Some comments from Laura: I was going to write a brief memorial message about my mother, about who she was and about why I loved her as I did. The process has been a sort of therapeutic one for me, musing about the memories of her that have been flooding in, but what came out is not the brief message I thought it would be. It’s the long (much too long) and somewhat rambling sampling of memories that I’ve posted below. Details of memories are notorious for their inaccuracy, but I think the fundamentals here are real. It provides a daughters view of who Clara Smale was and something about why I believe that I lucked out,
big time, to have had her as my mother. It’s organized into several very roughly defined sections:
big time, to have had her as my mother. It’s organized into several very roughly defined sections:
1-mothering
2-laughter
3-concern for right and wrong
4-frailty and caution
5-on dying and on living too long
Mothering was one of Clara’s biggest jobs and she was great at it. She gave us help of every sort, comfort, a tremendous amount of freedom (with occasional constraints), and guidance on how to be good people.
· In kindergarten I tell her about how all the kids pick on Ross Purdy, who they call a “sissy,” and Cathy Vanselow, who is obese, and she urges me to be especially nice to these two kids in a way that all the others can see, and to never ever join the nastiness even when the other kids expect me to.
· Nat and I are 10 and 12, living in France, where she lets us run, unsupervised, free to play day and night, to explore far and wide, free to take the train into Paris to wander, where, with Hermine and Herve, we find the pet stores. We bring home baby ducks, but she doesn’t seem too mad, just helps us try to figure out what to do with them. They attach themselves to Nat, follow him everywhere, for weeks, and she teaches us about a fellow named Konrad Lorenz, and his geese, and what he called “imprinting.”
· I’m 13, back in California, she won’t let me take a Greyhound bus to the Sierras to try out the cross country skis I’ve bought myself, just because I’d never been cross country skiing before. We argue intensely, its the only serious argument I remember, but she just won’t let me go. So I go downhill skiing instead. I have an accident on my first trip down the slope and she drives the 4 hours up to the Sierra Club lodge to take me home. I feel sheepish, but she’s nice about it.
· I’m 26, shouldn’t need to run to mother for help. But the old pick-up truck I use to drive my voles from the lab on campus to the facility on 4th street breaks down in Berkeley, where animal rights activities are on the rise. Leaving it there is not an option, but I don’t know what to do. So I call my mother and she comes running to the rescue.
· She offered me books, all the time. In elementary school she gave me “Manchild in the Promised Land,” by Claude Brown, “Nigger” by Dick Gregory, “I know why the caged bird sings,” by Maya Angelou, “In the Shadow of Man” by Jane Goodal. And then there was the “Diary of Ann Frank.” I was not that interested, but she really wanted me to read it. I finally did and couldn’t put it down. She comes to my room when she hears me sobbing, tries her best to comfort me and apologizes for forgetting to tell me how the book would end. But she keeps giving me books. The last one, two years ago, was Studs Terkel’s “Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times.”
· I’m working on my first term paper, in 7th grade, on the murder of Fred Hampton by a gang of Chicago policemen, and she takes me to the Berkeley library where she shows me how to use the microfilm records to see the back issues of the Black Panther Newspaper that I’m looking for. When my paper is written she looks it over and says its good but suggests that I replace the word “pigs” with “policemen,” quickly realizes that she won’t be able to persuade me, changes tactics, and convinces me to switch to “cops.”
· I’m having trouble with my love life, realizing that I’m falling for a woman, wondering whether I should still be with Michael or not, when I run into my mother on Shattuck Avenue. She sees that I’m distraught and we sit down on a bench at the bus stop to talk. She tries to make me feel better, she urges me to try to work through problems with Michael, tells me that no relationship will always be perfect but that those that stick with it are likely to be happier in the long run. That night she calls and apologizes because she had focused her comments so much on the value of maintaining my commitment to Michael, she says she’s sorry that she had steered our discussion away from the central issue of my conflict over whether I was gay or straight.
· Much later, she tells me of a walk in Tilden park that she’s taken with two friends. Feeling a bit nervous she finally brings herself to “come out” for the first time and tell them that her daughter is gay. It turns out that the son of one of her friends is also gay, as is a daughter of the other. She smiles and laughs as she recounts the story.
