Beautiful Things

On walking through the aftermath

I was at my desk at my very first office job in Midtown Manhattan when my mom called. I had a ticket to fly the following day to see her in Dublin, where she’d been living for a year with husband number five.

“I need to get out of Ireland, immediately,” she said when I answered.

I wasn’t supposed to take personal calls unless it was an emergency. It seemed back then that life for her was nothing but emergencies.

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

“So I was brushing my teeth this morning,” she said.

“Mom, can we skip to why you have to leave Ireland?”

“I’m getting to that,” she said. “I was brushing my teeth, and he walked in and said he’s leaving me for his assistant. He says they’re in love.”

“Oh mom,” I said.

“I can’t be in Dublin,” she said, street sounds in the background. “Maybe you could change your ticket, and we could meet somewhere? Anywhere in Europe.”

“Madrid,” I said, for no particular reason, other than never having been there.

I found her in a café in the Madrid airport, looking deflated. She was a petite, glamorous Aussie, sometimes mistaken for Priscilla Presley. Now, though, she was huddled over an espresso, quiet and sad. I hugged her, then sat down at the small metal table.

“So, what now?” I asked her.

“Yes, what will I do?” she said.

“No, I mean here in Spain.”

She thought for a few moments. “I wonder,” she said, “if maybe we could just see some beautiful things.”

We planned a road trip. This was in the late-nineties, pre-smartphones, so I bought a guide book at the airport. We sat together, dog-earing pages, plotting a course.

Before leaving Madrid, we stopped to see Picasso’s Guernica, standing in silence in front of it for a good twenty minutes. It’s such a difficult painting. It made me think of how hard my mom’s life had been. I wondered, standing there next to her, how she had endured everything.

Her parents gave her away when she was nine. I once asked her about this, and she said, “Well, they were obviously very busy with the new baby. And it was only for a few years.”

After that, she was a teen mom in an abusive relationship, and fled Australia for the States, leaving this man and their toddler daughter behind. She started a new life, a new family, telling no one for many years. She and my dad weren’t together for long, but he never knew about my older half-sister.

My mom’s life in the States continued to be chaotic and violent. There was one ex-husband in prison, other exes who should’ve been. She seemed always on the run, rarely living anywhere for more than two years. Before Dublin, it had been L.A., Bermuda, NYC, Vermont, Iowa, Colorado, then L.A. again. In each one of these places, yet another emergency.

I said to a therapist once that my mom was like a wounded bird, always drawing the worst kinds of attention. “That’s one way to see her,” the therapist said. “But she’s also like the phoenix.”

So, in the aftermath of this Dublin disaster, we set off from Madrid to see some beautiful things together. We traveled by train and bus, reading and napping as rows of olive trees whipped by. We walked through labyrinthine medieval streets in Toledo, and under orange trees in Sevilla. We watched flamenco in a tiny wine bar, and visited royal gardens. Finally, we took a bus east to Granada, to perhaps the most beautiful place I’ve ever been: Alhambra.

My mom stood at the reflection pool within this Islamic palace and one-time fortress, looking up at the endless rows of layered ornamentation and hand-carved script, marveling.

“Oh my,” she said. “It’s just…. oh my.”

The night she died, twenty years after that trip, my wife, Emma, invited a bunch of friends over, everyone gathering in our kitchen. At some point, I felt I should probably say something. This Spain trip kept popping up in my mind. The story seemed to want to be told, about traveling with my mom to see these beautiful things.

I clinked my glass with a cheese knife, and the room hushed. I could see her there, standing in front of Guernica, marveling at Alhambra. I wanted to say how all these difficult things and beautiful things seemed not just related, but intertwined. How maybe she and I learned together to find beauty, even among the wreckage.

I tried to speak, but the words caught in my throat. “To Maureen O’Dea,” I said, hoisting my glass, unable to say more.

We walked from our house together, down the hill toward the Hudson River. Some of my friends lit lanterns and floated them up into the night sky. I’d initially grumbled about the idea of the lanterns, but I went along with it, and they were gorgeous, actually, soaring up and to the north, finally winking out of sight in a distant bank of low-hanging clouds.

As we turned from the river, the wind picked up. The street before us was dark with the new moon, and I felt a pang of loneliness. What would I do now?

I felt ashamed for not telling the Spain story in our kitchen. I should’ve waited longer, collected myself, and told everyone about the beautiful things. I felt I’d failed my mom somehow.

On this march back up the hill in the darkness, my friends brought out their phones, illuminating the pavement beneath us, our steps slow and quiet. Though full of sorrow, I felt encircled, like being within a phalanx, walking in formation. There was the warm glow of our kitchen window up ahead. Just then, one of these people I love—I’m not even sure who—placed a steady hand on my back.

Maureen O’Dea, ca. 1970