Mom

1.

The first movie I’m reputed to have set eyes upon was Psycho, which my parents saw at a drive-in when I was barely one. The first movie I remember seeing a portion of was North by Northwest—the portion being the one in which Roger Thornhill almost drunkenly drives “Laura’s Mercedes” over a cliff—also at a drive-in with my parents. Part of an early-60s double bill, I guess. The first movie I remember sitting all the way through was The Haunting, which my mom asked me to stay up and watch with her during its network television premiere—was it 1966, 1967? this is one factoid I have found resistant to my Googling chops—on an evening when my dad was working his second job parking cars. We were both plenty scared by it. I don’t remember if my mom held my hand or not. Even then though I found it kind of funny that she was asking a not-even ten-year-old boy to help her not get overly spooked by what she had heard was a pretty effective horror movie (and even with commercials it was pretty potent).

And that was it: I was hooked on images and their synchronization with sound just as hard as the Beatles had hooked me on music. Looking through old pictures this week I came across a shot from Christmas 1970—good grief, did my parents actually buy my brother a drum kit?—and I’m sitting there with my hair holding a record album with the curving letters “OCKER” the only visible clue to its title, and it took me a minute before I figured out it was the Joe Cocker Mad Dogs And Englishman double LP. My dad mostly liked Chet Baker (well, he’d tell me that, years after we hadn’t shared the same roof) and my mom’s favorite was Tony Bennett so, yes, I must have driven them crazy, but they were always indulgent—even got me the picture sleeve single of “The Ballad of John And Yoko” when it came out.

When I was a little kid, poring through a library book or the Arts and Leisure section of the Times, I asked my mother—with no real clue why I should have any expectation that she would have a ready answer to the question—“Why do you think Jean-Luc Godard wears sunglasses all the time?” And my mother answered, “Maybe it’s an affectation.” And I asked her what “an affectation” was, and she told me.

My sister and I recall my parents going once again to the drive-in to see David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter with the expectation that my sister and I would be sleeping in the fold-down back seat of the family’s Ford Country Squire station wagon. But we did not, and my sister recalls my mom telling her to put her head down during the forest love scene between Sarah Miles and Christopher Jones. I remember no such thing; I just remember the scene—Miles’ rather self-consciously artily-depicted nudity amidst all that green, on a gargantuan screen framed by a soft warm New Jersey night, and the silhouettes of my parent’s heads immediately in front of me.

Lest I give the impression that my parents’ drive-in choices were unfailingly discriminating, I should add that If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium, and Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell are also reasonably vivid memories from that time.

After my parents split up, I watched a lot of movies with my mom. Her favorite star was Paul Newman; her second favorite was Robert Wagner. But she didn’t rate The Towering Inferno particularly high despite the fact that “R.J.” and Newman were both in it. We saw Raging Bull together some time late in its release—I think it was something like my ninth viewing—and that’s not really a comfortable movie to sit through with one’s mom but coming out of the theater with her I felt a shared tacit acknowledgement of the film’s painstakingly accurate and painful depiction of the sacred and profane within Italian-American working class milieus—we both looked at each other with what would come to be known as the “well, that happened” expression. For all that, my mom still kept a crucifix not very much unlike the one seen in Jake La Motta’s familial home among her effects. (She was born Amelia Teresa Petrosino, and graduated from St. Joseph’s, a Catholic high school in or around Fort Lee.) One time, for lack of anything better to do, we even went to the local multiplex for pot luck and ended up seeing Gotcha!, which elicited a “what the hell was that” from me; Mom, wanting to be optimistic, shrugged that parts of it were kind of cute.

2.

Long before being a loser who lived in his mother’s basement was a thing, I was a loser who lived in his mother’s basement. As I put it in “Going Through The Motions,” a piece of my writing that appeared in Black Clock last fall: “After my parents were divorced in the early 1980s, my mother got an apartment in West Paterson. The place was a two-story house and the unit my mom rented encompassed both the ground floor and the basement, and it was determined I could have the basement for a fee of $250 a month that I would never pay.” The bit was somewhat funnier when my mom was around to read it. There were all sorts of ways in which I was a hardship to my mom—even up until the last days of her life, I tell myself, and then concerned and kind friends and family members pull me back from that—but I do know that she got some satisfaction from the fact that during the time that I spent dicking around “honing my craft” or “trying to find a vocation” or whatever the hell it was I was doing, she was the only person who never said to me, “get a job.” Because she really did believe that someday I would make good as a writer. So I roosted there, and the little victories started coming my way: a piece I submitted on spec seeing print in Musician magazine, a how-the-hell-did-that-happen monthly music column in a girlie mag, and, finally, after what felt to me like a tortured bout of argumentative correspondence, an invitation from Robert Christgau to write a piece for the Village Voice’s Riffs section. That was it: I knew then that I had it made. I soon heard from another “jerk from Jersey” (her phrase) who’d gotten into the Voice, Rosemary Passantino, and after an initial antipathy (I found her as humorless as I’d expected any English Lit grad student to be, while she thought the bowling shirt I wore on our first in-person meeting to be unforgivably louche) we got to be thick as thieves. Last week RP wrote to me: “I will always remember your mom, happy to have us and not caring a bit that we were way too old to be lying around for hours pretentiously commiserating over comic books and French philosophy in her basement!” In fucking deed.