· She gives Kay and me her favorite, expensive, skin cream from NY. I don’t use it but Kay tells her that she loves it and then she brings it to Kay each time they meet up. Kay brings her crossword puzzles which make her smile.
· I have a stroke in Michigan and she comes running from California. She walks into the hospital room, looking very worried. I feel badly and tell her that I’m sorry, a mother shouldn’t have to see her kid in a hospital bed like that. She realizes that I’m still me, smiles and relaxes. She spends 10 days in that hospital room, along with Kay. She does crossword puzzles and reads while Kay works and I spend most of my time sleeping. She tests me, reading me an article from Science magazine about where in the brain of rabbits a memory is established and stored during classical conditioning of an eye blink to a tone. She’s happy to see that, although it’s a major struggle, I can understand the logic of the study, and she is not too worried about the fact that I can’t begin to remember the name of the brain region itself. She leaves after 10 days, telling me that I don’t need her now, that I’m in good competent hands with Kay there at my side. A few years later I lapse into a moment of self-pity and tell her that one of the post-stroke things that I miss is seeing the full wide open panoramas of the African savannah that are so spectacular, because now I have only half the field of view that I once did. She thinks a bit then tells me not to feel too sorry for myself, most people will never ever get to see a view like that. She has a point.
· Nat and I are all grown up, her full-time mothering career is over and I begin to encourage her to move on to her next one, suggesting that she become a lawyer, maybe a doctor, or that she could go back to being a librarian, but always she gets the discussions moving on to different tracks, or says that she doesn’t want to go to medical school, or says that Steve makes plenty of money, the jobs should be left to those that need them more than she. She had never pushed me towards one line of work or another, or towards a career at all, she had simply let me make these decisions based on what was in me, and I finally realize that I should do the same for her, and I lay off, I lift the pressure I’d been putting on her.
· She gave to others but asked for almost nothing for herself. She takes the bus to the hospital to have surgery on her hand, saying that she doesn’t need to bother us for a ride (but she lets me pick her up afterwards and take her home). She visits MI with her sister Norma and husband Bob, and absolutely insists that they sleep in the good bedroom, the one that I had cleaned up so thoroughly for her so that it would be completely free of the hair and dander of dogs and cats that she was so allergic to; Kay finds her in the morning asleep on the bathroom floor because of the asthma that has been triggered by the animal hair and dander in the other guest room where she had tried to sleep.
· She shopped for and prepared so many dinners for big lively gatherings, always doing it in what seemed a slow and completely disorganized manner but that somehow always ended in a perfectly coordinated meal with all its parts coming together at just the right time.
Her laughter
· She laughed so easily, so genuinely and so wholeheartedly, at so many things. I would hear her laughing uncontrollably in the TV room, I’d run and find her by herself, watching John Stewart. Reading her daily paper in the other room, always starting with the funny pages, I’d hear her laughing and she’d come to show me what it was about. If I wasn’t in town she’d mail me the cartoons. She wanted to share so that others could enjoy the humor too.
· We go to the gay day parade in San Francisco. It’s very very crowded, but people see her and move apart to offer the old lady the best viewing spot. She’s struck by their generosity, hesitant to take this “gift” but they insist, so she moves to the prime viewing spot at the edge of the parade; I sneak along behind her. She begins laughing when the “dykes on bikes” lead the parade by us; she especially likes the newly married couple in the lead, the one in front wearing a tuxedo, the one behind in a flowing bridal gown holding roses in one hand as they zoom by. She smiles and laughs hysterically for the next hour and a half, at the brilliant crazy humor and loving nature of those in the parade that pass by us. She’s so very happy, it still makes me smile to think of her that day.
Concern for right and wrong
· At a card table in front the Shattuck Avenue co-op, summer of 1965, I play and she talks with people about the Vietnam war, gets people to sign petitions against US involvement in the war, hands out buttons with a peace sign on them.
· Two years later, I come home and see another girl sitting in my mothers lap, feel a jolt of jealousy then look closer, the face of the girl is disfigured, half of it looks like it has melted, as does one arm and hand, and she’s missing ½ a leg. My mother had brought the 7 year old, Twee, home to play with me. She helps set up a bench at one end of the ping pong table where the girl can sit as we play; she gets me to read a book to Twee, explaining that she might enjoy it even though she can’t understand the English. She’s right, the girl smiles and laughs as I read. When Twee leaves mom explains that napalm had been dropped from American airplanes onto Twees’ village in Vietnam, but when I ask why she can’t explain.
