• • •

I wasted a lot of the time I had with my mother as well. Is forgiveness ever fully conscious? Insofar as it is, I forgive my mother here and now for whatever she may ever have done that I may have failed to forgive, even for her death. Today it is a Tuesday, and the sun is out (how prone I used to be to the weather! how happy such days as this made us!)—and I forgive my mother as though I were spokesman for the very gates of heaven, as though I could paint forgiveness to stretch from my childhood to the place among the constellations where right now, perhaps, my mother is smiling her particular smile and struggling to articulate one of those little, passing insights that give life its foil of meaning. I have learned now that loss and forgiveness come only too readily to join each other, like shy and sorry partners at a crowded dance. As my sense of loss settles and becomes clearer each day, so, too, does my desire to forgive rise up and overwhelm me, until I feel I could forgive not only my mother, but also the terrors of war, the cruelty of illness, the mystery of life and death. In the end, long after a death, when your pain has become fully a part of you from which there will be no separation, as integral as your sense of humor or of self-worth, you find that the pain has brought with it its reverse. For it is also the case that all the joy that came before that pain, which had seemed foreign, or inaccessible, or temporal, or forgettable, also becomes an inalienable part of you. Then the act of memory does not entail recollection of events or circumstances; then everything you do is a part of your act of memory, and every bit of your daily life, no matter how trivial or banal, becomes a form of tribute. Already, some kinds of memory of my mother are fading. I cannot remember so well as I once could what her voice sounded like, or how she walked, or the smell of perfume and fur that came with her into the house on a winter day. I have gone on with my life, and I busy myself with ordinary negotiations, with playing the piano, with Helen, and with other friends, with lovers, with taking care of my father, with Freddy. From time to time I plan and throw a party. You get on; you get on with life because there is nothing else to do. The new experiences do not fill the void this death has left, but they lie beside it, and, as they accumulate, form banks around it to make it less terrible. My mother said the day she died that she had wanted all her life for her love to wrap me up and make the world a safe place for me, and I imagined then that her love was made of masses of cotton wool in which I could roll and luxuriate. But my mother’s love is no longer outside of me; it is within me. It is not made of cotton wool, but of bones. What the world sees are skin and eyes and the soft shapes of flesh; but that unknown and unknowable part of me that holds together the rest, giving it worth and meaning, is the part that my mother gave to me. I have built myself upon it. The little memories that are the stuff of this book are almost meaningless by comparison to that. The credible life I lead does nothing to belie the wonder of this truth beneath the surface.