Once, in the years when I was trying to be stoic, I entered a maintenance bay in eastern Afghanistan. It was cavernous and reeked of petroleum, and in a dank corner my friend Richard had assembled an office out of battered furniture. I’d come there at 9:00 p.m. on a Sunday — shivering, and wielding my rifle and a flashlight—because it was Easter and I felt obligated to phone home and Richard had a line.
“I’ve got work to do,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind if I’m here.”
“No problem,” I replied, and pulled a phone card from my pocket.
There was a static ring followed by a voice: “Honey. Oh honey, oh my gosh honey, it’s so good to hear you!” It was my mom and her voice was startling as much for it’s unexpectedness as its tone. In the weeks since I’d last phoned, my dad and sister had kept me abreast of her situation. Because of her situation, her series of situations — anorexia and depression and borderline personality disorder — part of me had assumed she’d be asleep or in the hospital. And if not asleep or in the hospital, then I certainly hadn’t imagined this tone: a tone so full of light and lilting as to evoke summer. A tone I’d known all the years before her situation. A tone you longed to wrap yourself up in.
“Hi,” I said cautiously. She was 7,000 miles away, but I wasn’t quite sure how to approach her. “Happy Easter.”
“You too. You too, honey! It’s so good to hear you, sweetheart. Dad just left to get ice. How are you? Do you need anything? What do you want me to send? It’s beautiful today. I wish you could see the garden. Grandma’s roses just started to bloom.” As she spoke, the barrier broke between us, and I surrendered to her voice, forgetting about her situation, forgetting about Richard.
But five minutes later, she brought up my grandma — a Polish woman who’d made cinnamon rolls and cheesy potatoes and a quilt for every one of her fifteen grandchildren. A woman who’d loved birds and roses and was raised on a farm in North Dakota. A woman who’d died last month, unexpectedly, of stroke and kidney failure.
“Uncle Mark called on the day it happened,” my mom explained. “And we knew something was wrong because he was crying and he asked to speak to Dad. And you know what he told, Dad? He told him he’d just come from Grandma’s hospital room. Uncle Mark and Grandma had been talking when suddenly she’d stopped and said, ‘Look at all the beautiful butterflies!’”
“All the beautiful butterflies?”
“Yeah, honey, the doctors said she had a stroke. It can make you hallucinate like that.”
“Oh.”
“So Dad got on the phone with Uncle Mark and Uncle Mark told us to come quick. He thought she was going to die. Like today. So we all got in the car, honey. And of course it was a blizzard out there and the roads were covered in ice so it took us forever. When we get to the hospital the whole family was standing around her bed.”
“Everyone?”
“Yes, honey. Grandpa, Virginia, Sherrie, Michelle, Mark, all their spouses, all the grandkids. Even the great grandkids. Thirty, forty people. You couldn’t fit another person in the room. And everyone was singing to Grandma. Church songs. Christmas carols. She wasn’t saying anything. She was coming in and out of consciousness. Then out-of-the-blue she piped up and said, ‘Shut up! Everyone just shut up and stop singing!’ You remember how feisty she was, right? So we stopped singing. And then everyone started coming forward one by one to say goodbye. Grandpa went last. He told her how much he loved her. And then we just watched the blips on her heart rate monitor move farther and farther apart.”
I began to weep — quietly at first. Though I tried to control myself, the sobs escalated from a snivel to a howl. Richard looked up, the computer monitor illuminating his concern. I felt heat on my face; I was an army lieutenant and people weren’t supposed to see me cry. “Are you all right?” he mouthed, his eyes enormous.
“I’m fine,” I mouthed back and swiveled my chair so I was facing away from him.
In truth I was still howling, and I knew he’d be deaf if he couldn’t hear it. For reasons I couldn’t articulate I was angry, then, and I longed to slither 7,000 miles through phone cables and connectors and throttle her.
In retrospect, my anger was two-fold. First it was betrayal. Certainly my mom must have known I’d done everything to be stoic on this deployment, yet she’d dangled something so ridiculously sad in front of my face as to make stoicism impossible. And second, it was embarrassment; the reason I’d been stoic for six months in rural Afghanistan was that I’d equated tears with weakness and an inability to perform my job, and now the mask was off and Richard had seen me cry.
“I’ve gotta go,” I said. And I lied and told her my phone card was running out of minutes. Then I set down the receiver and stood up, shaking. Richard was already upon me.
“Hey,” he said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “Hey!” He looked me deep in the eyes, and I averted my gaze, my skin still burning. “Are you really gonna leave like this? What happened? Are you all right?”
I squirmed away, slung my rifle across my shoulder, and pocketed my flashlight. Instinctively, I crossed my arms. “I’m fine,” I said numbly, still not meeting his gaze.
“Hey, sit down. We’ll talk about this.”
“I’m fine,” I repeated.
“Bullshit you’re fine!”
“God damn it. I’m fucking fine,” I said, and turned and left.
The next day it was overcast and a light snow was falling and when I saw Richard he looked at me questioningly and I shook my head. He didn’t bring it up again.
***
Six years have passed since that breakdown in Afghanistan, and a couple of months ago — on the other side of the globe, in a mountain town in southwest Virginia — I sobbed again when recalling that night in the maintenance bay. The memory, like so many others from Afghanistan I’d forgotten, was dredged up when my father phoned to tell me that my mother was back in the hospital. This time, the reasons for sobbing over what happened on deployment were different: I sobbed not because I felt the absence of my Polish grandmother but because I felt, so keenly, the absence of my mother.
Once the most emotionally intelligent person I’ve met, she was the woman my girlfriends came to when they needed advice. She made connections with people wherever she went. She felt emotions so strongly that she couldn’t help but convey them. This is why I’m certain that my father — stoic like me — could never have accomplished the feat my mother managed to accomplish on an Easter in Afghanistan; I’m certain that his descriptions of my grandmother’s hospital room would have lacked the emotional resonance to bring his equally stoic daughter to tears.
But now her mental illness — which began in the months during and preceding my deployment — has progressed, and often she is unresponsive or forgetful, a shell of the mother I remember. In recalling that night in Afghanistan, I long for the tone of her voice, her overuse of “honey,” her mention of roses blooming in a garden she no longer tends. And I long, even more desperately, for her to make me cry again.
I’m certain that, this time, I wouldn’t have the urge to throttle her from 7,000 miles away. And I’m certain that I wouldn’t lie that my phone card was running out of minutes or say a quick goodbye. I even suspect that when Richard — a friend I’ve retained after all these years — came forward to comfort me, that I would allow myself to be comforted, that I would sit by his phone and offer him specifics: butterflies and blizzards and Christmas carols and heart rate monitors. And I suspect that when he looked at me questioningly the next day, that I would thank him for entertaining those details.
After my dad’s phone call, I made a resolution. I will imitate a version of my mother — a version I can recall only in memory — by allowing people to see my emotions, by allowing people to deliver their emotions to me.