A Carlin Home Companion (26 page)

I'm not into the whole bullshit angel thing, but I'm not sure what else I'd call the people around us that week. We were held up and together by many spirits weaving love around us. People everywhere swooping in to take care of everything for the memorial. It was as if someone threw a huge safety net down to catch me gracefully as I fell from the highest point. Many hands, arms, and faces caught me, and whispered, It's okay. We are here. We are here. The memorial was shaping up to be more than a remembrance of my mother, my father's wife, the friend, confidante, and hero of hundreds. It was becoming a physical manifestation of Brenda Carlin herself. The many hands worked to create something beautiful, something quite real and yet most intangible—just like her spirit.

*   *   *

Wednesday morning I woke up (still sleeping at my dad's house), and it was gray out. It's what we call June Gloom here in Los Angeles, and it fit my mood perfectly—no cheery fucking sunshine to juxtapose against my grief. In the kitchen as Dad made coffee, I said, “Mom would have woken up in pain today because of the gray. I always felt horrible for her on days like this. I'm glad she no longer has to. Is that wrong?”

Dad stared out the window and nodded his head ever so slightly. “No. Me, too. I think it's okay to be glad the bad parts are over.”

That wasn't the only relief I felt. Woven between my searing rawness was a sense of expansion, as if there was now more space in the world for me. A chunk of my inner hard drive had been erased—one part held the worry for my mom, but the other part held my need to take care of her self-esteem. I was relieved I was no longer in charge of that. I didn't say a word to my dad about those feelings. I felt too guilty to share that one.

On Friday, Dad, Bob, and I went to the funeral home. Why the fuck do you have to do this just days after a person dies? Isn't it difficult enough to face the big bogeyman of death without having to encounter some horribly sincere yet strangely detached man whose only job is to sell you a fancy wooden box? It felt like too much, but still we wanted to have one last good-bye. Mom would be cremated.

We walked into the room that held her, and there she was—in a coffin. My mom was in a coffin. She'd never again get up; never again fill that chair in the kitchen where she, in her nightgown, ate her banana in the morning; never again lie on her side of the bed, where she'd spend endless hours reading detective novels and watching bowling or ice-skating on TV; never again brighten my soul with that laugh, that spectacular laugh.

I looked at her and thought,
She's not here. She's not anywhere
. I tried to let the surreal be real to me.
This stiff body is my mother
. I touched her hand.
I'll never talk to her again
. I kissed her forehead.
She's not here
. I cried. Again.

I slipped a picture of Bob and me holding each other and smiling beneath her cold refrigerated hands to let her know that I was safe and loved and taken care of now. I did this believing full well that she knew that already, because otherwise she never would have left me so soon.

*   *   *

The day of the memorial was eerie. I'd always imagined that when my mom died, they'd have to sedate me and put me in a straitjacket in a rubber room at UCLA Psychiatric Ward. I just knew that I'd fall apart. For years I had dark images of this scenario creep into my mind's eye while I was driving on the 405. But on that morning, I woke up in a state of complete serenity—the kind Zen masters only dream about. Every cell of my body was alive and twitching, yet my center was as solid as the very earth I stood on. I was the earth.

I gathered our family—my father, Bob, Mom's family from Dayton—my aunt Barbara and my cousins, Ginger and Mindy—and Mom's closest friends—Ros, Theresa, and Susan—in a circle in the backyard away from the rest of the guests. I knew we needed to ground ourselves before we faced everyone at the memorial. We all held hands, our eyes closed, and I offered a prayer. Since I didn't know any real prayers, I talked about Mom. I talked about her strength, her unconditional love for everyone, and how
we
were now beacons for this love, and that we were to go out there today, for the rest of our lives, and do her work: Love ourselves and all those we touch—just as she would have done. I finished with, “She is no longer here to care for us, so we must care for ourselves now.”

It was amazing. I was standing there, my feet firmly on the ground, and my heart wide open. It was real. I was real. I was love.

