As it turned out, we spent Christmas Eve, 2009 in the hotel airport, bumped from our flight; three days of bad weather in Europe leading up to our departure, trains were snarled and stranded, a monstrous backup, and we found ourselves among the thousands missing the celebrations.

Poor AirFrance lady was scared of me at first. I didn’t respond well to the news that our seats had been lost. Wasn’t a total freak out – I just started to speak, quite upset, “We can’t fly today? Really? Well… that’s… just…” and I kind of stalked off to a spot ten feet distant. Maybe she had me pegged for a heavier type than I turned out to be, once I’d counted to ten.

Obviously you can’t take this out on an employee. Poor thing, she’s been looking into her share of pissed-off faces.

We take the shuttle to our humble digs just outside the mechanized warren of the vast Charles DeGaulle Airport, an ecosystem of metal, glass, and wire, and featuring every species of vehicle in all stages of mutation. The world looks cloudy and spoiled, petroleum-stained and grey as sorrow this wet north-winter day.

Everyone’s at least vaguely depressed, from the shuttle driver to the passengers to the hotel staff. No one should be here. There’s a room inside a memory that calls, someplace fire-lit and warm against the cold. This is where we should be, in innocence and expectation.

Instead we are holding vouchers and carry-on bags, two hours to kill before dinner and the bar closed. The room is small and touched with mold at the corners, clean enough but meant for quick passing. What would it be like to live out your life in this room, I wonder?

As a kid, I would stare into the display environments of furniture stores, those three-walled rooms where the bottle of wine on the counter is always empty, the books too, and the TV/VCR is a hollow rectangular box of molded plastic. So welcomingly sterile they seemed. You could curl up in this false space somehow, make it your home by filling it with your warm body, your life function. You could make it your bed. Who would feed you, tell you where to work, collect the money- where would you do your business? Clearly this false space could never accommodate animal me, but I would fantasize about trusting my fragile body to it.

Years ago, in those terrible months after my Dad passed way, I found myself jailed for the night in New York City, sick from drugs and trying to sleep, lying with a hundred others on a bare, piss-smelling concrete floor. We were cheek to jowl in the famous “Tombs” of lower Manhattan, awaiting our place on a docket backed up 48 hours thanks to the Columbus Day holiday. I remember I was turned sideways, trying to sleep, when I felt the pressure of a cellmate’s back against mine- we were too packed in to quibble over intimacies, by circumstance obliged to touch one another. Into my agonized state there suddenly flowed the warmth of contact, a physical balm like mother’s caress, and, instead of recoiling from the proximity of another debauched and filthy like myself, I relaxed and felt sleep finally cover me after hours of tortuous waiting. Couldn't this mammal's option exist for us refugees in our far-flung airport hotel this sad and stranded Christmas Eve?

Free dinner at the Hotel Campanile, CDG Airport, Paris; man, buffets make me sad! Speaking of mammals, nowhere do we seem more basic and vulnerable than here before the trough, leaning in with our snouts to sniff out the possibilities. Why bother with these colored rags of clothes? We’re just beasts in the barn, shuffling our way towards the evening’s feed.

That being said, we eat pretty well. The French know food, among other things. The table attendants are dark black women with golden cornrows, speaking beautifully in the language of this country. In my American mind, I hear the cadences of Virginia when I imagine a black person speak so it’s still a surprise to me when, instead, there’s the falling pearls of French.

Exhausted from an early AM wake-up call and the turbulent travel day, we shut out the lights just shy of ten. I’m lying in the dark, thinking about the year.

It felt short, like every year, but in the middle of certain periods it seemed to drag and stretch and test the endurance. Winter was grey and endless and Spring came in wet and late. The month of August presented a string of livid, blazing afternoons from which the fall of night might never bring succor. The sweat never dried and there was no natural movement of air, only our weak electric fans which oscillated lamely against the wall of heat.

In the late spring and early summer I struggled to teach my English classes while generally abhorring but doing little to break a quotidian inertia in which I wrote and drew and played music little while permitting myself too much obsession time over US current events.

I found myself hanging absurdly on the hasty scribblings of political bloggers, each one, right wing and left, chewing over scraps in a zone of impotence, muddling the world with half-truths and hyperbole. In their eagerness to predict the worst they shit on any sense of possibility Obama’s election might have suggested. He made his mistakes too; watching this year's politics go down was like watching the Pack lose to the Vikings in the dome. A blanketing sense of sheer impotence mixed with overwrought emotionality.

