Finding Stillness in a Noisy World by Jana Richman

Author:Jana Richman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781607816270
Publisher: University of Utah Press

My mother liked to visit me during the many years I lived in Tucson. My father did not visit because I had cats. He accused me of having cats for the sole purpose of keeping him away, but that was not the only reason I kept cats. I like cats. Shortly after my mother would arrive, she would get a phone call from my father. He would say, “Apparently you don’t love me anymore, apparently you love your daughter more than you love your husband, apparently I’m not good enough for you anymore, you have to go running off to Tucson. What am I supposed to do? Live on toast?” She would spend upwards of an hour reassuring him. This happened every day during her visit, often two or three times each day. When she hung up the phone, she would cry.

My mother craved solitude. On the rare occasions that my father left for a day or two to attend a cattle sale in a nearby state and my mother found a convincing reason to stay home—maybe a long-standing doctor’s appointment—one of her children or grandchildren would stop by to check on her, to make sure she was okay. She hated that, but she didn’t know she had a right to send them away. All the later years of her life, she waited patiently for my father to die, thinking she might live a few solitary years in peace. His father and a younger brother had died young of heart attacks, and my father was wound tightly. She had reason to be hopeful. Near age eighty, though, she gave up and died. Rest in peace, Mother.

I prefer to believe that I am more like my mother than my father, but that belief was easier to maintain when I was thirty than it is now. As I age, things work their way up to the surface like bones in the sand. My father’s fear of solitude is in me, and as much as I carry my mother’s craving for it, the fear often subverts it. Having been severely warned that to be old and alone is a horrible and inevitable fate, I have spent the last forty or so years warding off that cruel destiny. I don’t particularly want a lot of friends at this point in my life, but I am fervently cultivating them nonetheless.

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