Brenda Cullerton - The Nearly Departed: Or, My Family and Other Foreigners

Copyright 2003 by Brenda Cullerton

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First eBook Edition: September 2009

Map illustration by Joel Holland

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Childrens Publishing Division from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Copyright 1908, 1937, 1953 Charles Scribners Sons; copyrights renewed.

Clarkson N. Potter, an imprint of Random House, Inc., for use of a sentence from The Fearful Void by Geoffrey Moorhouse.

ISBN: 978-0-316-08459-8

A darkly hilarious memoir about the final passage in the lives of the authors wildly eccentric parentsa journey to the impenetrably remote and foreign land of her own backyard

Brenda Cullertons parents were always a bit strange. Her mother gardened in curlers, pop-it beads, and black baggy underwear and was so afraid of lightning that she slept in rubber boots. Her greatest disappointment in life was the fact that her husband became a wealthy businessman, an entrepreneur who eventually took to hiding wads of cash in the toes of moldy old shoes in the barn.

This was a family to escape fromand Brenda did.

But when she starts making trips home to care for her mother and father in their last year, Brenda finds that advancing age and illness have made their earlier behaviors seem downright normal. She also finds a concrete wall dividing her mothers house in two, a brother living in a tar-paper shack on the lawn, a seventy-one-year-old pot-smoking uncle planning to shoot Canada geese down at the pond, and a barefoot caregiver/nurse from Ghana who weeds with a very large machete and dreams of hunting local bush meat.

After years of traveling the world, Brenda Cullerton comes home to the strangest land shes ever visited and discovers that it is loving, not leaving, that saves her. Equal parts humor and heartbreak, The Nearly Departed is a love letter to parents, family, and homehowever strange they may be.

Brenda Cullerton is an occasional ghostwriter who continues to develop slogans for the sometimes fickle world of fashion. She has also written several books on interiors and the home.

Geoffrey Beene: The Anatomy of His Work

A Home for All Seasons

Time at Home

For Richard, Jack, and Nora

And though it might well be that I should be drawn across the desert by the prospect of an explorers crown, I also knew that, more powerfully still, I would in truth be propelled by my own fears.

Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Fearful Void

F OR THE FIRST TIME IN OVER TWENTY YEARS, MOMS bedroom windows are open. Shes always hated light and air. Its 7:30 on a Saturday morning, and Im holding her hand. Leaning in to listen to what I keep thinking might be her last words, I cant believe what I hear out in the yard:

Ill give you four bucks for the lawn chairs.

Tell you what. Give me six, and Ill throw in the picnic table.

Deal!

Its Mothers tenant, Stan the man who lives on the other side of the wall in her house. Hes having a tag sale.

When people say death is difficult to describe or imagine, I dont think this is what they have in mind. With half the town of Ridgefield double-parked on our front lawn and total strangers wandering around our backyard, haggling and hauling away early-bird bargains, I wonder how I could ever have hoped this would be a moment in the life of my family that other human beings could relate to a moment like in the movies or in novels when children gather quietly around their mothers bedside, weeping and whispering private good-byes.

What the hell is going on over there? asks Gail when I pick up the phone. An otherwise unflappable friend and neighbor from across the street, she sounds dumbfounded. Have you seen the sign at the end of your driveway?

Yes, Gail. Ive seen it. Im finally howling, not just with rage and despair but with raucous laughter. My mothers life has been one of such exaggerated horror and humor, the fact her final departure is marked by a huge hand-painted sign outside the house that reads EVERYTHING MUST GO! MOVING SALE! is almost poetic in its perfection.

Steeling myself up to step back into her room, I spray the air around me with essence of lavender, a scent that from now on I will associate only with disguising the smell of death. Moms mouth is open like a baby birds, waiting to be fed. Her silver hair, which for years lay hidden beneath a blue cotton bandanna tied like a refugees beneath her chin, is neatly braided into pigtails. I dont know where Im going, she says over and over again. I dont know where Im going.

Placing my hands over hers to still her trembling, I dip a cotton ball into a bowl of her favorite Marcus Dairy peppermint-stick ice cream (hand-packed, of course) and squeeze. Weve melted the ice cream and mixed it with double her usual dose of Xanax. Without a few drops on her tongue every hour, Mother would suffer the agonies of physical withdrawal. What irony, I mutter to myself. And what an absurd and futile gesture. Because it is withdrawal, not from pills or drugs but from the world, thats killed my mother.

Mom at nineteen in Danbury, Connecticut

W HEN THE WEATHERS BAD, MOM GETS IN THE CAR and backs up to visit Dad. Its about fifty feet in reverse from her house to his, behind the garage. I dont know which is more dangerous her driving or her walking. A month ago, she hit a tree. This was right after Christmas. She says it got in the way when she swerved off the road to avoid a jogger. A jogger with antlers? asked Eric, my brothers fifteen-year-old son. Mom has a tendency to see things, not just because she wears three pairs of glasses, one on top of the other, but because her vision, her perception of the world, is so brilliantly impaired.

Mother detests joggers. When they first arrived in the neighborhood with their 4 4s and custom-built billion-dollar tract houses, Mom would follow alongside them in her car, beeping the horn and yelling: What are you? Nuts? Youre going to die of a heart attack, mister. Go home. Joggers were put in the same loathsome category as everything else that signified change: chvre, arugula, color television, even landing on the moon.

Why would anyone ever want to go to the moon? This was said with total disdain and amazement at a time when the whole country was euphoric about our conquest of outer space. For the next thirty years, Mom would repeat that same rhetorical question, replacing the word moon with Italy, England, France, Russia, Greenwich in short, any destination her children or her husband were headed for that was beyond Ridgefield or Danbury, her hometown, twelve miles away. Mothers mind has always been willing to wander a great deal farther than the rest of her.