We went to Puglia with the Speras in June, back to our little lamia just outdside Ostuni. The space was perfect for two couples. I was chewed on like a beast of the field by the ravenous southern mosquitos  which hover in their legions near the many cisterns. We played Bridge almost every evening but Mr. Spera and I couldn't get a good card, it seemed. The ladies destroyed us. L., Mr. Spera, Mary, and I would go the the pocket beach we discovered and cleaned up in '08; Peg doesn't prefer beaches. I could dive off the little rock in four meters of water and watch my blue shadow slither by on the white sand floor of the sea. We cooked sea bass on the outside grill and, during a quick break in the action, I carried my wine up to the roof of the lamia where there's a deck with a great view of the groves. The moon was bursting full and hummed like a motel sign. There was the famous Big Dipper, a truly distinct, unmistakable shape amongst the million blinking stars in the Heavens. You can see how it's made such good company over the centuries.

Lying here in bed, Hotel Campanile, CDG Airport, Paris, not sleeping very soundly 'cause I'd turned in way too early, I'm thinking about my mother, thinking too of all the departed along this road of life which lengthens as it contracts and on which we travel, increasingly burdened.

Remembrance of Jack Rose, guitarist, our friend from Richmond days, passed away in '09. When L. and I met, Jack was living with Laura and Barb in Richmond, in that big wooden house next to Eggleston's Restaurant. We were all rock n' rollers. I immediately saw that Jack was a special player, also quite the drinker though everyone was drinking a lot then, no one more so than me. In any case, we had some good times. Once Lawren said, by way of greeting, "Hey Jack….boffed any girls lately?" I loved the way she said 'boffed'. Jack, unfazed, replied 'sure'. L. and I moved down to Richmond winter of '94 and we saw a lot of Jack. I used to watch him play with Uglyhead in one of those near-condemned row-house basements on Leigh Street. We would drink National Bohemian beer in the red cans. Richmond is a beautiful city and those were my first days and nights there, hanging out in that scene.

Remembrance also of Pio Quinto, painter, passed away in '09 during the Summer. Fede had told me how Pio was suddenly diagnosed with a galloping cancer which had already laid him out in a hospital bed, a few weeks to live. I hadn't seen Pio for awhile and that was why. He was a flawed but passionate painter, a guy who always gave L. and me the time of day, even offered to show me his studio and hang out. If only my Italian had been better! Pio had a quick tongue and would break your balls; it was a little intimidating sparring with him in Italian and he didn't speak English.

Truth be told, I blew off swinging by his place a couple of times and now he's gone- I missed my chance. He is survived by his companion Laurella. They had a boy together, also called Pio. Pio's around eight I think. All the Parco Lombroso guys are in love with Laurella, she's really wry and sharp, quick to laugh but a skeptical soul. She came to my art show at ai Preti. Farewell, Pio.

After our restless night in the Hotel Campanile, we are offered free breakfast, buffet style, for our sorrows. I have a new xMas Carol- 'Saw a French breakfast buffet on Christmas Day in the morning.' Not a bad buffet, though no eggs, sadly. They're playing a jazz radio station on the speakers, not loud but present. I hear Giant Steps by John Coltrane. Every few moments, a recorded woman's voice stage-whispers, 'jazz!'.

I saw a French breakfast buffet on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day
I heard Giant Steps by John Coltrane on Christmas Day in the morning

Our passage from momentarily huddling arrestees on the forsaken stretches of international travel to well-washed and on-time passengers is seamless and cheerful. We're on our way, plus AirFrance gave us the exit seats as a way of apologizing for our delay so I'll be able to stretch my legs.

As the plane rises, I write "On Christmas Day, 2009…."

We arrive at Dulles around 4:00. Rich is there to meet us. I get L. and me a tall paper cup of coffee at the Starbucks just outside the arrivals area, as per tradition. Guess I'll always look for my Mom in that crowd of expectant faces. Rich is cheerful and all fired up about politics. We have a great talk on the ninety minute drive from the D.C. area to Goochland County. L. is really fond of my eldest brother. She wants to buck him up. I'm worried about him, like I'm worried about all of us. Gotta stop worrying so much. We'll be okay.

It's the Land of Christmas at the Spera's house. We arrive in a thick blue winter dusk and the warm lights calling from inside seem to sing at me like that "do you see what I see" carol, heard in a state of seasonal enchantment years ago in the back of Mom and Dad's old Pontiac station wagon.

This was my favorite time of the year as a kid because my brothers would be back from college. We were always running to Dallas-Fort Worth airport to pick someone up. The Ingham family had strong Christmas traditions- we made a pretty big deal out of the whole occasion. We would wait 'til Christmas Eve, when prices had been slashed, to purchase and put up the tree. Stockings always came first, opened on Mom and Dad's rumpled waking bed. All those pictures of Dad in his bathrobe, half sitting up and smoking as we tore open our stocking gifts! There was the Italian sugar cookie from the New York Times cookbook Mom always made, the cardamom rolls with their spiral shape, Fred Oscanion's eggnog and the Venetian turkey.