· We’re living in France and I receive a letter from my friend Jeannelle who writes that “they are busting up the schools” and that she’ll be going to a private school now and I ask my mother what Jeanelle meant by the “busting” of the schools. She explains the efforts being taken towards racial integration and the busing program that would begin to help bring blacks to white schools and whites to black ones. She tells me that it’s a very good thing and explains that Jeannelle only uses the word “busting” because her parents are afraid of integration. Later, I am headed to Junior High School and am provided the choice between Adams, primarily black, and Portola, primarily white and I never perceive any effort to push me towards one or the other, probably because she knew that I’d make the choice she wanted me to make, for Adams.
· She laughs as she tells me of a phone conversation she’d had with Charity Hirsh, a partner in the anti-war movement; when she later picked up the phone an audiotape of that earlier conversation played. Someone (FBI?) had been listening in, and bungled things a bit.
· 1972 she takes me to a concert at the Greek theater, a folk singer named Joan Baez, a benefit for Amnesty International; it has a lasting impact.
· A spontaneous symbolic protest erupts on University Avenue and she, Nat and I rush to join it. Berkeley folks want to secede from the union. We all walk back and forth across the street blocking the cars from getting off and on the freeway. The Police try to scatter the protesters, one singles my mother out and chases us down a side street, then he stops, lets us go.
· A few years later, she’s upset with the Vietnamese when they invade Cambodia, it leads to a rift between her and some of her more leftist friends.
· Soon after G.W. Bush is elected, she’s visiting MSU, we stand talking with Sharleen outside her office, she tells us that she’s very worried, she thinks he’ll be worse than any president in the last century, maybe in the history of the nation.
· She sends me many articles cut out from newspapers that have stories that she likes and wants to share. One is written by David Harris, x-husband of J. Baez, and she tells me that I must read it, that it provides the best argument against the US invasion of Iraq. Harris goes through a long series of reasons that it would be a disaster for each of a wide range of groups of people and ends with a comment on how there is, however, one person in the world that would be absolutely thrilled if we invaded: Osama bin Laden.
She was frail and she was cautious.
· There was always a certain frailty about my mother. Hiking with Michael and I in the Berkshires, lost, sweaty, exhausted, she can’t go on, has to lie down, is sick and dehydrated when we finally get back; hiking in Borneo, so wiped out she can barely make it back; tumbled on the beach by a tiny little wave in Costa Rica; holding tiny branches of the juniper bush to steady herself as she walks up the front stairs in Kensington; almost blown over by the wind in Chicago….and much more…
· Fear of foods that might be unhealthy; fear of the sun; afraid of sailing with the boat at a slight heal; afraid of my father’s (and Hermine’s) driving…and much more…
· By a lake in the high sierras she prepares for a swim, takes off her clothes, folds them and sets them down, goes to the edge, touches the water. It is cold, ice cold. She steps back, puts all her clothes back on and sits down to watch the rest of us swim.
· In Berkeley, Shattuck Avenue, she sees ahead that there’s a street woman who she thinks might be mentally ill standing on the sidewalk. Uncomfortable, she tries to avoid this woman by crossing the street. She trips and falls and the woman runs to help her up and to make sure that she’s OK. Telling me about it later she feels badly, she is embarrassed about the fear and prejudice she had felt to start with.
· On a visit to our camp in Kenya: we’re eating dinner when we hear Risi and Joseph smashing pans, making noise, and the sounds of elephants that they’re chasing away in the riverbed below, we all stand, a bit alarmed, then the rest of us sit down to finish dinner; Clara eats the rest of the meal standing up, worried that the elephants might come back. She and I get ready for our baths in the Talek river but on the way there we stop to watch a beautiful large cobra cross the path. She decides she doesn’t need to bathe in the river, we turn around and go back to camp where she takes a sponge bath near her tent instead, for the rest of the visit. She designs her own urinal so that she doesn’t need to go outside to pee at night. She tells me that one can actually see the wildlife at least as well on the nature shows on the TV. She’s the only visitor that ever responded that way.
