When my
mother died in March 2002, I was living in Texas and had (and have) the dual
responsibilities of family and job, so I was away from her side. But I went
over for her funeral, and went back a year later to sell the old house in
Ferney-Voltaire. Mother, thankfully, went like that
(finger-snap) after a long degeneration into senescence. She was alone in those
last years, except for occasional Geneva visitors and weekly phone calls from
me; and it’s only out of convention that I say I’m sorry she was, because I’m
not, really. I know better than anyone that she wanted it that way. She
disliked society, and had little time for most people, and less for the age we
now call "modern" (but which will soon seem no more so than Thermopylae or
Waterloo). She wrote rarely to me and never to anyone else, and became more self-absorbed, gradually
cutting herself off from her neighbors. Whatever French she knew gradually
ossified, until she sounded in the end exactly like the American-in-Paris she’d
started out as forty years before. So in those last years she took up residence in her
mind, where it was always 1947, and a triumphant new post-war world was just
outside the door, and hope shone on every side, and Dad bestrode her world like
a colossus.Then, just after she'd turned 80, came the stroke. She was taken to a hospital, and it became obvious that she could no longer stay in her old house, so via phone and Internet I arranged a nursing home, a pleasant enough place it seemed: a converted inn on the Swiss border, with a view of the Voirons and Mont Blanc. But when she realized that she would never again live in the decrepit little house that Voltaire built, and that she would thenceforth be dependent on brisk white-uniformed strangers, she was ready to go. After speaking to me quite lucidly on the phone the day before (and happily agreeing to move to the nursing home in a week's time), she died, her job done. My memories of her are rooted in those long-ago days at Chemin Bonvent, with the Jura mountains purplish on the horizon and the willows shivering in the breeze at the bottom of the garden and Pete Toy basking in the sun under the apricot bush. If there's a heaven, that'll be my corner of it.