I can appreciate a good effort around the holidays so I find myself well situated in the home of Peg Spera, Queen of Christmas. There's so many delicious varieties of cookies, a carton of Food Lion eggnog in the 'fridge; Mr. Spera likes to indulge in a little caffeinated coffee when I'm around. At this point, the Spera Christmas is my own past. I can feel at home here, watching bowl games in my "soft pants" as L. calls them, digging Peg's decorations, the luxury of having a dryer.

Running through the woods one morning just after sunrise I see a bank of winter trees, stripped bare save for clusters of leaves still clinging past the Fall. They are the color of parchment and flutter in the passing breezes. The spreading dawn bleeds pearl pink onto the blue sheet of sky, producing an electric contrast with the parchment color of these last dead leaves. They explode into frantic motion, like startled birds.

We saw everybody; L.'s brothers and their families, a few of the Spera's friends, Aunt Jean and family, the Richmond crew, Colette, Jeff and Deb in Crozet. As for C'Ville, we only got as close as 5th Street extended where we were spooked out of a Taco Bell by a pair of wasted and somehow dangerous seeming rednecks who rolled in just after us. It occurred to L. that, here in America, people do actually get gunned down in public places from time to time, something almost inconceivable in dear old Verona.

It was a good holiday for football. I saw some good games. Saw Brett Favre, #4, three-time MVP and Super Bowl champion lead the Minnesota Vikings. For those of you who know, you'll know what an offense to nature this represents. Saw a lot of college football where our blustery, hungry American nature is so well displayed in the production, those giant truck commercials still, all that simple and self-encouraging patriotism.

We go to a big salad bar restaurant for my sister-in-law Miranda's birthday. Man, you eat badly on Broad Street! The dressings taste of rancid oil, the tomatoes make me think about petroleum as they were clearly brought in from a long way away, there isn't even any rucola. We have become spoiled by Italian produce and Italian ways of eating. Why would I pour some hideous, creamy sauce over my salad when there's golden oil from the groves of Puglia? And all these fat people – every fifth person you see walking about in the endless parking lots is just morbidly, impossible overweight! I mean, I've had a few pounds on me in the past but the profile you see these days in the States goes way farther.

Oy, I shouldn't be so critical but I can't help it! I love my country, I love Virginia; just that I'd rather stay in Europe. Does that make me an elitist of some kind? I like to be from outside the tribe, I like to have to fit in. I don't feel superior, or at least I constantly remind myself that I shouldn't and try to behave accordingly. In America, I really begin to miss the funkiness and loveliness of Europe pretty quickly, after a few days or so. But I love hanging out at the Speras. I love the woods.

We spent a week in Rome with Richie-boy, seeing all the possible sights; we were sun-baked on the ancient ways of the Forum, moved along by sweaty crowds in the shaded sanctuary of the Pantheon, jostled on B.O. buses to the jangling, multi-lingual soundtrack of the tourist city. Stayed in a one week rental with windows on the air shaft, just off main drag, Trastevere. One piazza overflows and spills into the next, everyone with bladders full of booze and pissing in the streets. It's a real urban jungle, like Alphabet City back in the 80's. I loved Trastevere, though.

We walked Mary on the Janiculum Hill, with its jewel of hidden Bramante. Rich carried his massive new camera, phallic lens preceding him by nearly a foot. Have I ever sweat so much? Final night was the full moon. Rich and I got into a brother spat in the Medieval alley, reminded me of back when we were younger and wilder. The pizza guy had to come out of the restaurant and urge us to eat up, our pizzas were getting cold. L. got sympathetic looks for being stuck with these bozos. All in all, a great week.

Back in Verona, L. and I got to work on a sculpture for Tomaso Cinti's Associazione Culturale, FuoriScala. They were holding a week-long event, called Onirica, to raise awareness about recycling and sustainability and we were invited to provide some art. L. had the idea of creating a giant piece of crumpled paper out of cardboard.

We settled on the thin but tough cardboard used in pizza take-out boxes. Rich was mostly left to fend for himself while L. and I sweated over the massive project. Four hundred boxes, bisected and cut into triangles, each triangle attached to the other at the edges with strips of linen and rabbit-skin glue to create foldable elements, hours and hours of unrelenting labor, cutting and gluing in the steamy Vicolo. It was great, inspired fun. In the end we had a sheet of cardboard 3 meters wide by 4 meters long (roughly 10' x 13') which we folded up into the sculpture.

