I read the email, took a deep breath, and let the tears come again. I read it a second time but when the finality of it all had set in, I somehow found myself amusingly struck by Michelle’s strategically impeccable timing: A true NBA fan, she fought off death right through the Finals and the draft. Yes, she would miss the annual July splash of free-agency signings, but the most significant one—LeBron James to the Lakers—had been no great mystery to her, or anyone who remained in the world of the living.
For those of us who loved Michelle, and certainly for me, her life’s conclusion was a bitter pill but one made more acceptable by the gentle ambience of her final days. My father had died in 1990 of sudden heart failure, leaving so much hauntingly unspoken, unresolved. Not so with Michelle. Her thunderclap diagnosis of cancer and subsequent demise were stunningly swift but not enough to prevent all of us—by bedside or phone—to say good-bye in whatever way we needed to say it.
Most important, there was enough time for her children to gather round her while she was alert, communicative, and largely still herself. To tell her things—as Darcy confided and her other children would later confirm—that I knew better than anyone she had longed to hear. Outside her hospital room, her daughter Devon had sobbed when I shared the maternal misgivings Michelle had expressed to me in the final months of her life. Yes, of course there had been issues, she said, and there was emotional scar tissue. But certainly in adulthood it was soothed by appreciation and respect for the enormous challenges her mother had met. As Blair, the youngest of the five children, said when I repeated what I had told Devon, “She was the one who stayed!”
Though Michelle never did relinquish the hope for more quality time, more days preoccupied with newspapers and yoga, NBA games in high definition, and even the occasional return to her courtside haven, I did believe she was really OK, or at worst relieved that there would be no prolonged, futile struggle with dementia after all—no plunge into what she imagined as nursing home hell and no drawn-out time of being a burden to anyone, especially her children. That was the fate she had dreaded more than death: becoming a drain on their lives. It was why she had sacrificed considerable annual sums that challenged her retirement budget from late middle age to buy a long-term health-care policy that would have provided nursing care had she needed it.
She was far from broke, though, and in those final days, she told me how grateful she was that her children would inherit the remains of her estate. Divided by five, it would amount to nothing life-changing, but it was a fortification of her parental claim as the provider—the one her children could count on.
Unproductive as grudge-holding was—at least that was what Michelle had long lectured me—I knew that she held onto the ire caused by her failed marriage and the ensuing financial hardship, apparently right to the end. Presumed to be unconscious by her children during one of her final days, she startled them by cursing her ex when she had apparently overheard them mention him. In adulthood, all of her children could easily imagine how difficult and frightening those early years must have been for Michelle—far more easily than when they were young, dealing with their own needs and fears. How could there not be some resentment, even when they could intellectualize her sacrifices—or, once Michelle had reconstructed her work and social life, the time she had not sacrificed for them? While her sons had married and had children, her three daughters had not. Michelle did occasionally wonder if the example she and her ex had set had soured them on the institution.
In adulthood, Darcy was by her own admission the most distant of Michelle’s children, though her corporate work was most similar to her mother’s. Years passed between visits to Stamford from the West Coast. Yet Michelle was over the moon when Darcy, after being downsized out of a corporate position during the Great Recession, didn’t wallow in misfortune, picked herself up in 2009, and redirected her life, as Michelle had once done. She headed abroad for several years to Russia and Turkey to teach English, a reinvention of which Michelle was proud.
“I’ve always thought that maybe we butted heads so much because she was the one most like me,” Michelle told me, while accepting her share of the blame—she could be overly judgmental and critical of life or career decisions, and was especially cool upon learning of Darcy’s early career decision to work with her father. Their relationship, perhaps more so than the others, took measure of the complexity one would expect from a large family having come through such domestic upheaval—and one ultimately scattered around a large country, their time together growing more infrequent in later years, perhaps making it harder and harder to say the things that needed to be said.
Minor familial tensions persisted even in Michelle’s final months. In the late summer of 2017, she had invited Blair to come east from Los Angeles for the last weekend of the US Open. Blair preferred a one-stop arrangement that would require fewer accumulated miles. Michelle nagged her to splurge on a nonstop flight, arguing that there could be delays or cancellations and their weekend watching tennis would be marred, or ruined. What she really meant to say—and what she told me—was: I may never see you again, and I don’t want anything to get screwed up!
In Devon’s case, having long since relocated to Florida, she
