When I was thirty-three my mother wrote asking me to be the executor of her will. She always was a great letter writer, and refused to use the telephone for long distance calls, even after I urged her to call collect. At least once each month I would find a small envelope in my mailbox with her perfect handwriting. Sometimes I\u2019d get three in a week. She\u2019d long ago stopped asking me to visit, focusing instead on reporting to me the mundane daily events of her life and those in the small Rhode Island town where I grew up and she still lived. At times, and especially toward the end, she\u2019d write to me about my father and our relationships with him, which she knew was the main reason I lived thousands of miles away.<\/p>\n
In the months before her death, she\u2019d written that the doctors had told her she was in full remission, and that a recurrence was unlikely. So when I received her letter hinting that things were worse than she\u2019d been letting on, I wasn\u2019t exactly prepared to drop everything and go see her. She hadn\u2019t come right out and said, \u201cI\u2019m dying,\u201d but I did wonder. I debated with my wife for a day and a night about what to do. My mother and I had been estranged for years, since before my father\u2019s passing, and my home there seemed a remote and forgettable memory. It was where I was from, but not where I was going.<\/p>\n
If my friends in Phoenix asked me where I grew up, I\u2019d say \u201cback east\u201d as if I were answering their question with a question of my own. Should I have gone home or not? It wasn\u2019t that I hated the place, or that I didn\u2019t love my mother as much as any other son. I felt, though, that life seemed to pull me in a direction away from that place, and I did nothing to resist it.<\/p>\n
Was she dying? Yes. Would she die soon? I couldn\u2019t say, and I wasn\u2019t sure I wanted to think about it. In her last letter, she\u2019d written about our family, especially my father: \u201cPeter, sometimes fathers and sons don\u2019t ever become friends like they should. Maybe it\u2019s because they were too much alike and never realized it. Or maybe it was because one of them, the father or the son, didn\u2019t have enough of himself to go around.\u201d<\/p>\n
She went on to talk about Frankie, the brother I never knew. \u201cI pray every day for both of them, Frankie and your father, and although I miss them terribly, I have no great desire to leave this life.\u201d With age she grew less able to distinguish last year from twenty years ago. I\u2019m sure, too, the illness clouded her memories. She wrote about the past as if it were the day before. \u201cWhen you came home from that fight with your face cut up, your mouth bleeding, your clothes all dirty, I wanted to go and find the boy that did it to you. Your father and I worried about you the way you\u2019d left the house. Yes, your father worried too.\u201d I imagined, as I read it, how she must have looked while writing the letter, hunched over in her bed, frail hands grasping the pen, an effort in every stroke.<\/p>\n
As a teenager, and even into my twenties, having seen how my brother\u2019s death had affected her, I believed my mother was weak. When my father passed, I was much too engulfed in my own rebellion to recognize how much strength she actually possessed. I blamed them both for my never really getting to know my father, and I never forgave them for going to Italy without me the year before my father\u2019s death. This might sound petty now, but I really thought that inviting me would at least have given me a chance of some relationship with them both. I was graduating high school then, unsure of my future, and prone, like many that age, to blame my parents for my discomfort with the world.<\/p>\n
This residue dulled my instincts toward family obligations. I decided not to go home yet, convinced she would still be there when I did. The further I immersed myself in my architectural practice, the more convinced I was that my contentment lay somewhere within the homes I designed.<\/p>\n
At that time, I had to finish designing a four-thousand-square-foot residence in Scottsdale, my biggest project to date. The client, a Texas oilman named Cobb, wanted to prove he could outfit his home in Arizona with as much Texas as possible. He fancied himself a 20th century Vanderbilt, but instead of importing Italian marble and Renaissance paintings, he\u2019d commissioned an Austin sculptor to create a work of art for the entryway. The only instructions he\u2019d given was that the sculpture must incorporate a barrel of Texas crude and a football helmet from Texas A&M.<\/p>\n
I wrote my mother that I\u2019d come to see her as soon as I could, and I hoped she\u2019d understand. But a few days later, as I sat down to go over the plumbing specs with my Texan, I got a phone call from a doctor named Lardner telling me to hurry.<\/p>\n
I prepared for the trip immediately. I\u2019d been living with my wife, Rebecca, in a rented house at the base of Camelback Mountain. She\u2019d grown up in Idaho, and had never been east of Chicago, but we fit well together because she\u2019d saved me from trying to climb the corporate ladder in L.A. (She pointed out that my suits never fit.) In return, I\u2019d convinced her she should teach, like she\u2019d always wanted. So I got my Master\u2019s in architecture, and we moved to Phoenix when Rebecca got a teaching job at a high school there.<\/p>\n
To be fair, until the call from Dr. Lardner, my conversations with Rebecca about my family history had given her no desire to meet my mother. She knew I still had resentments. Though we\u2019d talked often about me flying home for a visit, we had never seriously considered Rebecca joining me. So when I broached the topic, she didn\u2019t hesitate.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to meet your mother now, Peter. What good would that do? The poor woman\u2019s dying; she won\u2019t want me there. Who would stay here and pander to Cobb? And what about the other jobs?\u201d<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t answer. We stood in my office on a Saturday morning drinking iced coffee, a worn copy of Cobb\u2019s house plans on the design table.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not being selfish, honey,\u201d her tone had softened. She rubbed my shoulder while she spoke. \u201cAll I\u2019m saying is that it\u2019s bad timing. One of us should be here.\u201d Sometimes her pragmatism struck me as downright meanness. I needed to stay, but I had to go. This was Thursday, and I could get a red-eye flight that would allow me to be at my mother\u2019s side by Friday morning. So that\u2019s what I did.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, I buried her…<\/p>\n
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