April 9, 2008

I thought I could bang out
a column today—a regular column, a column about my readers' problems and
their freaky fetishes and all those asshole politicians out there. You know,
the usual.

The day my son was born, I
managed to slip out of the maternity ward and write a column; I wrote one the
day I was indicted by the state of Iowa for licking Gary Bauer's doorknobs. (I
was actually indicted for voter fraud—on a trumped-up charge, your
honor—but Bauer's knob needs all the attention it can get.) I've written
columns on days that I was dumped and on the morning of 9/11. So I figured that
I could bang out a column today.

I opened my laptop and
started reading your letters. I love reading your letters—I do. But I
couldn't get into it. I just don't have a column in me this week. I'm
disappointed in myself. I write this column at Ann Landers's desk, for crying
out loud, and the old lady banged out a heartbreaking, truncated column when
her marriage collapsed. If Landers could bang one out under that kind of
emotional strain, then I could damn well bang one out, too. Just do it, right?
Just fucking do it. But I just fucking can't.

My mother died on Monday.

Perhaps a sex-advice
column isn't an appropriate place to eulogize an articulate, elegant woman, a
practicing Catholic named for the patron saint of hopeless causes and, perhaps
consequently, a Cubs fan. I mean, really. Eulogizing my mother in the back of a
paper, alongside the escort ads? So let's not think of this as a eulogy. Let's
think of it as a thank-you note, the kind of nicety that my mother appreciated.

Forgive the cliché: My
mom gave me so much.
She gave me life, of course, and some other stuff besides: her sense of humor,
her bionic bullshit detectors, her colossal sweet tooth. She also gave
me—she gave all four of her children (Bill, Ed, Dan, Laura)—her
unconditional love. Long after I came out, she told me she always suspected
that I might be gay; I was the quiet one, the boy who liked Broadway musicals
and baking cakes and shared her passion for Strauss waltzes. When I asked my
parents to take me to the national tour of A Chorus Line for my 13th birthday,
that should have settled the matter. Your third son? Total fag, lady. But my
parents were Catholic and religious, and it somehow still came as a shock
when I told them. My mother came around fast and she came out
swinging—rainbow stickers on her car, a PFLAG membership card in her
wallet, and an ultimatum delivered to the whole family: Anyone who had a
problem with me had a problem with her.

But the real reason I feel
compelled to thank her in this space is because I wouldn't have this space if
it weren't for her.

My mother, as my brother
Bill likes to say, made friends like Rockefeller made money and George W. Bush
makes mistakes—and she was that friend you confided in and went to for
advice. I was a mama's boy—hello—and I spent a great deal of time in
my mother's kitchen, listening to her tell her friends exactly what they needed
to do. Sometimes gently, sometimes brusquely, always with a dose of humor. My
mom liked to say that her son got paid to do something that she did for free—and
isn't that the way the world works? Women cook, men are chefs; women are
housewives, men are butlers; she gave advice, I got paid to give advice. (And for
a few years, she did too; my mother and I wrote a joint column for a couple of
websites in the 1990s.)

So I want to thank my mom.
I wouldn't be writing this column today if it weren't for her gifts and her
ability to find the humor in even the most serious of subjects.

Even death, even her own.

After a long struggle, we
had to go into my mother's hospital room and tell her that nothing more could
be done. She didn't go into the hospital expecting to die, and she was not
ready go. But she took the news with her characteristic grace. She said her
farewells, asked us never to forget her (as if), and paused for a
moment. Then Mom lifted an eyebrow, shrugged, and said…

"Shit."

My mother wasn't crude; I
didn't get my foul mouth from her. She used profanity sparingly, and then only
in italics and quotation marks. When she said "shit" on her deathbed, we
understood the joke. What she meant was this: "Now, the kind of person who
casually uses profanity might be inclined to say 'shit' at a moment like this.
But I'm not the kind of person who casually uses profanity—and certainly not
at a moment like this. But if I were the kind of person who casually used profanity,
'shit' might be the word I would use right now. If I were that kind of person.
Which I'm not."

Everyone gathered around
her bed—my mother's husband (my son has two fathers, and so do I), my
sister, my aunt—knew what Mom wanted: She wanted us to laugh. This woman,
so full of life, who wanted so badly to live, having just been told she would
not, she
was trying to lift our spirits. ("Shit," for the record, wasn't her last word. Her
last words were just for the family.)

Anyway, my mom is dead,
and I am not
in the mood, as she used to say. ("You are so," one of us kids would usually
respond. "You're in a bad mood.") So I'm going to take a week or two off
from the column and the podcast, hang out with the boyfriend and the kid, and
burst into tears in coffee shops and grocery stores. I'll run some greatest
hits in this space while I'm away—I'll find a column or two featuring
Mom—and then I'll be back, just as filthy-minded as ever. In lieu of
flowers, please send pictures of your boyfriends' rear ends. (Lesbians may send
flowers.) If you're the donation-making type and you're so inclined, my mother
would be pleased to see some of your money flow to PFLAG (pflag.org) or the
Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation (pulmonaryfibrosis.org).

Oh, one last thing: I was
supposed to take my mother to see the national tour of The Drowsy Chaperone in Chicago this Friday,
April 11. It was her birthday present. I got us great seats: seventh row, on
the aisle. But I won't be able to use our tickets now. Not because it would be
too depressing to go without my mother—not just because—but
because, as rotten, stinking fate would have it, I'm going to be at my mother's
wake on Friday night.

But I'm practical, like Mom,
and I'd hate to see perfectly good tickets to a national tour of a hit Broadway
musical go to waste. And it occurs to me that there has to be a teenage boy out
there—in Chicago or close enough—who likes musicals and has a
mother who loves him for the little musical-theater queen that he is. If you
know that boy or you are that boy or you were that boy a decade ago or if
you're that boy's mother or grandmother, send me an e-mail and I'll arrange to
get these tickets to you.

Like I said, they're great
seats. I would go if I could. But I can't.

Shit.

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