3. 

I did move out eventually and my mom moved to western Jersey to manage one of several video rental stores my uncle owned. One of her regular customers was Keith Jarrett. I loaned him, by proxy, a laser disc of Roger Vadim’s Dangerous Liaisons ’60, which he was keen to see because Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers actually appeared in the film. I got to take my mom to see Jarrett’s trio for her birthday in December of 2013. It was a great show. I also took her to see Yves Montand at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1982—how the hell I pulled that off I have no idea—and Sinatra at one of his Meadowlands shows, not the really bad one thank God but one where he got sufficiently bored with his material that he sang “Love was just a glance away/a warm pair of panties away” or some such thing. Mom rolled her eyes at that but was otherwise largely delighted with the show. I don’t know that she had ever been a bobby-soxer for real but I could see her in the part.

In 1995 or so my work appeared in book form for I think the first time, or so, in the first and only edition of Leonard Maltin’s Film Encyclopedia, which did not become the franchise that Leonard’s Home Video Guide did. Here is what I wrote in the copy I gave my mom:

“4/16/95

Mom—This will provide you with many amusing hours trying to figure out which entries I wrote. Here’s a hint: I’d like to get my hands on the editorial assistant who introduced a grievous error into the Godard entry (it was Macha Meril who starred in ‘Une Femme Marieé,’ not Anna Karina). Only in the exciting world of book publishing can you get it right the first time, only to have some intern get it wrong. But that’s my sole complaint. Enjoy…

Love, your son, Glenn”

Pretty insufferable, yes. But my mom was gracious enough to be amused. I think my inscription of her copy of my De Niro book had a little more humility, and definitely more gratitude. I’m also very glad I dedicated the book to her and to my dad.

4. 

On March 7, I went to the Museum of Modern Art to see a screening of the five-hour director’s cut of Wim Wenders’ Until The End Of The World, which my friend the screenwriter and essayist Larry Gross had kind of insisted I discover. That Sunday was kind of my first day “off” in quite some time. In early February, my mom had been admitted to the hospital after a fainting spell in the Fort Lee apartment building into which she had moved the prior August. She hadn’t been herself in a while, and we had some appointments scheduled to look into the problem; her faint was just two days before a scheduled date with a doctor. Some scary hours ensued as doctors tried to figure out what was wrong with her. It happened that she had a benign meningioma. You have never seen anyone so excited and happy to be diagnosed with a tumor, ever. Because, for one thing, it meant that she didn’t have dementia. Yes, the operation to get rid of the tumor was a real bear, and various complications were possible/likely. But. This was a hurdle she could see her way to clearing. And yes, Schwarzenegger impersonations were proffered, and “It’s not brain surgery…oh, wait, it IS brain surgery” was uttered more than once.

And Mom came through the operation like a champ, as they say. And suddenly her friends and family saw how much of her spirit and personality had been subsumed by her condition, because her spirit and personality came roaring back. My sister was on the phone with my father one afternoon and gave the phone to my mom to say hello, and mom practically roared “Your first wife is still alive!” with a big grin.

I had not been entirely aware that the condition had been making it impossible for my mom to read anything much beyond a restaurant menu. Now  here I was, bringing her a Maigret mystery by her beloved Simenon, The Late Monsieur Gallet it was, and she was tearing through it. I had gone to visit her in the hospital, and then in her rehab facility, most days of the week, and she was always super-solicitous, worrying about the weather in which my wife Claire and I would be taking the bus, and so on. And when we’d leave her to take the bus back home, I’d roll my eyes when we pulled into the Port Authority and see she was calling, to make sure we’d made it back into the city okay

Anyway, I was particularly moved by the Wenders film, because one of its big plot hooks involved William Hurt’s character gathering images to present, via a new technology, to his blind mother, played by Jeanne Moreau. Moreau’s portrayal of a frail/strong woman for whom a certain veil of consciousness is lifted via technology and love resonated strongly for obvious reasons. I was terribly excited by the gift my mom had received, and looking so forward to the ways she’d use it, and how her family and other loved ones would share it with her.

5.

