On Authenticity, Goodness and Love

Which of these people strikes you as authentic?

I had a very interesting conversation last night with my daughter, a conversation that rolled over and into a conversation with one of the guests at our party. About that: it was a very good party, nearly every invitee braving a storm that dumped fourteen inches of snow, maybe the effort (and the double-helpings of pie) had everyone talkative and smooshy-calm. A party, in every sense of the word, is affected by others’ speech (or silence), a feeling of security (or lack thereof), our sense that people are or are not telling us the truth.

In any case, my mother is dying and has been dying since at least February 2024. She has been given - and by given I mean of her own doing and whatever affects our being tethered to the earth - ample opportunity to dip, the broken hip, the small strokes, pneumonia. The dementia has only increased, she’s like a woman walking alone into deeper and deeper snow.

Some of us - and this is the conversation I am referring to - have wondered how she keeps going, when there is no hope of getting back. I will mention here that her four caregivers and two hospice nurses have all said, they have never seen someone hang on through as many exigences and for so long. When my oldest friend in the world - we met in kindergarten and she knows my mother extremely well - asked what I thought was keeping my mom here, I offered that perhaps she did not know how to get to the next place; that she was still sussing it out. That, or whatever life force she had - and friends, it was prodigious - was still running.

“I think it’s for ______,” my daughter said later, referring to my brother; that he was not ready and that mom knew that and was waiting for him to be ready. My daughter does a great deal of exploring and reading about the seen and unseen, what people we are drawn to and what we build from there. Part of the reason the party was so good is that everyone, including people who had never met, were drawn to one another, everyone talked, in small groups and for long periods of time, easy alert exchanges of the kind I don’t think anyone predicted, and which my daughter later explained, if in a different context, as having to do with authenticity.

I am paraphrasing her: All people give off, let’s call it a vibe. What, she asked, do you think the strongest vibe is? Most people say love, and that is very strong, as opposed especially to its opposites, for instance, anger. Anger, she said, doesn’t jump off a person very far. Yes, you feel it, but it doesn’t radiate on its own; it’s short-sighted and invested in itself. I thought about this in the context, say, of a Stephen Miller or a Candace Owens. Yes, they have audiences - bad news travels fast - but not because what they are offering sustenance. Instead they offer hardness, obfuscation, bits of gristle the masses are meant to chew on, zero calorie snack after zero calorie snack, shot so quickly there is no time to consider whether today’s bit of anger or hate has anything to do with yesterday’s. To quote my friend Liz Wolfe - and all our congratulations and love to Liz and husband Matt on the birth this week of their son Sol - “I don’t know, man.” Seems like pretty thin gruel to me.

So it’s not love, my daughter said, that has the biggest radius, it’s authenticity. That people get this hit immediately, it draws us to people, it makes the worlds we choose to make, or what I think of as the good glue. It’s why we stare at babies (and yes, that’s my daughter in the left hand photo).

We went back to talking about my mother, and why she was staying; that as little agency as she has right now - as those reading along know - she is still my brother’s mother. “You’re ready,” my daughter said, “for Nana to go; you will be fine and she knows that.” She, my daughter said, was ready now too, but would not have been two years ago. _______, she said, is not ready, though he is more ready now that he was in February 2024; if my mom had died then, she said, “______ would have torn up the floorboards, and maybe himself.”

I don’t know if my daughter is right about ______, but last night, and especially this morning, I realized she is right about my mother, who I sat with for a while earlier today. I looked at this woman - still luminous at 80-something pounds - and thought about what she has been through, even before the recent health issues: the cancer, kidney and intestinal surgeries. The burying of three husbands (my dad the first, and the last to die). The being bed-bound for nearly two years, which was never on her bingo card. “When I get old I am going to go to the old person’s home and will rule the roost,” she told me, a dozen times. By the time I took her to visit one in late 2023, she was so meek and confused I had to turn around and pick her up.

And yet here she was this morning, petting the baby doll I gave her for Christmas, hanging on because, as a mother, of course that is what you do, you stay at your post.

Not every mother. Brigitte Bardot died earlier today and her Wikipedia page (which, grain of salt) detailed how very much she did not want to be a mother. She is of course vastly outnumbered by the people for whom the child is and always will be the center, will be the choice to you always make. My daughter extended this idea last night, saying my mother, before she came into the world, knew that she had two children, children she chose and would never un-choose.

When my daughter was an infant, I two or three times dreamed that I was in deep space, floating amid what seemed to be an uncountable number of silver cords. Looking at them, I knew we were all on a continuum, our parents behind, our children ahead, beaming the way. I woke from these dreams in hysterics, knowing that the only thing that mattered was my love for and my connection to my child. How, I thought this morning, could it be any different for my mother?