The memorial was out in the garden of my parents' front yard. The same front yard that Bob and I had gotten married in less than two years earlier. My father with Moe, my mom's Maltese, in his arms, along with Bob and me, joined the guests there and sat in the front row. Amid the hundred or so mourners sat a couple of very special guests: a life-size papier-mâché chimp smoking a cigar, sculpted by the Mexican artist Sergio Bustamante; and an enormous stuffed Easter bunny Mom had bought one Easter to sit at the dinner table with us. Later that week I found out that two neighbors had been puzzled by the chimp and bunny sitting amid the empty chairs before the memorial, but I couldn't imagine the day without them. It was essential that the chimp and bunny be there. They were tangible examples of Mom's spirit—her ability to be silly, even during a great tragedy, even during her very own memorial.

When the services began, I felt the reality of grief grip the air. It was overwhelming. But then Kenny Rankin, who'd opened for my dad in the early 1970s, took the stage and sang “When Sunny Gets Blue.” My heart melted. All I could think was,
Shit, man, this is going to be a great fucking memorial.

Kenny, as requested by Dad, was singing Mom's favorite song for her moments of floating melancholy that she was so prone to. The words filled me with such grief, and yet it was so beautiful and perfect for the moment that an enormous joy entered me. There was that realness, that love, showing up again.

Dad got up to speak. His first words were, “Brenda was a stone-cold knockout.” He then told the story of their whirlwind romance, starting at when they met at the Racquet Club. He talked about her taking him home to listen to her “stereo hi-fi,” his unexpected arrival to sweep her off her feet and get engaged, and their years before I was born driving to gigs all across America in their Dodge Dart. Although his voice was full of sadness, there was a glint in his eye and warmth in his heart that took us all back to the night their eyes locked at the bar thirty-seven years earlier in Dayton, Ohio. We were all young, fresh, and untarnished with George and Brenda in that moment.

A few friends, the ones who could manage to speak, got up and revealed the myriad ways Brenda had touched their lives: Her ability to have fun almost anywhere; the importance of buying three of anything—pairs of shoes, sweaters, bras—if you fell in love with it; and how you could confess any transgression to her, because she'd receive it without a twitch of judgment.

And then I got up to speak. I spoke about Mother's Day, and how it would never quite be the same for me, ever again. I spoke of love, and how I now knew that it is the only thing that can survive death. I spoke of my mother's philosophy toward life. I used the words of Joseph Campbell, who described it so eloquently. He talked about how the only way to begin to understand and know the wonder and mystery of life is to accept the monstrous nature of it, too. That there is the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the joy and the suffering, and that's just the way it is. Nothing can change that. And if you think you can change it, you've missed the point. Life is fucked, and the only way to be in this world is to “participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”

That's what my mother did: She participated joyfully in the sorrows of her world.

As I spoke and looked out at the crowd, I could feel the space between everyone, that unique space that's cracked open by death, filled with an unflinching honesty, and where no one needs to hide. I was filled with such exhilaration because I was so tired of hiding—hiding my voice and truth from myself, and the world. I didn't know how, when, or where, but I knew, as I revealed myself to them, who I really was, and what I was here on this earth to do: to stand in front of others and reveal the rawest truth about life.

It sounds strange, but that day was one of the most beautiful days of my life.

And it was the closest I'd ever come to having a plan.

*   *   *

Those flashes of clarity and strength quickly waned. I was flayed by grief. Everything hurt, nothing felt real, and I felt an eerie separation from the rest of the human race. When I watched TV or went out in the world, I couldn't believe that life still marched along. How dare it? I wanted to stop people on the street and say, My mother is dead. How can you go to lunch or pick up the dry cleaning? My mother is DEAD. Have you no heart? Nothing interested me, felt meaningful or worth an effort. I existed somewhere between the living and the dead. I was beyond the veil.

Bob and I went to someone's birthday party the weekend after Mom's memorial. It was mostly filled with strangers. As people found out about what had just happened, I'd get a blank stare, then a “I'm sorry to hear that,” and then they'd retreat. They were afraid it was contagious. I didn't blame them. I'm sure a black hole surrounded me. I wanted to retreat from myself, too.