The show was fantastic. They had somehow secured a fine space, the galleries of the old Pallazzo della Ragione near Piazza dei Signori. We had four walls to scribble on and a great chunk of floor space. On Saturday night, the opening weekend, we sat out on the Renaissance steps of the Palazzo and drank beer 'til after midnight, watching as waves of people came and went.

There were Fede, Phoebe, Rebecca and Mick, Fabbiana and Luca from ArciKroen in Villafanca di Verona, assorted cats from ScalaColore, Stafan the mad conductor, Elena and Valentina, Matteo and all the dudes from FuoriScala, Gaelle and Geoffroy, Livinia and Federico and their kids, who scampered around and even under our sculpture, Heidi and Roberto, Audrey and Josh, Giampaola Bonente (my student) and her exquisitely dressed husband, Michele the writer….who else? In the end, hundreds of people saw what we did, so it's a good thing we were pleased with the results. A 100% recyclable sculpture which, at the end of the show, we were able to toss in the cardboard bin near Parco delle Poste.

Rich was an A+ guest. Must have taken a million pictures. We spent a good deal of time in the hot, heaving streets of Rome, waiting for him to frame the shot, but we wouldn't have had it any other way. I loved the fact that he wanted to lean into the language, wanted to participate somehow. I told him about Vespasian and "pecunia non olet" and he got great kicks out of the idea of Italian oldsters calling a public toilet "un vespasiano." Rich really gets Italy. Next we'll do the cathedrals of France. 

The manager is Claudio, a real madman. He's always busting my balls for being American but you can tell he digs me; we dig each other. Once I heard him sing "he's a poet, he's a picker" by Kris Kristofferson in heavily accented but nearly perfect English, banging away on an out-of-tune classical guitar. He says he loves the way I sing Fabrizio.

Claudio's always kidding me about Obama, how Obama's paying my way here in Italy. "Obama ti ha pagato la spesa, la bolletta della luce, le scarpe, la birra!" ("Obama paid for your groceries, the light bill, your shoes and your beer!) The list of things Obama pays for changes each time we see each other. Sometimes Ugo and I stay late with Claudio and Piero the bartender after all the ragazzi are gone and I feel like a cool and favored cat in this far-off reality.

So I've been giving Claudio my cards for a couple of years now and he's always telling me I should have an art show at the osteria. I've been resisting, not much interested in spending a ton of money and burning myself out, but I figured this year, since I've got some new stuff in the works, I could hook it up.

All October and into November I'm stressing out, trying to juggle teaching thirty lessons a week and drawing. There's a fair amount of wall space to fill. Of course I get myself into trouble with ambitious ideas that chew up more time than I'd imagined. There's a good few pre-dawn sessions which take me back to the C'Ville days when I used to do that all the time.

I'm going to show pages from my new comic about Mom, the two big pieces from Amore, Dove Sei?, some Tanguy Houseplants, the full-color paintings I did of Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, and Cheney, some new, more conceptual stuff as well. Should be a good spread.

Lawren and Phoebe will do the food, Ugo, Luca, and Luca's brother Umberto will join us for a bit of music. The opening is Monday, November 23. Lawren helps me a ton, in a hundred ways, with aesthetic suggestions, framing ideas, with the hanging itself. We get everything up on Sunday, all in good order.

Of course, I have to work all day Monday, totally ragged out after several days in a row of non-stop effort and strange hours. By the time I make the show, around nine PM, I am spent. There's actually a big crowd. Tomaso Cinti emailed everyone on his Onirica list and of course Phoebe, the Mayor of Verona, got her friends to turn out. My tiny fan base of osteria ragazzi are there too, so it's raucous and gratifying, more or less.

We hang until the wee hours and I finish off the night with a grappa, infuriating L. who throws the cell phone at me in the street and storms off. Can't say as I blame her. I've been pretty withdrawn and at loose ends lately. Productive sure, but it can't be easy for her living with me these days.

I'm just terminally sad, I guess. Everything I do I'm doing for my Mom, but I'm not sure I have the same gusto any more. Doesn't mean I can't be inspired, can't be effective as an artist. It's just that I'm always getting stopped in my tracks by this sadness, this wan sense of futility.

OK, my show was fun, but what do I get for it? And why am I striving in this seemingly futile effort to pay my bills by means of my talents? This was all Mom wanted for me and she never got to see it happen. She would probably have known what a let-down all this is, how I find myself showing art in a bar, selling little, complimented by everyone but still unknown and unsupported.

Thanks anyway, Claudio-you're a good man. Sadly, Obama didn't pay for the framing- I did. 

