by Liz Phair
I kept watching to see if her limbs moved or her eyelids fluttered, but she was basically gone. Sprouting from her jaw were a couple of seven-inch-long chin hairs that quivered every time she exhaled. I wanted to pluck them so badly. She’d always been very vain about her appearance and had even walked in a local fashion show at age seventy-five. But I wasn’t about to cause her pain in her final moments. Let the mortician deal with that, I thought. To me, it seemed like evidence of neglect, and I was much chillier the next time one of the nurses came in to check on us. I booted her out of the room before she had a chance to waste any more of my precious time.
Winnie never woke up again. By dinnertime, everyone had arrived. We ordered food and stayed up late, talking and laughing in the next room. If she could hear anything, I imagine it sounded exactly like one of those joyful gatherings in the past when we ate sumptuous meals together and took drinks in the living room, reveling in one another’s company. Those were the days when her first husband—my mother’s father—was still alive, as was her son. I would say we did a pretty convincing pantomime of some of the happiest times in her life. We all went back to our hotels at about 1:00 A.M., and she passed away sometime between our departure and dawn. I can easily believe she waited to slip away quietly, not wanting to bother anyone.
On the flight back to L.A., all my emotions bubbled up unexpectedly. The in-flight movie was Finding Neverland, a tearjerker about the inspiration behind the book Peter Pan. I was overcome watching Johnny Depp’s character, the author J. M. Barrie, encourage the imaginations of the young Llewelyn Davies boys, who had just lost their father. I thought about how Winnie cultivated my imagination, and how it was an integral part of who I became. She was responsible for so much that I’d been able to do and express as an artist. Her property in Indian Hill was my Neverland, and I hadn’t made that connection until it was too late to thank her.
I started bawling in my seat, crying silently. My shoulders heaved, and my face was wet. I kept dabbing at my eyes with cocktail napkins. I put my sunglasses on in the darkened cabin and sat there, a wreck, blowing my nose every two minutes. I was helpless to stanch the flow of feelings that poured out of me. The other first-class passengers were unnerved by my outburst. Somebody passed me more napkins. The other passengers in my aisle kept their gazes deliberately forward, but I knew they must be thinking I was taking the movie a little hard.
Something had gotten jostled loose in me with Winnie’s passing, something that had been blocked, and now I couldn’t stop crying. In the days after, I became emotional at the drop of a hat. Sentimental. Regretful. In awe of the power of love. Horrified that I couldn’t have Winnie back. It became a joke between my boyfriend and me, because I was not sad, I was just feeling. He would come over and find me crying while I was cooking. Or a TV commercial would set me off. I knew in my heart that what I really couldn’t accept was the act of dying itself. I was crying over the fact that everyone I loved had to die. I was crying because dying had to be a part of living.
One night, about a week later, I had an intense dream. I was kneeling before an altar, looking at Winnie on her deathbed. She was swaddled in a blanket, but sitting up, drinking a glass of fizzy Airborne cold medicine that my mother had just poured for her. I heard Mom say, “Mother, you looked so good! Even in death, you were adorable.” Winnie seemed pleased, but I felt separated from them, like I was watching this tableau from another reality. The sheets from Winnie’s bed extended all the way down to the floor and flowed over the altar, spreading beneath me like a field of snow. I wished I could share in their happiness.
I felt a presence over my left shoulder, a wise and spiritually enlightened being. I was not allowed to look at him, but he said four words to me, and just like that, I was cured. He used simple language, something a human could understand, to describe a much more complex and nuanced truth about the universe: “There is no death.” I didn’t cry the next day, or the next, or ever again in the same manner. Since then, I have trust in my bones that Winnie’s okay, that we’re all okay.
