My Mother
I first began writing it as a story about my mother being struck by a brain tumor and the how she dealt with the impact of this tragedy. But as I was writing the first episode I began to realize the memoir could be much more than that. I could use the last year of my mother's life as a narrative spine from which a series of flashbacks would sprout to tell a more expansive story of my family.
The climax of the saga would be the last week of my mother's life, which she spent in my bedroom before dying with my sister and me at her side.
I hit upon this approach four years ago, while visiting my mother's home town in Ireland. It was Easter in Blessington, a small farming community just south of Dublin. On Sunday I climbed the bell tower of our family church, pulled the rope, and rang the bell for my Mom. It was a profoundly moving experience.
My mother is the hero of The Birds That Fly Backwards. She was the one who held the family together. She endured my father's emotional abuse and shielded her children from the many nasty ways in which he betrayed her. My mother forced my father to strike a bargain to save their marriage. For the sake of the children. That phrase has become a cliche. But reducing it to a cliche denies the painful emotions associated with such a pact.
My sister and I benefited enormously from this arrangement. My father also benefited. He had a domineering personality. If you walked into our home in the 1960s you would think my father ran the entire show and needed nothing from anybody. But in fact he desperately needed the emotional equilibrium my mother provided. If they had divorced, Dad would have fallen apart. He knew that, which is one reason why he kept rebelling and trying to prove he did not need Mom.
When my father turned 65, my mother revealed she had saved a bunch of money while working as a secretary in an architect's office. She offered to take Dad on a trip anywhere in the world. My father said he wanted to go to Guadalcanal, where he had fought as a Marine during World War Two. And so they went, in 1986. Once there, Dad broke down and confessed he had lost his identity and emotional equilibrium in the war. Mom held him and promised to help him regain his stability. No other woman would have had the tenacity and empathy to do that for someone who had often been so cruel to her.
That was my mother's most important gift to me. Empathy. She always tried to see the good in other people. She never judged them. She approached everyone with an open heart. As a writer that has been one of my fundamental principals: to approach every character I write about with empathy, an open heart, and to try to understand them rather than pass judgment on them. My mother taught me that.
She took me by the hand when I was two and led me along the beach so I could set foot in the ocean for the first time. She loved the ocean. In family photos and home movies if a body of water appears in the frame, you will find my mother turned toward it. "It brings me such peace," she used to say. She would inhale the sea breeze and you could feel the visceral effect as it filled her with quiet ecstasy.
Every morning and night I walk along the cliff in Malibu and pass the bench she used to sit on during her last year on this planet. I look out at the ocean where her ashes now swirl and I think of her. Sometimes I talk to her, expressing gratitude for all she did for me and my sister.
Her family came from Ireland to start a new life in America. She couldn't afford to go to college, so she became an American Airline stewardess instead because it was one of the few jobs in the 1950s that gave women a measure of independence and financial freedom. My father had not even graduated from high school. But together Gloria and James Weddle grabbed hold of the opportunities of the post World War Two boom and managed to put both of their children through college to provide them with opportunities Gloria and Jim never had.
Whatever their shortcomings, that remains a stunning achievement.
