Recently, I was watching the video that you surprised me with on my twenty-first birthday, back when I was still in college and just finishing my junior year. (You’d orchestrated dinner for nine at a floating restaurant in New Jersey: you and Shirley, her boys and their wives, Rachel and Chris and I. I have no recollection of what we ate but I’m assuming that, being 1984, it involved gigantic white chargers and squiggles of balsamic glaze and an architectural dessert made of royal blue spun sugar. I do remember wearing a gray cotton Esprit pants suit with shoulder pads and you introducing me to someone that night as my daughter, Terry Bradshaw.)
At the end of dinner, you slipped me a wrapped VHS tape: you’d gone through all of our home movies and on a splicing machine that I have no memory of you owning, pasted together a mosaic of our lives. There you were, bathing me in the kitchen sink when I was a few days old. There were Mom and Gaga, pushing me in a stroller at the World’s Fair. There was the trip to California when I was seven, and my third birthday party at Jahn’s with the neighborhood kids and their parents, many of them gone now, and a few frames of me running around the playground while Mom glared furiously at your camera, enraged by something, I’m not sure what, and you kept filming. Her silent fury — the furrowed brow, the cold glare — was unmistakable. Since you first gave me the tape, I’ve watched it hundreds of times but I never knew whether you, safe from the vantage point of photographer documenting our little world, simply hadn’t noticed Mom’s rancor, or if you’d purposely included the clip because you wanted me to know that this, too, was a part of our every day and a thread woven into the fiber of who we were. That along with the joy that we’re anxious to show off to the rest of the world is sorrow, that they are companions, that one cannot possibly exist without the other.
Donald Hall, who you would have liked, says that contradiction is the cellular structure of life. I can’t disagree, and in the fifteen years since we last were together, I’ve learned to live with joy and difficulty, often — okay; usually — in the same breath. Before you left, I would have fought it tooth and nail, always thinking that I could have re-ordered the ways of the universe. But I couldn’t, and neither could you.
So much has happened over these last fifteen years: I’ve published two memoirs and am working on a third. There have been awards and nice publications. I’ve had great jobs and left bad ones. I have dear friends — kind, talented, loving, immensely generous people — in my life, and other friends who I’ve had to part ways with. We lost Susan’s mother a few years back, and Harris in 2008, but you probably know that. Your big sister turned ninety-nine this year. Susan and I have both had the kind of health crises and scares that are inevitable with middle age. I’ve been trying to take care of my mother since her accident back in December, despite the ongoing rancor that I know you remember so well. One night, over a martini-drenched steak dinner in Manhattan, long after you divorced her, you promised me that someday I would be faced with the challenge of having to let my humanity and compassion override years of enmity and resentment; I would be faced with the job of taking care of her at the possible detriment of my own health. That I would have to sustain and nurture both of us.