My own parents are aging now. They’re the ones who need help crossing icy patches of sidewalk and getting in and out of cars. They’re preparing to move into a retirement community soon. I’m the one who’s urging my grown son to spend time with them on the weekends while he’s at school in Chicago. I can’t make him understand, anymore than my parents could make me see at his age, what an opportunity and a gift it is to soak up the presence of your grandparents, while they’re still here. He loves Mimi and Poppy, and he spends a lot of time with them, but he doesn’t yet relate to the profound forces of love at work within these intergenerational relationships. He’s not supposed to. He’s young.
I go with my parents to hear a lecture on North Korea at the Fortnightly of Chicago. I’m in town for the week, staying at a hotel in the Loop near my son’s dorm. He’s already tired of seeing me, so I find myself at loose ends and invite myself to tag along with Mom and Dad. I love the old Lathrop House on Bellevue Place. Nick’s father and I were married there. The Georgian-style mansion was built in 1892 as a private residence and sold to the Fortnightly in 1922. It has an old-world glamour that is increasingly rare in the modern age.
When I arrive, the pre-lecture cocktail party is in full swing. Men in sport coats and women in colorful suits and scarves are milling about downstairs. The library reeks of Scotch. I spot my elderberries among the sea of white-hairs and join their conversation. I talk with a very interesting couple about 3-D printing, and their grandson’s inappropriate attire in this year’s Christmas card. I tell them he’s my hero. I’m the youngest person present by at least twenty years, and certainly the only one wearing black fishnet stockings. The bartender and I exchange glances every so often to keep it real.
When it’s time to take our seats in the ballroom, I notice how many people are having difficulty walking through and finding their seats, including my father. I’ve reached an age where I don’t see older adults as a separate category anymore. I see them as upperclassmen with motility issues. They’re distinct people to me now, some awesome, some annoying. I do notice my own strength in comparison, though. I’m aware that my muscles are full and smooth, that my hair is shiny and thick. We are all destined to fade, but tonight, I admire the fortitude and the level of engagement it took some of the people around me to come downtown on a cold winter’s night—to hear a talk about a part of the world that is more germane to America’s future than its past. It shows interest in a geopolitical reshuffling they may not live to see.
Indeed, when I look at them, really look, I can imagine the women in ponytails, bobby socks, and saddle shoes, the men with their hair slicked back and their shirtsleeves rolled up—all of them going to a dance at a local gymnasium. They were young once, too. And though they may not have come here tonight for the sex, it’s clear that they still care about what they look like, enjoy being seen and, more important, known by one another. It’s so beautiful that it makes me want to cry. We do our best throughout our lives with our ever-changing bodies, but we’re always the same people inside, whether we’re eighty-two, forty-nine, twenty, or five.
The lecture is disappointing. I can tell the speaker thinks of himself as a hard-hitting journalist, à la Christiane Amanpour, but he’s really one of those guys who will tell you he’s a spy when he gets drunk enough. He’s probably been working on the same “explosive” book for a decade. It’s plain from his lack of preparedness that he thinks he can phone this one in and collect an easy paycheck. He’s grossly underestimated his audience. The caliber of their intellect is entirely lost on him. He sees a bunch of rich old geezers who’ve been out of the game for years. I see a group of people who still care about a world that rarely cares about them. As one professional gigger to another, I’m thinking he can go fuck himself. I’m not even sure he’s sober.
My dad starts coughing. He snuck his bourbon into the ballroom, and he’s acciden
tally inhaled some. His face turns purple as he tries to suppress a cough. The speaker is droning on at the lectern, and Dad is stubbornly refusing to deal with his problem. We offer him sips of water, which he turns down. A woman in front of him offers him a stick of chewing gum. He takes it, unwraps it, pops it in his mouth, and keeps on coughing. Soon, lozenges are passed down the row of seats. These Dad also declines. He’s actually enjoying his sudden celebrity, oblivious to the fact that other people aren’t enjoying the noise. After two minutes of his intermittent hacking, both Mom and I give him dirty looks and suggest, separately, that he might want to step out of the room for a second, but he takes our orders for suggestions and waves us off.
“No, no, I’m fine.” He shakes his head, grinning and crossing his arms like a ten-year-old, slouching jauntily in his seat. Mom rolls her eyes. I can see I’m going to have to take one for the team.