I'd been doing some drawings from photos I took in Catullo Airport, shots of people coming and going in the Arrivals Terminal; wanted to use them as backgrounds for the comic I'm working on. The piece had to be big to fit the space, so I decided to blow these drawings up.

Again, I went with the lovely, firm cardboard of the pizza box. We always get pizza at this place near the English school; they know us well and were the source of the 400 pizza boxes we used in the Onirica show. I used the top and bottom of the boxes to cut out equal squares of roughly 40 cm.

Wanted to do a diptych so I divided two of my 8.5" by 11" sketches into 20 squares. The idea was to project the squares, one by one, onto the cardboard, tracing over the projected and enlarged line with brush and ink. When each square of cardboard was painted and lined up properly, you would end up with a piece about four feet by six.

Once I'd painted each square, forty in all, L. helped me glue them together with our linen strips and rabbit skin glue, creating two pieces of more or less six by four feet. I wrote the date Sunday October 26, 2008 on one of the pics., the day I got back to Verona after cleaning out Mom's house. No one'll know what it means, but I will.

The location for the show is the Verona Canoe Club. It's a funky indoor-outdoor space enclosed by old stone walls, with locker rooms for the club members, a covered picnic area, meters tall racks where the canoes and kayaks are stored, and a wide stone porch facing the river with steps leading down to the water. 

It's right where the ancient Roman Customs House used to be and I'm pretty sure some bits of it date back to those times. You get a great view of The Adige and the vibe is old and urban and pretty hip for Verona.

Lawren and I hang the show Sunday AM, October 4; the gig will run through the day and into the evening. L. really knows how to get it done, has great ideas for hanging and presentation.

We show up around nine PM. There's a decent crowd there and we have a good time. Fede comes by with Trifola the dog, also L.'s friend from the gym, Maria Francesca. I give out my usual stack of cards, chat with fellow artist Sante Starace who does the big painting at Osteria la Carega, bump into a smattering of Scala Colore folks. A good time, except they actually made me pay for beers, something that would never happen in the States.

Last I wrote, we were ramping up for this group show with our buddies at scalaColore. This was May, so a good while ago, and the whole universe has shifted since then.

It’s the eve of the scalaColore show, beginning of July, and we are setting up the exhibition space with Betti, Monica, Stefi, Andrea, Vera, Sami, Cimo, all the “Fede’s” and “Nicola’s”, Mirko, Jan, Tomaso, Davide, Alessandro- cool folks who, along with L. and me, have put together some decent work, seems to me. The locale is called TECA, a warehouse space with upper gallery and two-story ceiling, rented out for trade-shows and parties mostly. (You can see shots of the show here on the blog; L. posted them ages ago. Just don’t have the energy to write about it all so long after the fact. Suffice it to say, we felt pretty satisfied with how it came out, made our money back plus profit. Can’t take too much credit ourselves, but we felt our contributions were strong and it was worth the work.)

So here’s what happened. We have a rental car, the new Fiat 500, to get back and forth from The Vicolo to TECA, in via Basso Acquar. It’s the third of July, a Thursday. I called Francesca at Citicar Rentals in the AM to arrange returning the car. We meet up at the Borsari Gate where a blazing afternoon in the old center is fully in swing. I’m exhausted from several days of intense work and running around, stressed about the opening and a little dazed by the blazing sun on the white marble of the Roman gate. Cheerful enough, though. I joke around with Francesca about what a pain in the ass art is. It feels good this morning, speaking in Italian.

I remember the moment I opened the door to our apartment on The Vicolo. You can see straight into the front room, the work room, where L. sits at her desk. She has the Skype headphones on and her glance shoots up from the screen in front of her, eyes locked on me with an expression so naked and pained that my heart immediately seizes up. It’s my brother Rich on the phone and I feel like I know what he’s going to say.

Strange to think of this moment at a distance of many months. So much of what came later strikes me now as a dream, a sleepwalk, but that moment will be fixed forever in front of my eyes. It was the first step in a crossing, like the instant you plunge into the cold sea and every fiber of your being reacts at once. I can’t open our apartment door without a glance of remembrance, without reflecting on that wrenching shift.

Richard’s voice is torn. I haven’t heard him sound like that since back when he was drinking. Our mother is in the hospital in Rochester, MN, in a coma. She has suffered a massive brain hemorrhage and, though she’s stable physically, the general outlook is grim. Her brain, her mind, that part of her which she most valued and depended on for her sense of self, is severely, perhaps irreparably damaged.