There are, when you come down to it, two kinds of “you can’t make this up” stories: the kind that are just remarkably absurd and silly, and then the kind you would not want to make up even if you could. The story of my mom’s death falls into the latter category, I think.

It was March 10, the day she was scheduled to come out of rehab. I took the bus out to Jersey, carrying with me a canvas bag where I had her new dish drainer and dish pan. I also had some tennis balls that I was gonna cut apart and put on the back legs of her walker. (It turns out the walker they were giving her was sufficiently snazzed-out that it wouldn’t have needed the upgrade.) On the bus I got a phone call from my aunt. Seemed that my mom had complained of chest pains earlier in the morning, there was some concern among the staff as to what it meant. They were going to take her to the hospital up the block and have her checked out. She’d have to stay another night in the rehab, at least. Well, okay. So I wouldn’t be helping bring her home today; instead I’d be reconciling her to staying one more night, and going with her to the hospital for some tests.

Mom wasn’t into it. “How’s your aunt going to get off work tomorrow?” she asked. Well of course she could get off work tomorrow. Don’t worry about it, Mom. For now you should just relax, because we need to take you up the street and get checked out. I left her room and went to speak to the head of the nursing department. There were some concerns about Mom’s hemoglobin count that needed addressing. Then I needed to make some calls: to my sister, to my aunt. I went back to my mom’s room and the patient with whom she shared a room was out in the hall, in her wheelchair: “You better get in there,” she said. My mom was on the floor, having tripped and fallen, face first, after having gotten up from her bed to go to the bathroom. She was bleeding from the nose. She was lifted up, and sat down into a chair; her blood pressure was taken. It was fine. “How do you feel?” “Awful.” Well, that was to be expected. So now she was going to have to be checked out for a broken nose, too, when we got her to the hospital. But for now we had to lay her down. Once in bed, she complained of not being able to breathe. She was hooked up to a small oxygen supply. I sat at the side of her bed and held her hand. “I can’t breathe,” she said.

“It’s gonna be okay, mom. You ARE breathing. Breathe through your mouth. There.”

I squeezed her hand. Even though she was breathing, she clearly felt that she could not. I said to a nurse, “She says she can’t breathe.”

“That’s why we gave her the oxygen.”

“Something else is happening. Get someone in here.”

And then I kept saying “It’s gonna be okay, Mom,” and after a little while she exhaled deeply, shut her eyes, rolled a little to the side, and she was gone. And I knew she was gone. Efforts to resuscitate, in the rehab facility and then the hospital, went on for an hour after that. I’ve consulted with her neurosurgeons, who did an amazing job with her and are understandably kind of angry now, and it would appear that what took her was a pulmonary embolism.

6.

My mom was my first love, and she taught me what it meant to be loved. I may have not treated that gift so carefully as I ought to have, through many too-long stretches of my life, but I never lost it, and I cling to it now ever more fiercely...or at least I try to, or tell myself that I try to, I don’t know. My mom had a hard life—more than one of her friends has told me that in the past week, and frankly in some cases I haven’t been sure how to take the information, not that it’s news to me or anything—but she also had a life full of event and eventually adventure. And she knew that she was loved, and she took a lot of delight in the people around her who gave her that love. You can see, in the picture above, the genuine joy she’s experiencing as she holds up that mewling jowly infant who was I at six months (as opposed—I might as well beat anybody else to it—to the mewling jowly infant I am today).

I feel kind of lucky that I’m not more of a Loudon Wainwright III adept than I already am, because if his song “Homeless” had been wired into me back when he first sang it, I’d be more of a wreck now than I already am. “When you were alive, I was never alone,” it opens; “somewhere in the world, there was always a home.” It goes on: “And I feel like I faked all that I ever did,” oh dear. “They say in the end, your good friends pull you through/but everyone knows, my best friend was you.” I am more fortunate than Loudon here, because I found another best friend, Claire, who will have been my wife for nine years this coming June. God knows I’ve put her through it, but I do think I’ve been able to make her happy sometimes, though not as happy as she’s made me. And while it’s never going to be possible for me to truly accept a world that my mom isn’t in, I guess I will someday be able to recognize what so many people have been telling me these past few days, which is that I somehow did make her proud, not just in the end, but always. 

Comments

[Ryan Smith]

Glen,

That was beautiful but I wish you didn't have to write it. Sorry for your loss.

[Mark]

So sorry to hear of your loss Glenn, thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here. All the best.

[Bunting]

I'm so sorry, Glenn. Take good care.

[Brian]

I'm sorry for your loss.

[Aden Jordan]

I'm sorry for your loss, Glenn, and wish you and your family the best.

[Chris L.]