“Dad,” I whisper under my breath, “go outside. You’re bothering people.”
He gives me a look of wounded surprise, as if it never occurred to him that that would be the polite thing to do, and storms out like we’ve voted him off the island.
“Jesus Christ,” he mutters on his way out. “I just inhaled the wrong way.”
Dad is adorable, but he cannot handle criticism.
Seeing my father exit, another tall gentleman decides to make a break for it, too. He gets up out of his seat and walks shakily down the aisle to the back of the room. He probably only needs to use the restroom, an urge as unassailable as any, but forgets that he’s no longer the master of his own ship. He’s terribly unsteady on his feet and, within three steps, has snagged his toe on the carpet and pitched forward, landing face-first, sprawled out on the floor in front of us. Several women gasp and clutch at their chests. The lecturer stops speaking, and in the ensuing silence, we hear the beseeching wails of this poor man, who cannot get up from the floor by himself.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so embarrassed.” He lies collapsed and helpless on the ground in front of everyone. “I’m so embarrassed.”
My heart is in my throat as I watch two of the staffers rush over to help him to his feet. He can’t even look us in the eye. He hangs his head down in a palpable display of shame that’s agonizing to see. This is someone who had likely been an executive, who might have started his own company or been a partner at a law firm. Judging from his bone structure, he was once handsome, too. I’m suddenly fiercely angry at the way time robs us of our dignity. I want to help, to change his perception about what happened. Nobody here thinks he’s foolish.
My brain is racing a million miles a second trying to think of what I can do or say. I want to stand up and speak. I feel myself rising out of my chair, hesitating, then sinking back down again. I wish I had the timing of a comic. I wish I could get a laugh—to defuse the tension, but also to change our collective takeaway, to restore his ego. Funny people have such power to heal others in difficult situations. They can acknowledge foibles while reminding us all that we’re the same. They can change what we remember about a moment. They can redirect our history with a few well-chosen words. But I’m not funny, so I sit and watch as they practically drag him up, one man on either side, holding him under his arms. As luck would have it, they choose to deposit him in the empty seat next to me. They bring him to me, right on cue.
“I’m so ashamed,” he whispers. He is trembling, and I can see tears pooling in his eyes.
“Don’t be!” I shift my body, recrossing my legs toward him and tilting my head in his direction. “You fell like an athlete! Were you an athlete in school?” I look straight into his eyes, a flirtatious smile on my lips. If my career has taught me anything, it’s how to hold the gaze of someone I barely know and meet them exactly where they are, emotionally. I can’t count the number of times I have hugged and greeted fans who were trembling and overcome, or had disabilities of some kind that made communication awkward. I can withstand the fires of embarrassment and stay right with you, locked on target for a brief time. So that’s what I do.
He and I whisper to each other for the rest of the lecture, getting to know each other like we’re on a first date. I lightly touch his arm and throw my head back and laugh. I surreptitiously stroke my skin through my fishnets and wobble my foot in its high-heeled boot. We’re two conspirators in the back of class, having a good time. Soon he’s smiling, and I bet all the other men wish they had gotten to sit next to the prettiest girl in the ballroom. And that’s how you do magic.
* * *
—
“Your parents are selling their house!” Mallory yells into the phone. She is stunned.
“Yeah, they’ve been talking about it for a couple of years.” I walk through the house looking for the iced coffee I just had in my hand. I adjust the phone, going upstairs to try to remember where I last set it down. Maybe I was in the closet? “You have to move into assisted living before your health deteriorates, or they won’t take you.”