We do a conference call, my brothers Rich, Jim, Ted, and I. It will be impossible for me to fly out until the following Monday so I have to sit tight. Ted, our first responder by virtue of proximity, will be at Mom’s side the next day, St. Mary’s Hospital. Jim will follow from Palo Alto and Rich and I will arrive at the beginning of the week. It feels good to hear my brother’s voices. We even say one or two things about politics; I feel myself perking up talking to them, despite this heart-breaking errand we must now carry out. They give me courage.

I decide to do my thing at TECA. Mom always said that working is the best way to shield yourself, temporarily, from sadness. I do a “performance”, coloring hundreds of printed cards, on site, which I sell for change. Have a table and a lamp where I work throughout the evening, arraying the painted cards on a rotating carriage display like you see in a tourist shop. I shave my head, drink beer, and work for hours, till my hand aches. It’s a moderate success. The hundred or so euro I earn goes to scalaColore.

Jim calls on Saturday morning to say that the prognosis is even worse than originally thought, that Mom is probably not going to make it. We have to walk Maryland just after getting off the phone. There we are, crossing Ponte Vittoria in a daze. I have tears rolling down my face and my sunglasses on. I am wiping the water off my cheeks when our good friends ‘Cesco and Cecilia motor by on their Vespa. Seeing us, they swing around to say hello, all smiling and cheerful in the late-morning light of the bridge. They are to be married in August. I was going to draw a picture for their invitation. Obviously, one needs to explain- we cannot talk at this moment. I say, “mia mamma sta per morire” (“my Mom is going to die”)- this is probably not how you would say it. They get what I mean, though. What sweet folks they are! I feel like I just broke their hearts, by the look on their faces.

The folks at scalaColore are cool too. I have to miss the last day of the show, Monday, and won’t be there for the clean-up, so I explain that there has been this incidente, this terrible accident, with my Mom and that I must return to America to see her. Hugs all around, good thoughts. The Italians are fine, warm-hearted people. Fede comes by the show on Sunday, riding his bike with Trifola the dog in the front basket. His sober face says it all. Fede understands the sadness of the past, the agony of the flesh, the world of the parted which tugs at our sleeve. He’s my Italian older brother.

Weeping in the window seat, that pull at the guts as you lift into the air. I have a Neil Young song in my head- “I feel like goin’ back, back where there’s nowhere to stay….these rocks I’m climbin’ down have already left the ground, careening through space.”

Everything I see makes me think of all the things she’ll miss now. The stores, newsstands, coffee shops, all the cheerful airport displays; they cry out to her in her absence. She always enjoyed choosing some little thing on her travels, a cookie or a latte or a gift for someone. She was delighted by these small, independent decisions.

She was a great traveling companion, my Mother. I think of her coming through the gates at Catullo last year, walking strong on her fixed left leg, no wheelchair for Mom, thank you very much. How many hours total did we spend together in cars, going from one town to the next and talking non-stop?

All the paperbacks in the airport newsstand she’ll never read now, the bright magazines! She always had a book tucked under her arm, always. And there’s Barack Obama, taking a shot at the nomination, Bush on the way out. She never got to see the end of the Bush years….

She and Richard were supposed to visit us in September; we were going to show her Rome. I had imagined her at that sweeping view of The Forum you get from the Capitoline Museums. It would have fired her imagination. We wanted to take her up on the Palatine with its grand ruins of brick foundations, the umbrella pines in wan repose, the silence above squalling downtown Rome; all these things that won’t happen….

Ted meets me in Minneapolis/St. Paul. My plane was right on time. It’s always fine seeing my brother, no matter the circumstances. He is driving my Mom’s Toyota; she had been on one of her car journeys when she was struck down, in fact she’d just spent a week at Ted and Alice’s in Vermont.

On Feb. 7th of this year, Mom adopted a little terrier dog named JoeJoe. L. and I had been encouraging her to get a dog for years and she was thrilled with dog ownership, “besotted” as she liked to say. It kills me to see JoeJoe’s little leash crumpled in the back seat.

Nothing breaks my heart like a hospital. She’s in her own room in the ICU, head half-shaved from where they had to release blood from the top of her brain. Seeing her without her glasses makes me think of all those times she spent the night with us in C’Ville, when I’d get her up in the AM. People who you think of as always wearing glasses seem rumpled and vulnerable without them on. They blink at you and you know they they can’t see you. Plus her mouth is agape, she’s all collapsed. Moving close over the bed to embrace her, I am hit by the sour smell of her breath. Of course- they cannot brush her teeth for her, indeed she’s not even eating anymore. The sweet, soap-smelling air of her is broken. She seems already gone.

