Dogs Get Mad; People Get Angry (Two Doors and a Window Part 1)
“Two Doors and a Window” is a series of essays that I wrote in 2020.
“That’s the burden of having a parent. They haven’t a clue what they’re doing. And every mistake they make chips away at us. As we get older, we got to glue the pieces back together. And we can blame them, but here’s the thing. They’re human. They make mistakes.”
When my mother died, I was in the room. When my father died, I was on a plane.
When my mother, Meryl, died, I was 29. When my father, Harvey died, I was 43.
Next April will be 20 years since Meryl died. As I lean toward 50, the fact that I never got to know my mother as an adult is a thing that whispers to me from the cracks in my skin, as my female friends bemoan their mother’s off-base birthday gifts, tossed-off insults, and embarrassing social media posts. I am not an angry person — I was when I was a teen and hormones lit confusing pathways through my system, lighting fireballs aimed at Meryl and her husband, Sid — but in general I am mild, more likely to over-interrogate myself than to shake a fist at the world and all the people in it. But now, when people complain about the mothers, more often than not… I get so mad.
Gypsy and harlequin (1947) by Remedios Varo
Meryl would always say, “dogs get mad, people get angry.” It was just a thing she said. And yet I associate madness with mental illness and anger with rage, which I suppose is exactly what she intended. It worked. As far as madness goes, in my 20s I read in Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing that “you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” There are many quotes like that in the book, many signposts that say that writers who don’t write will go crazy. As I have come to know my own anxiety, I have come to forgive myself for not writing every day. But I have never forgiven myself for not writing about my mother’s death. There are only the emotional records, never parsed with reasonable, processing fingers on the page. And now, as my friends get to know their mothers’ personality tics through the lenses of their own experience in a way I never will, sadness and rage and confusion and more sadness hiss like warming magma from the fissures that have formed over the years, ossified by my lack of looking.
For all these years I have tried not to linger on how her death — and the small insurance settlement and the sale of her house, all split among me and my siblings — fueled my second move out to California, the one that stuck where the first one didn’t, the one that got me making music and shadow puppetry and finding a writing community and getting a husband and even a dog, for crying out loud. It was a sad fact that I occasionally acknowledged but never really examined. The day she died is there, too. (Or was it night? Hospitals don’t tell time.) The day she died is another thing that stays slightly fluid beneath me. It’s nothing I want to heat up and let flow out into the light.