“Yeah, I know,” she says with a sigh. I can tell she’s gutted. We grew up together and lived four blocks apart for forty years, if you count my frequent returns as the prodigal daughter. She and her husband bought her parents’ house, so anytime Nick and I come home to visit, it’s as if nothing has changed in the neighborhood. I still walk over to her place and let myself into her mudroom like I did when we were in fourth grade. Our kids have grown up wearing the same grooves in the sidewalks that we did—taking the same routes to the park, to the lake, uptown, to each other’s houses. When my parents leave the home I grew up in, it will truly be the end of a long and happy era. I have already done my grieving. I’ve come back as often as I could these last five years, soaking up the quirks and joys of a community where we put down deep roots. Nothing will ever be the same.
I like the woman who’s buying our house. We all do. She will make the improvements it so desperately needs. She will smooth its rough edges and hopefully knock out a wall or two to modernize. I think we will leave behind good vibes for her and her family. But my heart aches to think of never coming home again, never seeing that specific light in those specific rooms, never looking out at the same views again. When you live in a house long enough, you fill more than its walls. Your reputation and your lifestyle anchor your place in the community and your presence on the map becomes part of neighbors’ daily drive from one side of town to the other. “Oh, there’s the Phairs’ house. I like what they’ve done with the planting this year.”
I experience it, too, every time I jog along the Green Bay Trail, or when Mom and I take long walks through the beautifully landscaped lanes in the village. That’s Elizabeth Ebert’s old house, I say to myself. That’s Mrs. Wilson’s place. That’s where Chris Beacom lived. That’s where I went to that sleepover at Debbie Oberman’s and they had soda pop you could get straight from a fountain installed in the sink. That’s Penny Rusnack’s mansion. And Lara Chase’s modernist masterpiece, where we weren’t allowed to go in the living room for fear of damaging the art. The list goes on and on. When the Phairs leave Winnetka, we will be doing more than detaching our memories and belongings from their moorings. We will be detonating a brief, nostalgic seismic wave throughout the whole North Shore.
The decluttering began in earnest several years ago, when we made room for my brother’s family to move back to the United States for a spell. I tore through closets, organizing, feeling like a samurai. I didn’t fear death during the process, nor the loss of our past—not even when we began emptying the house in earnest, in advance of my parents’ move. I kept my mind empty and used rationality to tackle the job. Despite what my mother may tell you, I absolutely made room for keepsakes and sentimental objects, photographs, school art projects, and postcards. But not in duplicate and triplicate. This was a paring down of items, a selection of what was truly important, evocative, meaningful, or irreplaceable. Anything in poor condition was discarded. This was hard for Mom at times, and t
hough she’d asked me to do it, she found the process emotionally disruptive.
The thing was, I still believed in my parents’ future. I knew that memories we got rid of she and Dad would soon replace with new ones. If there was one overarching message I got out of cleaning my parents’ house, it was that Nancy Phair abhors a vacuum. She’d squirreled away so much stuff. Every available nook and cranny was filled with a bewildering mix of scrapbook ephemera—such as matchboxes, incomplete decks of playing cards, vintage buttons, bookmarks—and rather valuable pieces of jewelry, ivory letter-openers, Brussels lace, and gold cuff links. If there was a filing system, I couldn’t make it out.
Mom followed me around most days, delighted about the extra space and the relief of having her belongings sorted, how it cleared the junk not only out of her drawers but out of her mind as well. On other days, we fought over decrepit, moldy paperbacks she and my father had read when they were newlyweds. “You can buy another copy,” I argued. “You can read it on your iPad.” I wasn’t opposed to keeping meaningful items if there was something rare or singular about them, but these books were decidedly commonplace, and their bindings were manifestly rotten. She grabbed them away from me, in tears, and stormed out of the house. I admit, I can be hard to live with.
You see, for her each thing represents a trip, a friend, an occasion, or an era that she will never have back again. She doesn’t have decades ahead of her. She can’t travel to all these places anymore. Her life is shrinking, not expanding, and every bit of her past that I throw away, however insignificant, is like a withdrawal from the dwindling bank account of her time here on earth. She’s wealthy in receipts. These things are tangible proof that, however little time she has left, she once did have a great deal of time to spend, and she spent it well. She’ll need physical reminders of it, now more than ever, if she starts to forget.
