Background

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I was lucky as a child that my mother ~ I called her Dorothy ~ was my favorite playmate.  She looked a little like Judy Garland, and I thought The Wizard of Oz was about her.  But then she made me a recording of herself singing Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush in one of those booths in Times Square, and I realized she couldn't sing on key.

When I wanted to be Wednesday Addams for Halloween at the age of eight, it was based on the New Yorker cartoons around the housae as much as the TV show, and my mother was delighted to make my costume from scratch.  We won first prize at the local Unitarian Church in Brooklyn Heights.  My parents were married in the Unitarian Church in 1954.  Some of their best friends gave us original editions of Edward Gorey's works just as I was learning to read.  I don't think this influenced my sensibility as much as reflected our shared family karma.  Our dark humor has always been one of our deepest bonds.

I'll fast-forward a bit here.  Suffice it to say that throughout the years, even when I left their home in Conn. to return to New York City at the age of 20, my parents and I remained one another's confidentes, best editors and best friends.  My father was an editor-in-chief, and my mother was a science editor, and then an English teacher.  She cultivated electives in Science Fiction and The American Transcendalists ~ Unitiaran authors and poets such as Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, et al.  She taught at an integrated public high school, in keeping with her commitment to Civil Rights.  How ironic that her own are being violated now.

In April of 2003, as we were preparing for my father's memorial service at the Unitarian Church in Westport, Conn., my mother had what they called a "mini-stroke."  After spending a few months with her getting her back on her feet,  mostly with Occupational Therapy, I returned to my then-home in Vermont for half the week, and spent half the week with her in the family homestead in Norwalk, Conn.  A year later, she had a serious seizure, and her recovery from that ~ partly given the medications she had to take ~ was so difficult that I quickly gave up my home in Vermont, and moved in with her full-time, and my sister Jessica, who due to learning disabilities had never left home.

I was happy to care for her, after the six-month vigil my mother and I had shared during my father's illness.  I learned that that time together is precious beyond measure.  In 2004, I endeavored to create a nursing home at home for my mother, and a new life for myself, as I encouraged Jessica to assume greater responsibilities for helping to manage the household.  She grew into an excellent shopper and cook for us, and was able to maintain her part-time job with animals and her lifelong passion as an artist.

My mother opened up in ways that I never could have imagined before.  While she had the outer persona of "Mrs. Dalloway-Meets-Gracie" ~ she loved a good party ~ her inner "Emily Dickinson" soul was seldom accessible before this time together.  Not to me anyway.  And here she was, suddenly waking up in the mornings reciting poetry, sharing private memories and reflections, and introducing me to whole new inner vistas. While of course she raised me on Old Possum, I had never encountered Eliot's Quartets until 2007.  I thought she was raving deliriously about bin Laden one morning, but she was reciting Abu Ben Adam, by Leigh Hunt. 

Our seven years together as a family of women were some of the most fulfilling, and challenging, of my life.  It was incredibly rich for me ~ a Reiki healer ~ to spend this time doing various therapies with my mother, and learning so much more about her life and thoughts than I ever could have otherwise.  It was stressful at times too, especially after the market crashed and I was concerned about our diminishing resources.

But it was cut too short by her severe stroke in March of 2010.  And losing possession our home of 40 years, which I fell in love when I renovated it after a furnace fire, has been nothing short of traumatic.  It is currently on the market, and I am urgently trying to block its sale.