My mother. She was not part of the daily weave of my life. She was in many ways deeply significant to me. Yet she was also both real and unreal to me, in some respects a sort of phantom presence in my life. Everything about my relationship with my mother is complicated—a vast unsettled sea of emotions and memories inseparable from the wreckage and ruin of my colossally troubled family. And so the grief is also unfathomably complicated. And vast. Sometimes in roiling waves that find me sobbing in the middle of an art show, as I did last weekend … one minute turning in an ordinary interested way, wine glass in hand, toward a bird print in a crowded gallery, and the next moment overcome with grief for my mother …

My father. He is confused and irrational. He is surely lost and hurting. The lightness and warmth in my mother’s marrow made her late-life confusion of the cheerfully addled variety. But my father, his childhood abuse and abandonment early gone to gangrene, has become in dementia only a more distorted version of the self-pitying intellectual bully boy has always been. Most of him these days is delusional, spiteful, and even mean. His head is filled with bizarre imaginings about plots I am cooking up against him. The truth is that notwithstanding all that was admirable and interesting about his philosophy-reading, foreign-film loving, war-protesting self, he’s always been fundamentally a jerk. The most important truths are that he visited massive damage on his children, and that he all but ruined my mother’s life. I may as well toss in the postscript that he has spent much of the last year laying plans for a shirttail cousin, crazy and recently living in a car in Texas, to come and cook for him as soon as my mother died.

Most of all, my father and all of the problems he brings–the calls from alarmed doctors and social workers and, on the very morning of my mother’s funeral, the crazy shirttail cousin; this man’s ongoing attempts to pull me into the swirl of nastiness he feeds on; all the ways in which his needs are deposited, unwanted on my doorstep–this tragically wrecked and destructive man who happens to be my father continues to intrude far too much into my grieving for my mother. Which has made things infinitely messier this past month, and more difficult. The fact of of having so much anger tangled up in so much grief. The fact of losing the parent who loved me, and whom I loved, and being stuck with the one who got, and still gets, in the way.

My mother. She was, I think, not amazing, although she could have been, especially had she not been taken hostage by my father. But I do think she was remarkable. She was smart and had the best heart of anyone I’ve known. She was resilient and, despite every reason not to be, hopeful. She devoured good books, gladdened at red zinnias and pink cosmos, deplored injustice of every kind, and sighed and ached for the world’s sad and unlucky people, its hungry children, the shivering souls in ragged coats sleeping under bridges. She played the piano with spirit and would break into a lively foxtrot or rhumba when snappy music came on the radio. She unfailingly turned toward life and people with interest and warmth. Even in the worst throes of family shipwreck, her impulses were generous ones. She lit up a room. That’s a lot for a life. It’s also what she had to give me, and did. Her legacy. I was able to tell her that, for which I’m grateful.