CityView Magazine

10 | May/June 2019 I M C F A D Y E N ' S M U S I N G S A Letter from Mom BY BILL MCFADYEN I t has been five years since I told her "Happy Mother's Day." I doubt she remembered the last one, as dementia had eroded her ability to retain things. In fact, during those last few "Happy Mother's Days," she was struggling to appear composed hour by hour, while inside she was embattled with the forces for and against reason and reflection and purpose. At the time of that very last salutation to be happy because she had fulfilled her ultimate life's goal of being an effective mother to three boys, escorting them into manhood with her expectation that we protect our name with good deeds and our souls with constant faith, she was anything but happy. ere was absolutely nothing that any of us could do to reverse or rectify that. She knew on some level that the universe in which she existed was at best tangential to ours. She strove to re-enter ours, while in fact it only worked to any degree when we made the effort to live inside hers. Wherever she was that day, whatever town, whatever year, whatever reality, we had to try to assimilate into it with her. It was joyless travel for everyone. For the first few years aer my mom died, I have told people that I was struck by my inability to really miss her. ough I was never a total stranger to her, I was no longer the son in whom she found joy for my mostly-staged outlandishness. She raised us to fit with and inside of the original universe. I spent a lot of time "tormenting" her with my committed bachelorism and my shanty dwellings and my emigration to Hawaii for a couple of years. She pleaded with me in opposition to all of these, but deep down, she liked it. She maybe even loved it. But I did not miss her. I think that because we lost so much of her in those last few years, it was a relief that she found her way out of here two weeks aer Mother's Day for no explicable reason. She was not sick with the flu. She did not have a racing heartbeat or shortness of breath. She was whatever normal for her had become. Yet fieen days aer Mother's Day and fourteen days aer the death of our dad (no longer her husband but now her dear friend with whom she shared the successful history of raising three sons), she simply did not wake up. As I said, for several years, I did not miss her. is whole recreational writing thing started for me in 1983 as I was a few months before graduating college. It was really not I that started it. It was Andy McRee, who wrote a Captain's log (a James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise-style log) chronicling a road trip with pals to (I think) a concert at P.B. Scott's in Blowing Rock. It was hysterical and (for me) inspirational. So I started my own. I kept it all through the rest of that school year and the following summer in Fayetteville. It was on the den table in Maui until 1985. It came all the way across the country aer I bought the Ford truck in Bellingham, Washington.

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