· She was timid, but as Steve puts it, she was also a “Woman of the world.” In spite of all her caution, she traveled and lived across the world, with homes that began in Dearborn and ended in Hong Kong, and included, along the way, Barcelona, Paris, Coventry, Rio de Janeiro, NYC, and Chicago, with shorter stops in places like Morocco, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, China, Kenya, Australia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, French Polynesia, Borneo, the Bahamas, BVA and beyond. She brings us gifts from her travels, beautiful tourmaline earrings from Brazil, wall hangings from Thailand and Peru, scarves from China. When she’s older she wonders if a simpler life would have been more relaxing. I remind her of some of the places she’s been and tell her that life might have been simpler but not as interesting. She thinks about it and then agrees.
On dying and on living too long
· She was overly cautious about many things but she was also afraid of living too long.
· She tells me that when her own mother died it was not as sad as it might have been because she felt that she had lost her slowly over the years as the dementia had marched along, she felt her mother had been lost several years before her death.
· When she calls to tell me that grandma Smale has died she muses about how strange it is that the body can be living and breathing and the mind can be very much alive, and then the body, though it is still there, turns off, and now the mind is gone. She doesn’t understand why it is so important to people to recover the bodies of loved ones that have died.
· She was a fan of Jack Kevorkian.
· She’s living in Chicago on the 33rd floor and I look around and see that it would be a bad place to be if there were a fire and I ask her if maybe they should move to a lower level and she says that she’s 73 years old, better for her to be trapped on the 33rd floor than for a younger person, who may have many more years of life ahead, to be stuck there.
· She tells me that something is wrong with her brain. I tell her not to worry, she does not have Alzheimer’s. This exchange occurs several times over a 2-3 year period. I try to reassure her, I tell her that I’m a neuroscientist, I know what Alzheimer’s is and this isn’t it, this, what she has, is simple normal aging. As those few years go by I see that she is struggling more and more to find words, titles of books, names of movies, but I am fixated on Alzheimer’s, as though this is the only form of dementia there is, and I insist to her that she is OK, this is normal aging, this is not Alzheimer’s. She knows something is wrong but I won’t hear her.
· In the Philippines, December 2009, she and I play scrabble every morning. She plays slowly, but she beats me once or twice, but she struggles when she tries to add up the points, gets frustrated, I insist that she can do it and she does. But something is not right. One morning she muses about the possibility that there could be some form of afterlife, I begin my usual atheistic rant but quickly stop myself, realizing that her comments were coming from her sense that death was not some distant notion.
· I see her in Paris, June 2010 and she’s not well. We go to the Rodin museum but when we get there all she wants to do is sit. At restaurants she doesn’t look at the menu, she simply orders whatever Steve orders. Still, she reads the newspaper every morning and she can tell me about stories that are interesting to her.
· I visit in Hong Kong in July/August 2010, after the doctors have said that the images of her brain were consistent with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. She still reads the newspaper for an hour or two each morning, as she has forever, but she no longer tells me what she’s read in it; she can only get a handful of words on the easiest crossword puzzles; she’s forgotten how to play solitaire; her first word on the scrabble board isn’t a word at all; she can’t remember that I’d had a stroke. I’m sad. She tries to comfort me, to soothe me, words aren’t easy for her to pick out and string together, haltingly she says “its OK, I’m 2002 years old, no, its 2000…I don’t know, but I’m old. I’ve lived a good life. It’s OK.” A few days later I have a complete breakdown and she holds me, hugs me for a long time, kisses me on the cheek. She tries to soothe me and now she keeps saying “it’s ok, I’ll be better soon.”
· A brief conversation on the phone in early January, I talk about simple things, she doesn’t respond much, it’s hard to tell how much she understands, she seems relieved when I say that I have to go. She hears how sad I am and she tells me that she’s sorry, that she’ll try to do better next time we’re on the phone.
· In February 2011 she’s in bed when I arrive. I enter the room and she doesn’t look up. Steve tells her that Laura is here. She doesn’t smile. During my ten day visit she never gets out of bed. She often doesn’t seem to recognize me or even see that I am there. It’s so hard to make her smile. It hurts so much to see her like this. The evening before I leave, I go into her room to say goodbye. I sit by her and cry. She turns to look at me, confused, then concerned. She reaches out and holds her hand to my face, trying to comfort me. She can’t speak, she can’t understand what I try to say, but she doesn’t need the words, she can understand what I feel and she’s trying to make me feel better, as she always has. I say goodbye, for the last time.