Jim is there with computer set up on instant message to Palo Alto. His wife Leslie writes every few minutes with news and ideas. So much has to be considered! Rosemary (I still call her Rosie), my eldest niece and Mom’s namesake, made a chain of origami cranes which hang over Mom’s bed. There’s a story about Hiroshima, a little girl making thousands of these cranes to cure radiation poisoning; something Rosie heard. Mom was a fine grandma, always took time for her grandkids. I wonder how they’re doing with all this. It would help to have them here.

I’m always thankful for Jim’s brand of gallows humor. You can tell he’s shaken up though. Ted and I back to smoking. Rich will come tomorrow.

The doctors are waiting for us all to be present before we do the conference about Mom’s situation. By their faces, you can tell what the news is. We meet in a sun-lit room with a back-side view of the hospital complex, all the rooftop units, silver conduit and new red brick. The trees are green and bursting, grass in the courtyards smoothly mowed, bulging clouds in the big blue mid-Western sky. I take a photo. This was the moment when they said she would not make it.

We see pictures of the great dark blots where her poor brain was drowned in blood. We could keep her alive but there would be no earthly point. What was Rosemary Anne Gleason Ingham is gone forever. She could only exist as a lump of helpless flesh, and Mom explicitly stated in her living will that she would not want to live this way. Anyway, we knew the woman. We know exactly what she’d say.

Now, as stated by U.S. law, we have to let her die by starvation and dehydration. She will be completely medicated, of course, but I wish we could just give her a shot and let her be. We are told the process could take days.

So we have made this awful decision and there is a weird giddiness to it. We eat dinner in a strip mall Olive Garden, talking loudly so everyone can hear us about what a bastard Bush is. You can’t just sit there and cry. We’re actually enjoying each other’s company, just like the first evening we get together at Christmas. So weird that our mother is laid out in an ICU bed, fully departed from herself. In different circumstances, we’d all be in her orbit, seeking her out in one way or another, emerging from our fraternal mix to ask her opinion, offer to help her with something, or just put an arm around her. She was the rose of all our hearts, as the song goes, and now it’s final- we will have to say goodbye.

We have two rooms in a nearby hotel but spend little time there. We want to be close to Mom; Ted and Jim almost never leave her side; they sleep in the room, only go out to eat. You can tell Rich gets batty sitting there next to this shell of our mother, with her ragged, shallow breathing, and finds excuses to be out of the room. He’s doing all this logistics work and it’s a huge help, of course. Between the three of us, Ted, Jim, and I do a lot of phone-calling and up-dating with family and close friends.

Mom had been in Winona, MN when it happened. She was visiting Paul Barnes, the Creative Director at Great River Shakespeare Festival, and one of Mom’s favorite people. It was Paul who first came to her side. He’s helping us in a hundred ways, contacting folks, organizing the stuff she left at his place; he even found someone to adopt JoeJoe. When Paul founded the GRSF four years ago, he sought out Mom to help him launch the first season. He never shied from heaping praise on her and I know Mom was highly gratified by this because she, in turn, had great respect for Paul.

Leslie has set up a web-site to keep friends and family current and in touch, a fantastic move on her part. We are flooded with messages- too many to process at the moment. Serves to show how loved our mother was. It stresses us out, thinking of all the people who will be affected by her death, all the conversations we will have to have, all the contacts to make. At this moment, we are trying to focus on her and what we can do to help her. With Dad gone so long now, it’s up to us boys to take care of our mother.

I wish I was stronger for the task, but I’m shattered, reeling and unsure. I have to drink; I can’t take this straight. There are no drunken, maudlin scenes, but I feel like a kid who wants to punch his arm. It’s not that her death is all about me. I manage to be available, to be useful; there’s so much to do. It’s just that I know Mom would be sad to see me this way, wishing to vanish, wanting to give it all up and go with her, annihilating myself in spite of my better instincts. Part of me is not sure I can bear this sadness.

L. is devastated, of course. She and Mom were close; in fact, Mom considered L. my saving grace and took her part always, quite the opposite of the mother-in-law stereotype. If there was some disagreement between L. and I, Mom would lay out in no uncertain terms her opinion that it was for me to compromise. While this sometimes frustrated me, I had to respect my mother’s fairness and I know it made L. feel more comfortable in the family, more secure. Twice Mom was with us in Italy and we had such a blast. Last year, L. took an iconic photo of Mom sitting in a traghetto, crossing the Grand Canal in Venice. She’s wearing a black and white striped gondolier shirt of the type sold in tourist shops all over the city. She had taken a fancy to these shirts and decided to get one, which I found very cute. Mom was, after all, a sweet old lady in wonderful Venice, completely entranced by that weepy, cranky town with it’s crooked bell-towers and shadowy canals; she wasn’t jaded. Why not buy a tourist-y gondolier shirt and sport it proudly? Passing the ride-hawking boat-men by the little bridges, we joked that we needed no goldolier; we had Mom.

