The Long Kiss Goodnight
My mother was an endurance athlete. Not in the gym or on the road….but of life. She did not want to say goodbye to it. She comes by that honestly; in our culture the long-suffering, tenacious, enduring woman is someone to be admired—a figure of virtue, of honor. This attitude was interwoven in her DNA; thick like blood, deep like marrow.
She lived up to this image, and down to it as well. For the same woman who was used to putting others first, often put herself last. She bought a set of fine china when she was in nursing school that to my knowledge, has never been dined upon. She had some beautiful clothes that were seldom (or never) worn. Same with jewelry. She was all about taking care of business, and not much on pomp and ceremony. Frankly, she was hard to buy gifts for. But…she had a lifelong love for action movies—even westerns—anything that had suspense, thrills, speed, gunplay, strategy, and most of all—where the heroes won at the end, and the villains got what was coming to them.
And it was with that thought, that several years ago, I got her some films for Mother’s Day; among them, The Long Kiss Goodnight. It’s an action-packed spy movie featuring Geena Davis, who plays an amnesiac kindergarten teacher with a very interesting past as a top CIA assassin, and Samuel L. Jackson, a disgraced former-cop-become-private-eye who helps her research her past and rediscover herself—much to the shock of her former colleagues, the architects of a false-flag operation designed to create a faux-”terrorist” threat (with real explosives) in order to secure greater funding for their department.
It had everything my mother loved in a movie: politics, intrigue, fast-paced action, killer fight scenes, revenge, redemption, the requisite good guys winning and bad guys dying, and a badass female hero….who wasn’t just a hero, but also Somebody’s Mother.
She watched this movie all the time. More often than The Godfather, another of her favorites. Every time she played it, she lived vicariously through “Charli Baltimore”, the fierce, never-say-die heroine of the film. Charli, who cheated certain death several times throughout the story. Who above all, fought for her little girl. Charli didn’t just save the day; she was the path through which Samuel L. Jackson’s “Mitch” redeemed himself as one of the good guys. Charli was tough, resourceful, and a tough taskmaster; one of the more salient lines in the film comes from her stern lecture to her daughter while teaching her to ice-skate: “Life is pain. Get used to it!!” Charli taught her daughter well, and realized this when she handed her the exact tool Charli needed to make yet another of her great escapes; hidden in her daughter’s arm cast—the cast she wore from the fracture she received ice-skating, from the fall that prompted the lecture.
Poet Maya Angelou once said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” My mother didn’t tell many of her stories; omertá was her modus operandi. I think on some level The Long Kiss Goodnight wasn’t just entertainment for her; it presented an authoritative statement on motherhood, and the intensity of a mother’s love. The lengths to which we must go for its defense.
G’night, Ma.
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Pacing & Howling
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Changing Moods
I am so sorry my dear
Thank you. I’m still out of sorts. Just…tryin’ to keep busy, y’know, so I don’t have time to think. It was brutal towards the end. Cancer is a real m.f.
My deep condolences… losing my mother was like losing my compass. I have only recently figured out where the poles are again.
La Lubu, I’m so sorry.
Hey LL, wanted to share… I never got to stand with a striking union when my mother was alive. But yesterday, I did. I could feel her smiling down in happiness and pride at me!!!! I knew you’d understand that.
Post about Verizon strike: http://daisysdeadair.blogspot.com/2011/08/support-45000-verizon-strikers.html
picket photos: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2293823870622.136816.1399823366&l=09c73f8300&type=1
Love ya, Solidarity forever! xoxoxo
I’m so sorry to hear about your mother. You describe her so beautifully.
I came to read something else and wound up reading this, La Lubu. I’m so sorry for your loss, and that I wasn’t here for support when it happened. Your mother sounds like one of those “indomitable women” we’re always hearing about. Thanks for sharing her with us. Take care of yourself.
Thank you so much. This is the first Christmas without ma. Well, she wasn’t able to come last year either—she was too ill by that point; in-and-out-of it, and was hospitalized right after Christmas. She…”left claw marks in the concrete” all the way up to the grave. She Did. Not. Want. to die. Period. And she denied she was dying. Even in the nursing home, when actively, visibly dying, she denied it. And was angry about it, too. It was hard. We lost her before we lost her, if you know what I mean…the cancer had spread to her brain, and her liver failure probably also had an effect. She hallucinated, was incoherent. That was really rough.
At her funeral, that’s the eulogy I read. I read it silently to myself, over and over for a couple of days, and meditated—breathing in and out while holding my thumb and forefinger together, so that when I read the eulogy, I could hold my fingers together and somehow keep it together. It worked. after the funeral, one of my uncles took me aside and asked if I noticed the breeze that blew up at the graveside service (he used to be a mortician; he gave that up when he realized it was killing his dating life, as in, “so what do you do for a living?” “uhh….” LOL!). I did. He said that it was ma; that little things like that happened at every funeral he worked—that during a still day, a breeze would blow up. Or rain would stop long enough for the funeral, before continuing when everyone got in their cars. Things like that.
Every now and then, I still have dreams where she denies she’s dead, that it was all a mistake on our part.