Staring down into the cracks

I had a couple of conversations with Mimi in the summer of 2000, when I was in Vermont immediately after my divorce, that made me so uncomfortable. I remember sitting at the dining room table with her and my mother, and we talked about how easy it can be to act like a doormat, how many people (mostly women, in my experience) will let others steamroll over us because we feel that we don't deserve any better and that we had be damn grateful for whatever crumbs of love we get, being entirely unlovable.

I don't remember Mimi's words exactly: just a frustrated gesture and her referring to herself as a "doormat" in a cracked voice that spoke of hurt and frustration. And this was a heaviness on my heart after that, because I love Gogo so, and because it was shocking to see Mimi so upset.

I thought about this while we sat around reading her journals. The last few were often sad: she didn't enjoy going blind, of course, or feeling weak and ill a lot of the time. As I said to my sister, it was the same process we all go through when we stop thinking of our parents as the tall guardians of our childhood and learn to see them as people in their own right, with cracks and messy bits. I hadn't seen much of Mimi's messy bits. She nearly always bore even the worst things with a brave (and usually cheerful) public face.

But we learned now very much it meant to her to sing to all of her grandchildren. She called it "the greatest blessing of my life."

We learned that when she was alone, she sang all day long, not caring how she sounded, and I will always be glad to know that.

And she wrote about how much she missed Gogo after he died, how hard it was to do without him. In that minute I learned that the long-ago conversation was more complicated (of course) than I had bothered to think, that I did not need to carry that heaviness around anymore.