hugh Grant romantic comedy Love Actually. I’d cried more over the death of a beloved character in an Alistair MacLean thriller.
To pass the time until morning, until I heard the familiar thump of The New York Times being chucked against our apartment door by our local news carrier, until David would rouse and we would put on coffee, I turned on a solitary light and went searching for my copy of The Hobbit. I wanted to see if it still entranced me—if I could get lost in it again.
Soon I found my copy—and started reading at random. It had been nearly forty years since I’d more than glanced at it, but it all sprang magically back to life: hobbit houses, silver spoons, runes, orcs, dwarves, spiders. After twenty minutes or so, I stumbled across the part of the book, about halfway through, where our hobbit hero Bilbo and his dwarf companions suddenly find themselves, scattered and separated from one another, in a dark wood.
Bilbo races around in circles, frantically calling his friends’ names. He can feel and hear them doing the same. “But the cries of the others got steadily further and fainter, and though after a while it seemed to him they changed to yells and cries for help in the far distance, all noise at last died right away, and he was left alone in complete silence and darkness.”
Tolkien continues, “That was one of his most miserable moments. But he soon made up his mind that it was no good trying to do anything till day came with some little light.”
THE NEXT DAY Mom said she was feeling a little better.
As we sat in the waiting room before her chemo, in our usual chairs, I told her about the dinner and how we all missed her and that I was thinking about her. I didn’t mention that I sat for a while in the dark—that seemed a slightly Goth detail. But I did tell her I found myself rereading The Hobbit and that it still had the same power over me.
“Why do you think that is?” Mom asked.
“I think it’s because it shows that people—or hobbits, as the case may be—can find strength they didn’t know they had. In that way, it’s not so different from the Alistair MacLeans, I guess.”
“I spent some time thinking, too,” Mom said. “And I was so grateful that your father was able to get out of the house. It can’t be fun for him spending so much time sitting around with me when I’m not feeling great. I did manage to read some pages from a book that’s also about how people can find strength they didn’t know they had.”
“What book was that?”
“The Book of Common Prayer,” Mom answered.
“Didion?”
“No, Will.” Mom’s voice was somewhere between amused and exasperated. “The other one.” And then she added, smiling: “Besides, I think the Didion is A Book of Common Prayer, not ‘The Book.’ ”
Daily Strength for Daily Needs
Mom’s appointments were usually first thing in the morning—she liked to get them over and done with so she could get on with her day. Even when she was feeling “really not great,” Mom always took care with her appearance. I, on the other hand, usually rolled out of bed and into a cab to be there on time and frequently arrived unshaven, wearing yesterday’s jeans and whatever frayed sweater was closest at hand. Mom never seemed to notice, but if my father was there, he might make a comment like “Late night last night, son?” Dad is a very natty dresser, known for his bowties.
How can I describe what Mom looked like? She was perhaps five feet four inches tall. She’d had gray hair for decades and never colored it. She loved the sun but had pale skin, beautifully clear when she was younger, freckled and splotchy as she grew older. Some people described her as birdlike—her dark eyes were firmly set back and locked onto yours while you were talking. She wasn’t one to fidget when people were speaking to her; she held very still, with her feet curled up under her if she was at home and on the sofa; or leaned toward you if you were at a meal or a meeting, sometimes touching the pearls she loved to wear. People always commented on Mom’s eyes, their energy and spark, and on her smile. Mom almost always smiled—but when she was happier than usual she beamed. Her cheeks, just under her eyes, would crinkle, and her smile would encompass her whole being.
Before she got sick, Mom had sometimes felt she could lose ten pounds or so, but didn’t obsess about it. She wasn’t a big eater—salads and yogurt were her favorite foods. I never saw her overeat—she was that rare person who could restrict herself to one almond even if a bowl overflowing with them was right in front of her and she hadn’t eaten for hours; she could have one cookie off a plate (or half, for that matter), one small scoop of ice cream, one glass of wine. She was, I think, somewhat proud of her self-control, a form of mild asceticism; she also wasn’t terribly interested in food. When we were growing up, she cooked the things that everyone cooked: pot roasts and pork chops, a tuna noodle casserole recipe (omnipresent in the 1960s) that featured potato chips crushed and scattered over the top, and lemon meringue pie. That was my favorite, and I could down huge slabs of it. But whatever treat we were eating had to be cheerfully shared with one another, or Mom would redistribute it, with the smallest portion by far going to the kid who’d tried to hog it.
Mom also had a slightly socialist streak when it came to our possessions—again, mandatory sharing. My father was given to more Stalinist purges, in which any toy not properly stored was immediately put out with the trash. If the lesson Mom was trying to teach us was that people were to be valued over things, Dad was solely concerned with tidiness.
