The Faraway Nearby Read Online Free

failure to be the miracle of her completion and to be instead her division.
    â€œResentment is a storytelling passion,” says the philosopher Charles Griswold in his book
Forgiveness
. I know well how compelling those stories are, how they grant immortality to an old injury. The teller goes in circles like a camel harnessed to a rotary water pump, diligently extracting misery, reviving feeling with each retelling. Feelings are kept alive that would fade away without narrative, or are invented by narratives that may have little to do with what once transpired and even less to do with the present moment. I learned this skill from my mother, though some of her stories were about me, and of course my perennial classics were about her. My father was destructive in a more uncomplicated way, but he is another story. Or maybe he is the misery at the root of my mother’s behavior, and he certainly made her suffer, but there were people and historical forces at the root of his, and that line of logic goes on forever.
    It wasn’t only envy. When I was thirteen, my mother told me that the doctors had detected a lump in her breast. I found out decades later she had first told my father, whose lack of sympathy over this was part of what precipitated their separation and protracted divorce. I didn’t have much sympathy either; it was not that I refused to give it, but that there was none in my equipment yet, perhaps because I had experienced so little of it.
    When she didn’t get what she wanted from me that day she told me her medical news, she flew into a blasting fury that I remember, perhaps incorrectly, as the first of the long sequence of furies at what I was not or what she was not getting. I can still picture the two of us in front of the terrible house painted with the tan paint that had never dried properly so that a host of small insects stuck to it over the years. Now I can feel for that distressed woman who had no one compassionate to turn to, but at the time I just felt scorched and wronged. As it turned out, the lump was benign; the relationship, however, was malignant from then on.
    Thereafter, she often visited her fury at others or at life upon me. She took pleasure in not giving me things that she gave to others, often in front of me, in finding ways to push me out of the group. She thought she would get something through these acts, and maybe she got a momentary sense of victory and power, and those were rare possessions for her. She didn’t seem to know she also lost something through this strategy. In the decades that followed, I nursed her through other illnesses and injuries she kept secret from her sons, and during the worst of them, not so many years before the Alzheimer’s arrived in force, she berated me for not feeling enough for her while I was tending her.
    Sometimes it’s valuable to return to the circumstances of childhood with an adult’s resources and insights, and that time around I realized that I could not feel at all. Not for her, or for myself, except a dim horror, as if from a long way away. I had returned to the state in which I had spent my childhood, frozen, in suspended animation, waiting to thaw out, to wake up, waiting to live. I thought of her unhappiness as a sledge to which I was tethered. I dragged it with me and studied it in the hope of freeing myself and maybe even her.
    She thought of me as a mirror but she didn’t like what she saw and blamed the mirror. When I was thirty, in one of the furious letters I sometimes composed and rarely sent, I wrote, “You want me to be some kind of a mirror that will reflect back the self-image you want to see—perfect mother, totally loved, always right—but I am not a mirror, and the shortcomings you see are not my fault. And I can never get along with you as long as you continue demanding that I perform miracles.”
    I had brought her a copy of my first book and she responded by berating me for