“Talk to me,” she snapped, wanting to scream that she, not he, was the one who had sacrificed, who had suffered. Yet she was inescapably left with the self-judgment that she could have, or should have, done more.
Based on my knowledge of Michelle’s family, I would argue with her that it was plainly obvious to any objective observer that her children were fine, out in the world, doing their thing. Her Christmas letters were annually filled with dutiful updates on their academic, athletic, and later professional and personal triumphs, along with the good-natured needling of a woman who at that time could reason that there were hard choices that had to be made—for their financial security and her own sanity, as she wrote in 1972:
Speaking of children—mine—they are so inconsiderate and selfish. They actually expect and want three meals a day. They even ask for clean clothes and sometimes they have the audacity to want things ironed. I keep telling them that there are children in Europe who would consider TV dinners a delicacy. Besides, I defrost better than any other mother on the block. I tell them that living with a star can be difficult but it will be a rewarding experience when they write their autobiographies: Life With Mother. I get the feeling they’re unimpressed. ‘Mother Who?’ Devon asked the other day.
I wondered why in the world at this late stage of life she would blame herself—and for what, exactly? But it wasn’t really blame, she said. It was more sadness. Because whatever I thought of her life from the outside looking in, she didn’t have the same faith that her children, from inside the web of familial complexity, applied the same logic.
“They’re not thinking, Oh, my mother’s wonderful because my father didn’t do this or that,” she said. “I think they’re thinking, She was never here. She was out at a game somewhere or lying in bed, exhausted, and every time I was excited about something and tried to tell her about it, she didn’t care.”
I told her that she would have been irate with me had I been the one reflecting so negatively, so despondently. Should I start to call her Woody-ana? But I also realized that we were at different stages of life; there were feelings running through her I couldn’t yet comprehend, and this was a debate I wasn’t about to win.
Not yet, anyway.
• • • • •
As the holidays approached in 2017, Michelle found herself with an offer from Wynn Plaut, who had called to say she could have his tickets to the Knicks’ annual Christmas Day game, against the Philadelphia 76ers, if she could figure out a way to get into the city. Knowing she hadn’t been to a game since our trip together early in the season, I figured she would jump at the chance. But she sighed and said, “Probably not.”
“Why not?” I asked during one of our Sunday phone conversations, my standard check-in time with Michelle after the morning political news shows we both watched.
“I’m thinking, maybe if you’re out, you should really be out,” she said, sounding tired, distracted, even dejected. She told me that she found herself to be “losing interest” in things, lamenting her difficulty in shaking morning cobwebs and needing to focus harder to follow shows on television and comprehend the more challenging stories in the papers. I reminded her that she was only weeks removed from the tests that her son Brandon had convinced her to take to affirm that she was still fit to drive. There had been two phases, physical and cognitive.
“You passed them both,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “But what’s on my mind all the time now is letting go. Just letting go.”
It was strange, and sad, to hear Michelle sound so despairing. She had been so hopeful just before Thanksgiving, after undergoing a spinal tap, during which her neurologist had drained a buildup of fluid from the brain with the intention of installing a shunt to create a permanent flow. The shunt, in turn, would decrease the chance of swelling and potentially improve Michelle’s balance and mental acuity. But while fluid was drained, her doctors told her that she wasn’t a candidate for the more complicated insertion of a shunt. She initially shrugged off the results: “Nothing ventured, nothing lost.”
Now, suddenly, she was talking about letting go—in effect, giving up. Why? Had Michelle actually deteriorated, or was she merely having difficulty summoning the energy and positivity to carry on as usual? I knew how much she missed the Garden and couldn’t help but wonder if finally surrendering her tickets, being severed from the identity that had strategically served her life’s social reconstruction, was weighing heavily on her.
This, after all, was a loyalist who had once bragged to me for a 1990 Daily News column I wrote about her Knicks fidelity how she had cut short a work assignment in Hong Kong and endured twenty-eight exhausting hours of flights and layovers to make it to her seat for a playoff game against the Celtics. A woman who wasn’t too embarrassed to write in one of her Christmas letters that if she could change anything about her life, which was largely about business and basketball, it would be to make basketball her business. In another Christmas missive, she even joked—at least we thought—that she “hopes to be buried” in her courtside seat “when the time comes.”
In the years after her professional retirement, section 6 had been Michelle’s virtual office, the place that had made her feel most