When I was around six, I was obsessed with my stuffed animals, of which I had a large collection, and I could spend hours happily playing with them. There was a downside to this overabundance, however. As a precursor to my adult manias, I would grow panicked that I hadn’t shared my love for them equally and could lie awake at night worrying that I’d spent more quality time with Koala that day than I had with my oldest teddy bear, or with Basil Brush. Tomorrow, I swore, I would do better and be a fairer, kinder, more responsible friend to my stuffed companions. But one stuffed animal I rarely neglected was my turtle—mostly because I stumbled over him on the way to and from bed. He was the biggest stuffed animal I had—the size of a real Galápagos centenarian, albeit somewhat flatter.
And then someone, a relative perhaps, arranged for me to spend a week away. I was excited, packed my bag more or less by my
self, and had the difficult choice of deciding which stuffed animals would come with me. This was a chance to redress some of the imbalance, and I took along several smaller ones who had been largely ignored of late.
I recall coming home afterward to find my big stuffed turtle gone. I’m sure I looked everywhere before I went in a panic to Mom.
“Where’s Turtle? I can’t find Turtle.”
“Oh, sweetie. I’m so sorry. Turtle died when you were away,” she replied.
I don’t remember how long I grieved for Turtle, or how aware I was of mortality, that stuffed animals couldn’t actually die in the same way that people could and do. Now, nearly forty years later, it occurs to me that if Turtle had been a real turtle, he might still be alive.
Maybe it was this thought that caused me, one day in early December 2007, during a pause in our conversation as we were sitting, waiting for Mom to be called for chemo, to ask Mom if she remembered the death of Turtle. She did.
“Mom, I’ve always been curious: Why would you tell a six-year-old that his stuffed animal had died? And whatever did happen to Turtle?”
“One of my students was collecting toys and stuffed animals for an orphanage, and I gave her your turtle. You had so many stuffed animals! I didn’t really think about it. But I also didn’t give any thought to what we were going to tell you. When the time came, I just said the first thing that popped into my head.”
“And were you trying to teach me not to get too attached to things?”
“I wish I’d given it that much thought! I really was just thinking of the orphans.”
I can’t help but feel sad when I think about Turtle, even if I remind myself to think about the orphans instead.
“I think I was pretty mad at you,” I told Mom as we sat there.
“I was pretty mad at myself,” Mom said. “Are you still?”
“Maybe a little bit,” I said. Then we both laughed. But I was … just a bit.
AT FOURTEEN, I left most of my stuffed animals behind and cheerfully went off to boarding school at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire; my brother, the year before, had gone off to Milton Academy, in Massachusetts. My parents and sister embarked on their own adventure, moving from Cambridge back to New York. My father bought into a small concert management agency, falling in love with the burgeoning early music movement. Mom wasn’t sure what she was going to do back in Manhattan, and it was difficult to give up a job she adored, not to mention tenure. But Dad was tired of Harvard and Cambridge, and they were both, by birth and at heart, New Yorkers and had always intended to return. In addition, Mom wanted Nina to go to The Brearley School, in New York, where she had gone. Once back, Mom soon got a job as a college counselor at a school called Dalton and later as head of the high school at Nightingale-Bamford.
“Were you sad to leave Cambridge?” I asked her.
She was, she said. Very sad. But she was also looking forward to being back in New York. “The world is complicated,” she added. “You don’t have to have one emotion at a time.”
MOM HAD RECENTLY reconnected with an old Harvard friend. He would ultimately give her two gifts that would change what was left of her life. The first was a book called Daily Strength for Daily Needs by Mary Wilder Tileston. It was originally published by Little, Brown in 1884. My mother’s Harvard friend found a worn copy of this little book and sent it over. The jacket, if it had ever had one, was long gone. The book was stained and foxed, and its olive linen boards had turned sickly institutional beige.
The introduction to Mom’s 1934 edition, published right after the death of Mary Wilder Tileston, was written by William Lawrence, bishop of Massachusetts, and it explains the book well. The bishop writes:
For fifty years, ever since its first publication, I have used “Daily Strength for Daily Needs” from time to time and have given away many copies to Confirmation candidates and others; now that Mrs. Tileston’s hand is stayed, I count it a privilege as a token of gratitude to commend this Memorial Edition to the younger generation, knowing that however far they have traveled from the habits of life and thought of their elders they have still the same need for a call to courage, faith and cheer.
Since this little book was published empires have fallen, theologies have been rewritten, wars have been fought and standards of life have changed, but men are still men, their yearning in times of disaster for comfort is still keen and the call for courage strong.…
If you have a friend who is discouraged, laden with heavy cares or weak of body or faith, give him a copy of “Daily Strength for Daily Needs”; two minutes in the reading, one minute of thought or prayer, and his day will have a fresher note.
