Nobody's Daughter Anymore:
      The Summer I Lost My Mother
Stories on audio by Joyce Maynard

My mother was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor on Mother's Day of 1989. The next morning I left my family to go take care of her, that final summer of her life. She died in October. This cassette recording contains the series of columns I wrote over the course of that summer, read by me, about how my mother and I said goodbye, and the lessons her dying taught me.

Below is a text excerpt from the tape, about my mother's remarriage. You may also listen to an audio sample (below excerpt).

From Nobody's Daughter Anymore, 1990 —

When my parents separated, in 1972, my mother was fifty years old. She had lived in the same house with the same man for twenty-five years. Her life with my father may not have been easy or happy, but it was familiar, predictable (even in its pain) and, therefore, in an odd way, safe. So when my father left (having just retired from his university teaching position, and believing himself to have fallen in love with a young student) the bottom fell out.

My mother had known my father since she was eighteen years old, and so when she found herself alone after more than twenty-five years of marriage, the prospect of her finding someone else, in that little New Hampshire town where she'd lived so long, seemed remote. I figured (with the presumptuousness of youth) that the course of her life, from this moment on, would be fairly predictable: Busy career, the occasional dinner with old friends, and a gradual easing into grandparenthood. What more could happen to a person (or a person's grey haired, size fourteen mother), after fifty? Well, it turns out, the answer is "Plenty."

One night, fifteen years ago, my mother's telephone rang. "This is Sydney Bacon calling, from Toronto, Canada," said the voice on the other end of the line. "I've just read your book" (a volume of memoirs, about her childhood on the Canadian prairies) "and I want to take you out to dinner."

Well, said my mother, she wasn't planning to be in Toronto any time soon. "In that case," said Sydney Bacon, "shall I fly down to have dinner with you there?" And before she had time to think about it (and come up with all the sensible reasons why reasonable people don't do things like this) my mother heard herself saying yes.

It was not love at first sight. My mother greeted Sydney's airport limousine in a buttoned up navy blue suit with a prim bow tie, and talked loftily about literature. Sydney -- a formal-looking man sixty four years old, recently divorced, after a thirty year long marriage -- told her about his basket importing business, his worldly success. Dinner was almost over when he reached over to her and said quietly, "You have beautiful eyes."

He was staying at a hotel, but she invited him back the next morning for breakfast. She was beating eggs in the kitchen, making small talk (my cheerful, brisk, efficient, businesslike, invulnerable mother, playing the role she knew best), when he took the bowl from her, put his hands on her shoulders and said, "Where are you?" Not all at once, but gradually, over the months of weekend visits and talks on the phone that followed, she allowed him to find out.

A few months after meeting Sydney, she wrote this, in a letter to a friend: "You ask if 'I'm in love again.' No, it's not that. 'In love' was the experience with Max, so many years ago and for so long. 'In love' was feeling one would go anywhere, do anything, give up everyone else to be with the beloved. It was wanting to fuse completely with the other, be part of him. I am deeply glad to have had that experience, but I couldn't be in love again. I know now that no other person can complete me and make me whole. That I must do for myself. I know there is no freedom in a relationship based on mutual need. I would not give up my family or my friends for love, or my work, because those things are part of me and I would be fatally changed and lessened by their loss. I do not say 'never' and 'always' any more. In love? I love Sydney. That's quite different."

They had been having their weekend visits and trips together for just over a year when he said, "If you move to Toronto, I will buy you a house, give you the key and never come unless you invite me."

And that's what they did, for the next fourteen years: Sydney, keeping a spare, tidy apartment and coming over to my mother's messy house full of plants and Mexican folk art three nights a week for her marvellous dinners, and staying over weekends. Sydney carried on his work; my mother carried on her writing, and her travels, (sometimes with Sydney, sometimes not). As the years passed, they continued to be one of the most genuinely romantic couples I knew: two strikingly different kinds of people, with very different styles and interests, very independent, involved in the world beyond the two of them, but delighted in each other's company.

Of course, the life they lived was close to being a fantasy -- unreachable, for most people. (Anyone with children. Or anyone operating on a tight budget.) "He comes over still as a suitor," my mother wrote. "If we have a difference, it will be over something real, not the minor irritations that so often tangle the lines in a marriage. Our time together is saved up and prepared for. I would never appear at his apartment door without calling first to see if he wanted a visitor. I don't do Sydney's laundry; he doesn't pay my bills."

What they had with each other was deep trust and affection, pleasure in each other's company, total acceptance of who the other person was (and wasn't). She might have liked him to share her passion for Mexico. He would've liked her to go ballroom dancing with him, and to the horse races. But finally, they managed something few couples pull off, and something I am trying to learn, myself: neither one tried to change the other.

I think that from early on in her days with Sydney, my mother would have liked to be married, but for Sydney, it remained important that on some level, he maintained his independence. Then two months ago, when we learned that my mother was gravely ill, she announced to Sydney that she'd like to marry him. He said he'd like that too.

So we had a big wedding in my mother's garden. It was a perfect day; friends came from all over. Walking through her tulip-filled garden on the arm of my sister's son Benjamin, my mother greeted every guest. "Oh, Tony," she said to one. "I would have married you instead, if only you weren't gay." "Ah, Joe," she said to another, "My heart."

As he finished the seven blessings the rabbi wished the two of them health and long life. "Would that it were true," said my mother, always a realist. Then Sydney smashed the glass with his foot, and they kissed.

Listen* to a portion of Nobody's Daughter Anymore:

*Audio sample is in MP3 format, supported by a number of free, downloadable players, including MusicMatch Jukebox, RealAudio Player, and WinAmp.

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