I was sitting there thinking,
“You will put your work as an artist on the shelf,” she told me. “This will happen soon. You will enter the academic arena.”
I was thinking,
She told me a lot of things about my father that I thought she couldn’t have known without talking to him or other members of my family.
She said she didn’t believe in talking about prior lives because such talk wasn’t useful, but then she paused and said, “However, I have never met a new soul … until today.”
I can still hear her saying that, and it still gives me chills. It’s not that I put any factual stock in it, but there was something about it that sounded right somehow. When she said that, I thought,
“Whatever I see in my third eye I will never share unless it’s something you can change,” she said next. “If I tell you the train’s coming, watch out—that means you have a shot at getting out of the way. But if the train’s going to hit you no matter what, why say anything?”
I thought that was kind of a relief, and kind of a disappointment. After our session, she told me about all these surgeries she’d had. She said her third eye takes a terrible physical toll on her. I left my session thinking,
Meanwhile, when Molly left her appointment, she looked stricken and said, “I have to see a doctor. Jean said something’s wrong with my blood.”
Molly went to an appointment with her doctor. There was nothing wrong with her. The doctor said, “What sent you to me?” and she was too embarrassed to say. So Molly and I said many disparaging things about Jean MacArthur.
The next week, Molly’s identical twin sister was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, a form of leukemia. Again, I don’t believe in psychic phenomena, but we found that quite spooky at the time.
And even if I am not a believer, I did find that meeting incredibly useful. I still think about Jean’s train- wreck analogy whenever I talk to the
If we get back from Mood and they’ve bought only red fabric, I don’t say, “Gee, it’s too bad you didn’t get green!”
It doesn’t advance the plot. That’s why I wasn’t that thrilled by Nina’s words to the designers the day before the Bryant Park show in the Season 6 finale: “If you have anything referential, get rid of it!”
Get rid of it? The show was the next morning—a little late for replacing a whole look. Nina tends to talk about things the designers can’t change. Editors go there more than teachers. Editors are all about changing and improving all the time—which is what makes them so great and valuable to the industry, but it also makes them a little infuriating when there are unavoidable constraints. I like to talk only about the way things are, not the way they would be in an ideal world.
Maybe that’s why I like etiquette so much: manners help us deal with the way things are, with the place we find ourselves in, whatever that is. Rules of behavior come in handy when you can’t think straight, as when you’re extremely happy or sad over a major event like a birth or a death.
Funerals are especially tricky for people. At your most emotional you suddenly have to do some very complex logistics, usually involving last-minute travel reservations, car rentals, and ironing.
Which reminds me—one tip for the men out there: Make sure you have a nice dark suit and tie. Even if you never have cause to wear them in the rest of your life, you will need one for funerals. It’s shocking how many men in their thirties don’t own a tie and don’t even know how to tie one! Even if you don’t need one for weddings, you need one for funerals. What message are you sending if you show up in a sweatsuit to a funeral? It’s a basic lack of respect. Every man needs a suit. Okay, end of lecture.
I should tell you about my father’s funeral in the mid-nineties. He’s been dead for more than fifteen years, and before that he’d been in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s for seven years. And yet, between you and me, I’m still not completely over his death.
When I went home years ago for the Thanksgiving holidays, my father was in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer. My mother and I went to see him, and he was pulling his IVs out and very disoriented. They had to restrain him. That’s how bad it was.
Well, the next morning, Thanksgiving Day, his doctor asked us into his office, and he had a social worker in the room with us. I thought,
In other words:
When we left, we were both shaken up, but in the parking lot Mother turned to me and said, angrily, “What does that doctor know about our financial circumstances? Or the strength of our family? This won’t tear us apart. And that’s ridiculous that your father will
When we got home, the phone was ringing. My father was restrained, but he had access to a phone and he kept calling over and over again, every minute and a half. Mother got to the point where she wouldn’t answer it. My niece was a year and a half or so, and she kept pointing to the phone every time it rang, saying, “Pop! Pop! Pop!” which was her name for him. She knew it was Pop calling. It was very cute, and very depressing. Finally, we took the receiver off the hook.
The first time we went to visit Dad at the nursing home, we brought Raffles, our family’s beloved dog and a favorite of my father’s. She pulled out of her leash and collar, ran through the place straight to my father, and jumped in his arms. She’d never been there before, but she knew exactly where to find her master. Every time from then on, we’d let Raffles loose at the front door, and she’d run to my father and jump onto his lap, tail wagging.
Cut to year six in the nursing home. We brought Raffles, and that time she didn’t bolt down the hallway. She didn’t even want to go into Dad’s room. She treated this man she used to worship like he was a foreign piece of furniture. At this point he really was a vegetable. I looked at my sister and said, “That doctor was right. His soul is gone.”
It was another full year before he actually died, of a congestive lung problem, but for that year, as much time as we spent with him, he was a stranger to us and we to him.
We were offered an autopsy to conclusively determine that it was Alzheimer’s. My mother asked my sister and me what we wanted to do, because there was concern about the disease being genetic. I had mixed feelings about it, so I asked my mother what she wanted to do. She said she thought maybe she would rather he didn’t go through any more indignities, so we decided to forgo the autopsy.
Besides, we were pretty sure of what it was. My father was fairly young when he died: sixty-seven. His mother had died in a mental hospital at age sixty-seven, too. That was in the early 1950s. I’m thinking that she must have had the same disease, and they didn’t know what to do with her, so they assumed she was crazy.
By the time my father was the age I am now, he’d already been diagnosed. Knock wood, I’m okay. And I’m ever vigilant about my mental health. I’m the first person waving down a flight attendant to tell her that the magazine’s crossword has been filled in and to request a new one. Puzzles keep your brain sharp; at least that’s what I’m counting on.
My mother still has her wits very much about her, and I think I’m a lot more like her than I am like my father. That said—if I start counting quarters and handing them to you to recount, you’ll know it’s too late. My father kept change in pill bottles. He would fill up a pill bottle, then pour out the coins count them, put them back in, and hand it to me to count. You can’t ask why. When someone is past the threshold of Alzheimer’s, you treat them