The great inventors of the age are those who connect mighty physical resources with the needs of men; Mary W. Tileston, by her love of spiritual literature, her skill in selection and her knowledge of the spiritual needs of men and women, has brought them into connection with eternal truth and spiritual resource. I wonder at the untold influence of a quiet, modest little woman whose skill has given new impulse to millions of men and women through this little book.
Daily Strength for Daily Needs is not designed for the secular reader. Each day’s entry gives you one or two Bible quotes, drawn almost entirely from the New Testament; it almost always includes a scrap of poetry as well, usually religious. And every page has one or two or additional quotes—again usually theological in nature, but not always. The day’s theme relates to the selected Bible passages. Still, the whole point is brevity. Even reading slowly, it would be hard to spend more than one or two minutes on a day’s page.
The first time I examined the book, I found it somewhat ridiculous: it looked stern and pious and certainly dated. I couldn’t imagine that Mom would more than glance at it. But the book became her constant companion. It was almost always either on her bedside or in her shoulder bag. When she needed to go to the hospital, as she often did for fevers or bad reactions to chemo, it went with her. She kept her place with a colorful embroidered bookmark, something she’d brought home from one of the refugee camps she’d visited.
The very physicality of this little book provided part of the comfort. I think Mom liked that her copy was at least secondhand, if not third or fourth. The text had been providing wisdom and solace to people for well over a hundred years, and this one particular book had been doing the same for seventy-three of them. It was printed the same year Mom was born. Other people had turned the pages, had put their own bookmarks in and taken them out. Was it crazy to think that all of them had somehow left on the pages traces of their own hopes and fears?
Someone (not Mom, because I asked her) had underlined passages, but only in the first five pages and only where the book spoke about death: “For this day only is ours, we are dead to yesterday, and we are not yet born to the morrow” (Jeremy Taylor); and “For to know Thee is perfect righteousness; yea, to know Thy power is the root of immortality” (Wisdom of Solomon XV. 2, 3). The underlining was meticulous, in blue pen, and the underliner carefully omitted the word and in the first passage and yea in the second. This person either ceased underlining or ceased living after January 5. But she or he left an indelible mark.
The owners of the book were born and died; what remained was the physical book itself. It needed to be handled with increasing delicacy and care as the binding grew loose with age, but you knew that it was the exact same book that others had read before you, and that you had read in the years before. Would the words have inspired Mom the same way if they had been flashing on a screen? She didn’t think so.
Other books stayed by her bedside, too—like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living and Bernie Siegel’s Love, Medicine and Miracles, two best sellers from previous decades about the connections between mind and body, which we would discuss and which she also loved. But part of the reason Daily Strength for Daily Needs occupied a special place in her life was that it gave her solace from a Christian perspective.
I don’t know if it would be accurate
to say that Mom was disappointed that I’m not religious, but I suspect it would be. It was something she wished for me, as in “I wish you got the same comfort from religion that your brother and sister and I do.” She’d given up on my father, who would come to church with us but put so much energy into remembering and thinking up Bible jokes that he actually had an engraved leather book in which to write them.
Q: “What time of the day was Adam born?”
A: Just before Eve.
Q: “What Christmas carol mentions Charlie Chaplin?”
A: “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” It says “The silent stars go by.”
Mom would express great aggravation about these jokes, especially when Dad loudly whispered them to us during the sermon, on those occasions when we all went to church together. But she was also capable of cracking a hint of a smile when Dad told them once church was over. We kids, however, were not encouraged to repeat them or to create our own. One of the times Mom got truly angry at me was when I was making up a story about that famous biblical children’s book character “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear.”
My brother teaches Sunday school and has always taken his family to church; my sister had always belonged to a church. And when we were little, before my brother and I went off to boarding school, my siblings had both cheerfully gone to Sunday school at Memorial Church, Mom’s place of worship. But I never wanted to go and at some point dug in my heels. To this day, I can’t remember why. I was quite a malleable little fellow, happy to do what I was told, and rarely expressed a strong opinion about where I should be. But that Sunday school had started to annoy me. I wasn’t going.
As liberal as Mom was, she did have rules. We were to eat what we were served (except for one food that we could choose that we never had to eat, no matter who served it, or when); we were to dress nicely for dinner and sit properly at the table until we were excused; we were to write thank-you notes the same day we received a gift; we were to make our bed every day (that, we hardly ever did) and unpack our luggage the minute we got home (we punted on that, too); we were to look people in the eye when they talked to us, and call adults Mr. or Mrs. or Miss unless we were specifically given permission to use a first name (“Ms.” came when we were older); and we were to go to Sunday school and learn about the Bible. That last one was especially nonnegotiable.