For Leslie and Ted’s wife, Alice, this has got to be torture. They loved and admired our Mother, had spent a great deal of time with her over the years. What’s more, they know what a hell their husbands are going through in these days, stuck in a far away mid-Western hospital, out of comfort’s reach. We are all hyper in touch thanks to this awesome technology, cell-phones and instant messages, attending nurses and drip machines, beeping monitors and the cable TV. It can be comforting. You are never forgotten or alone. Still, I find myself at moments floating, engulfed in a silence which no signal can pierce. It’s not even anger or sadness that I feel. There’s no sense of the tragic, no cry to the Heavens. It’s just me, surrounded and alone, cut loose entirely from my moorings.

Mom’s heart is strong. She cannot pass away easily, at least her body cannot. I wonder, where has her mind, her soul gone? For the first three nights, I sleep on the carpeted floor of the family lounge in the Domitilla Wing, arm thrown across my eyes to block the fluorescent lights which are never turned off. You can’t help but wish she’d just let go. We are bugging out in here. Every AM I eat a sad and stony biscuit in the cafeteria where nobody smiles. You never saw so many worried faces in your life. The only people who laugh are the staff, and of course you can’t blame them; it’s their job being here all day.

I go out for walks on these flat rectangles of Minnesota streets, past the brick and wooden houses, the overgrown alleys, stop in some dark-brown sports bar for a tall, watery beer and read the NFL preview mag. Mom had recently sent me a box of Brett Favre swag, the commemorative edition of Sports Illustrated and one of those full-color hagiographies. He was supposed to retire after the Packer’s near miss last year, but rumor has it he is considering a return. Mom would have found this silly.

On the fourth day, I hit the hotel for a shower and a nap on a real bed. They are having a street fair in the courtyard outside the hotel complex with a little stage for musicians. I have no interest in any of it. Waking from a shallow sleep, I hear a guitar player on the sound system, chords drifting up, disembodied, through the sealed windows of the climate-controlled room. He’s going from a major chord down to that teary relative minor, as is done in thousands of songs, singing well like a top 40 country singer. What’s the tune? All I know is that the lilt of it, the cadence and the instrumentation, which would have pulled easy tears from my sentimental mother, seems to chime and echo inside my chest with a swelling sadness I cannot bear. I can’t stand it! This song is breaking me from within!

I leap out of bed, throw on clothes and leave the room, head down to the hotel bar where it is cocktail hour. The restaurant folks are hauling in chairs and umbrellas from the terrace; a big storm is rolling up. The bar TV talks of tornado warnings. I glance out the window where a yellow sky, the color of a bruise, is boiling and churning. All the vendors, with their canopies of crap, are scrambling to tie down. A fierce wind arrives, firing individual bullets of rain against the thick glass. St. Mary’s is a mile distant and there’s no way I’m walking in this tempest. There’s nothing for it but to have a beer and stare at the weather maps on the update news.

There’s a decent, if pricey, restaurant in the downtown area by the hotel. The Olive Garden starts to pall pretty quickly, so it was essential to find a passable dinner place since we have no way of preparing food these long days of waiting. We eat together and talk and again I’m struck by how much I enjoy the company of my brothers. Mom always took pride in the fact that her sons managed to stay close over the years. Everybody is facing this nightmare in his own way, Rich by busying himself with the thousand details of Mom’s estate, Ted with his quiet vigil, Jim with his gallows humor. I feel like they all want my company, or maybe they don’t want to leave me alone too much; they can tell I’m drinking, shattered, unraveling. I’ll get through it, boys, don’t worry about me! Stevie’s tougher than you think, I hope.

Finally, on Sunday, July 13th, Mom stops breathing. Ted and I are alone in the room. Jim is at lunch, Rich is at the hotel. For an hour, she had been taking one breath and just stopping, literally for five to ten seconds, before the next one. Each is shallower, more ragged than the last. It’s a torture to hear this, absurd as well. Why should we drag her poor body along like this? I am starting to freak out and Ted is sharp with me, telling me to shut up or split if I can’t take it. He’s right, of course. I am laying on the couch with my hands over my ears as Ted calls Jim and Rich, telling them that she seems close.

In that weird decompressed silence, that anti-climactic fall of an expected passage, she is gone; the next breath does not come. We kiss her and say farewell, too wrung out now to weep. She’s so tiny and crumpled in, so wasted away, it’s not even her anymore. I had kissed her goodbye in that sunny conference room, staring at the green trees and the giant sky as they told us she would not make it. Now we must gather our detritus, our lap-tops and books and old newspapers, straighten up the room and let them take her away.