I thought I could bang out a column today – a regular column, a column about my readers’ problems and their freaky fetishes and all those asshole politicians out there. You know, the usual. The day my son was born, I managed to slip out of the maternity ward and write a column; I wrote one the day I was indicted by the state of Iowa for licking Gary Bauer’s doorknobs. I’ve written columns on days that I was dumped and on the morning of 9/11. So I figured that I could bang out a column today.
I opened my laptop and started reading your letters. I love reading your letters – I do. But I couldn’t get into it. I just don’t have a column in me this week. I’m disappointed in myself. I write this column at Ann Landers’s desk, for crying out loud, and the old lady banged out a heartbreaking, truncated column when her marriage collapsed. If Landers could bang one out under that kind of emotional strain, then I could damn well bang one out, too. Just do it, right? Just fucking do it. But I just fucking can’t.
My mother died on Monday.
Perhaps a sex-advice column isn’t an appropriate place to eulogize an articulate, elegant woman, a practicing Catholic named for the patron saint of hopeless causes and, perhaps consequently, a Cubs fan. I mean, really. Eulogizing my mother back here with the escort ads? So let’s not think of this as a eulogy. Let’s think of it as a thank-you note, the kind of nicety that my mother appreciated.
Forgive the cliché: My mom gave me so much. She gave me life, of course, and some other stuff besides: her sense of humor, her bionic bullshit detectors, her colossal sweet tooth. She also gave me her unconditional love. Long after I came out, she told me she always suspected that I might be gay; I was the quiet one, the boy who liked Broadway musicals and baking cakes and shared her passion for Strauss waltzes. But my parents were Catholic and religious and it somehow still came as a shock when I told them. My mother came around fast and she came out swinging – rainbow stickers on her car, a PFLAG membership card in her wallet and an ultimatum delivered to the whole family: Anyone who had a problem with me had a problem with her.
But the real reason I feel compelled to thank her in this space, back here with the escort ads, is because I wouldn’t have it if it weren’t for her.
My mother, as my brother Bill likes to say, made friends like Rockefeller made money and George W. Bush makes mistakes – and she was that friend you confided in and went to for advice. I was a mama’s boy – hello – and I spent a great deal of time in my mother’s kitchen listening to her tell her friends exactly what they needed to do. Sometimes gently, sometimes brusquely, always with a dose of humor. My mom liked to say that her son got paid to do something that she did for free – and isn’t that the way the world works? Women cook, men are chefs; women are housewives, men are butlers; she gave advice, I got paid to give advice.
So I want to thank my mom. I wouldn’t be writing this column today if it weren’t for her gifts and her ability to find the humor in even the most serious of subjects.
Even death, even her own.
After a long struggle, we had to go into my mother’s hospital room and tell her that nothing more could be done. She didn’t go into the hospital expecting to die and she was not ready go. But she took the news with her characteristic grace. She said her farewells, asked us never to forget her (as if) and paused for a moment. Then Mom lifted an eyebrow, shrugged and said …
“Shit.”
My mother wasn’t crude; I didn’t get my foul mouth from her. She used profanity sparingly and then only in quotation marks. When she said “shit” on her deathbed, we understood the joke. What she meant was:
“Now, the kind of person who casually uses profanity might be inclined to say ‘shit’ at a moment like this. But I’m not the kind of person who casually uses profanity – certainly not at a moment like this. But if I were the kind of person who casually used profanity, ‘shit’ might be the word I would use right now. If I were that kind of person. Which I’m not.”
Everyone gathered around her bed knew what Mom wanted: She wanted us to laugh. This woman, so full of life, who wanted so badly to live, having just been told she would not, was trying to lift our spirits. (“Shit,” for the record, wasn’t her last word. Those were just for the family.)
Anyway, my mom is dead, and I am not in the mood, as she used to say. (“You are so,” one of us kids would usually respond. “You’re in a bad mood.”) So I’m going to take a week or two off from the column and the podcast, hang out with the boyfriend and the kid, and burst into tears in coffee shops and grocery stores. I’ll run some greatest hits in this space while I’m away and then I’ll be back, just as filthy-minded as ever. In lieu of flowers, please send pictures of your boyfriends’ rear ends. (Lesbians may send flowers.) If you’re the donation-making type and you’re so inclined, my mother would be pleased to see some of your money flow to PFLAG (www.pflag.org) or the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation (www.pulmonaryfibrosis.org).
Shit.
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