I'm so sorry you have suffered this cruel loss, GK. Will be thinking of you, and wishing you as much peace and comfort as is possible at such a time.

[Jeff McMahon]

Thank you for sharing this.

[Petey]

A quite beautiful piece, Glenn. And a fine way to honor your mom, who believed in you as a writer.

And, as horrible as it must have been, I'm happy for you that you were able to be with her for her final moments on Earth. Not everyone gets that chance.

[Stephen Bowie]

Let's see ... Local TV listings have THE HAUNTING as an ABC SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE on March 12, 1967, starting at 9PM. Not seeing an explicit reference to it as the film's TV debut, but it was pretty heavily promoted, so I'd bet you're right about that.

(I had a similar experience around the same age, oddly, with my mother and POLTERGEIST, whenever it first came out on VHS.)

[J. Santiago]

Thanks for your honest and beautiful piece. It reminded me of RK's poem.

Mother o' Mine by Rudyard Kipling

If I were hanged on the highest hill,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
I know whose love would follow me still,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

If I were drowned in the deepest sea,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
I know whose tears would come down to me,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

If I were damned of body and soul,
I know whose prayers would make me whole,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

[Gareth]

A beautiful, moving, honest tribute; my condolences to you.

[Olaf]

What a lovely way to honour and remember your mom. All good wishes and heartfelt condolences.

[Oliver_C]

R.I.P.

[AeC]

That was a beautiful tribute. I'm very sorry for your loss.

[colinr]

I'm very sorry to hear this sad news and wish to pass on my condolences to you and your family.

[Clayton Sutherland]

Very sorry for your loss, Glenn.

This was a lovely piece.

[lazarus]

Some of your best writing, Glenn. My condolences.

And I hope this isn't a crass request, but I'd love to hear you expound more on Until The End Of The World when you're up to it. I caught the director's cut a few years ago (and now own the soon-to-be-worthless German import set) and I think it's a special film. Wenders is divisive and many wrote him off after the 80s, but UTEOTW in the long version is a glorious mess in the way that Apocalypse Now is, with a great deal of poetry amidst the globetrotting and the all-star modern rock soundtrack. It's a culmination of his road movie obsession in the way that 2046 ties several of Wong Kar-Wai's films together and takes his style and themes to their extremes.

[Nicole Busch]

Glenn, what a beautiful, incredibly written tribute.

Your mother most certainly was proud of you--it was obvious every time I saw the two of you interact way back 30-plus years ago. She believed in you and you were lucky to have her.

I am so sorry for your loss and for what your family must be going through now. But I am glad you know how much she loved you.

[Titch]

A very touching post, Glenn. Also, a timely reminder for those of us who still have our moms with us, to get in touch more often before they're gone. One of the first things my mom and I ask about when we're on the phone is: "have you seen any good films recently?". She just saw Boyhood, which took us on a long trip down memory lane.

[Nelson]

Sorry for your loss, Glenn. Thank you for this deeply moving piece.

[Elizabeth]

XOXO

[L]

Hi Glenn. I remember that West Paterson house. I never knew you were half Italian, either. You are a great writer, always were, as well as a testament to her strong love for her son. An inspiration as I raise my kids today. All my sympathy to you & Claire, and may she rest in the peace of Christ, with mother Mary.

[George]

A beautiful piece, Glenn. I'm sorry for your loss.

You and I were born the same month (August 1959), and I lost my mother in February 2014. She was 82, had Alzheimer's/dementia, and it was horrible, to say the least. I can't bring myself to watch STILL ALICE because I don't want to relive that time. I actually bought a ticket but walked out as the film began. Maybe someday I'll try again.

[Griff]

That was quite a beautiful tribute, Glenn. Thank you for posting this.

I am so sorry for your loss.

All best.

[george]

"Her favorite star was Paul Newman; her second favorite was Robert Wagner. But she didn’t rate The Towering Inferno particularly high despite the fact that “R.J.” and Newman were both in it."

Did she ever see HARPER and WINNING? Those were two better movies with Newman and R.J.

[policomic]

This is a beautiful remembrance; thank you for sharing it.

Deepest sympathy for your loss.

[Jesse Crall]

Lovely piece, Glenn. Sorry for your loss but glad for the love that inspired such words.

[Shawn Levy]

Best wishes and godspeed to you all.

[Betsy Bonner]

The "mewling jowly infant I am today" bows to the "mewling jowly infant" you were at six mos. (and we all still are). Thanks for this beautiful, haunting tribute. "My mom was my first love, and she taught me what it meant to be loved." That is so wonderful. Peace, love, and Easter tidings to you and Claire.

[Owain]

I've returned to your blog today after a while away, and am very sad to read about the loss of your mother. Best wishes and sympathy to you and your family.