*   *   *

Six months before Mom died, Bob had signed up for the AIDS ride, a bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles encompassing fifteen hundred riders, one thousand tents, and five hundred miles over seven days. I had signed up to be a crew member so that we could do it together. The ride started on June 1, just three weeks after my mom's death. Although it was the last thing I wanted to do, I also knew it would help me survive those days of existential confusion. I would be so preoccupied with
doing
that the emotions I feared would crush me would have to be kept at bay.

But as I got on the plane to go to San Francisco to join Bob, I thought,
What was I thinking?
My only saving grace was that I was not doing any of the riding. I was on the crew. And thank God the universe sent me another angel—the person running the crew was my former sponsor from Al-Anon. I hadn't spoken to her in nine years, and there she was. Not that anyone could really take care of me in that moment, but she gave great hugs.

I was in shock still—a shell of a human being. I was part of that weird club—I'd lost a parent. When I looked at the people around me, I imagined how many other people had lived through this, and realized that a month earlier I'd never even had that thought. But now I looked at everyone and wondered,
Do they know this pain? This loneliness?

But there's nothing like a thousand gay guys to cheer you up. Every night at dinner there was a cavalcade of drag queens with amazing outfits.
Where did they
pack
this stuff?
I wondered. I barely had enough room for shorts and T-shirts for seven days in the one suitcase they allowed us. How does one pack a different sequined gown and headdress for a whole week?

My crew assignment was easy enough—every day we were to take down the signs, move them to the next camp, and put them up. Or it would have been easy if we'd had the right tools and experience, and the wind hadn't been blowing 20–30 mph most days. We had none of those. Every day we reinvented the wheel. By the third day I wanted to go home. Sleeping in a tent city, peeing in overflowing porta-potties, and worrying about Bob being mowed down by semitrucks on the highway was taking its toll. More than once I thought about using the dead-mother-get-out-of-work card so I could leave, but then I'd see some guy with HIV get on his bike to ride another seventy-five miles, and I told myself to hang on.

On our second-to-last night at Lake Cachuma, we were all physically and emotionally stretched. I was standing in line for dinner when a woman came up to me and told me that my dad was looking for me. I frantically searched through the camp looking for him. I scanned the tent city, the dining hall, and then ran out to the lake's entrance, but he was nowhere. I had missed him. He had looked for me for more than an hour in the sea of people and tents, and never found me. This was one of the biggest acts of love I'd ever felt from my dad. He rarely gave up his day for anyone else, and never did anything spontaneous, and yet he had on that day, just to say hi. I burst into tears when I realized that I had just missed him.

He missed me. He needed me.

A week later, when my dad told me that he needed to travel to Boston and New York for a few weeks for his book tour, I knew I had to go with him. On the outside I was a thirty-four-year-old married woman. On the inside, I was a lost little girl who needed her daddy. I wanted to be near him, hear his voice, and witness his thinking. Soak in his daddyness. The three-, seven-, and ten-year-old who had felt abandoned by him all those decades ago needed to clutch at his presence. I felt like I would finally get the time with him I'd always craved, and that this was my path to finding my way home to myself.

While on the trip, I escorted him to radio shows, morning talk shows, and book signings. I felt one orbit closer to him. Sometimes we talked about Mom, other times we watched TV together, but mostly we took in each other's presence and allowed it to heal us. I almost felt like his equal. Although my mom's presence was palpable in every breath I took, his daddy glow felt like it was keeping me from falling apart completely. I let it fill me up.

*   *   *

In the months that followed I ping-ponged between depression and motivation, confusion and clarity, and never knew what the day would bring emotionally. The grief was so intense that on some days I just slept all day. When my mom was alive we would talk once or twice a day on the phone. Her absence was sometimes so hard to accept that I would pick up the phone and pretend to call her. I'd have imaginary conversations with her about the impossible reality that she was now gone: