My mother, Anne Chamberlain, has just died, at the age of 87.
The most awkward part of the process of her dying has been people reaching out to me with empathy, and sharing their very touching experiences with the deaths of their parents, talking about how much they loved their mothers and how close they were with them. People tend to make assumptions that other people experience life more or less as they do, naturally. But the world isn't like that.
I may have little of that sort of mushy stuff to share, but I do feel compelled to touch on a number of different themes related to Anne, her life, my relationship with her, and her death.
Anne was the second of four daughters of John Seymour Chamberlain and Margaret Golson. (If Margaret had a middle name, I never knew what it was.) Anne was born on February 22nd, 1938, on the island of Manhattan, where she would make sure both of her children would be born later.
Anne was a sort of anti-elitist elitist the whole time I knew her, which was a while. "Anti-elitist elitist" is a phrase I coined to describe her, many decades ago. As an anti-elitist elitist, she never had much interest in her own family history. This was probably because her father was deeply interested in his family history, and his eldest two daughters had an especially bad time growing up under his abusive parenting. His parenting improved in time for the next two girls that came along, and he was a warm and loving grandfather for many grandchildren later.
Seymour, as Anne's father was known, was so proud of the Seymour line of his ancestry that he gave all four of his daughters the same middle name -- Seymour. The Seymour line dates back to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. They were founding members of the English aristocracy, back when it spoke French.
Anne's father's grandfather, or maybe great grandfather, was Jacob Chamberlain, from Seneca Falls, New York. Jacob was a founder of the abolitionist Free Soil Party in 1848, and a founder of the abolitionist Republican Party in 1854.
Anne's mother, Margaret, was a descendant of Irish refugees who went to Alabama, which was where Margaret grew up. She went to university in Louisiana, and then traveled to far-off New York City to pursue a career in music. Instead of the music career, she married a businessman and raised four children, all of whom also went to college and became accomplished musicians themselves.
Despite being from a family of musicians, with more musicians in every direction of the family tree you look at, from an early age Anne developed the notion that the great musician in the family was going to be her, and her alone.
She did go on to become a world-class concert pianist, spending the vast majority of her adult life teaching piano students. Like so many great musicians, she never seriously pursued making a living as a performer, though she often talked about the idea, and often seemed to be suggesting that if she hadn't made the decision to have kids, she would have pursued that avenue. When she talked about this dream of music teachers to be full-time performers, she would always assure me that she had no regrets about having had kids.
Back in the days when people bought records, classical music made up 1% of the music market. (Similar, incidentally, to how much of the music market folk music takes up.) Within that 1% of the market, the kind of music my dad wrote and my mom was most passionate about playing, what they called Avant Garde music back in the 1960's -- also known as 12-tonal, atonal, or just "concert music" -- made up a small fraction of those who listened to classical music.
Most listeners of classical music didn't and don't like this stuff. The idea of making a living playing it was always a fantasy to begin with -- no one does that. Even if you get a much-coveted job playing for a symphony orchestra somewhere in the world, there aren't any that only play that kind of music, or they'd largely be playing for the crickets. Back in the 1960's, the main orchestras in the world that played my dad's music were in eastern Europe, where everything was heavily subsidized, of course.
Being part of a tiny little group of highly-accomplished performers of a type of music hardly anyone listened to never stopped Anne from believing in her greatness, the greatness of classical music, the plebian nature of all other forms of music, or of the ineptitude of most other musicians in the world. She referred to them as people who "played music" or "played the piano," rather than people who were musicians.
Growing up in the woodsy suburbs of Wilton, Connecticut, where Anne and her music professor husband Howard moved to from Manhattan around 1970, my bedroom and my sister's bedroom were on either side of the bedroom that our parents shared with a Steinway grand piano. On most mornings, Howard would go to his makeshift studio in the basement of the house, and their bedroom would become Anne's studio.
Sometime around dawn she'd begin to play music. Although her main bread and butter was teaching private students, she always had some kind of upcoming performance to practice for. These hours of most mornings were an involuntary and very impressive sort of master class in how to practice impossibly complicated passages and learn to play them perfectly every time.
Then came the students, many of whom were naturally coming for their lessons after school was over, which was also when school was over for my sister and I, too.
My stomach churns to even think about what it was like to listen to Anne work with those students day after day, year after year.
For a short while, she was teaching students at the private hippie elementary school I was lucky enough to attend, but she was soon disinvited from teaching kids there, because of her teaching style, which did not correspond at all to the methodology prevalent at that wonderful institution.
Anne's teaching style was nothing like the caring, encouraging style of the teachers at the Learning Community. Anne's methodology, such as it was, involved a near-constant stream of dismissive comments and insults. She had one or two extremely dedicated students who were exceptionally good players, and they got off with far fewer insults, and even the occasional compliment. The rest of her students were treated as if they were undeserving of her attention. If they played a passage in a way Anne didn't like, she'd repeat the way they played it, in exaggerated form, mocking their lack of musicality.
How many children Anne alienated from music, I'll never know, but I imagine their ranks far exceed the number of kids who had positive experiences studying with her. Yes, if they stuck with it, they probably got good at playing the piano, and at sightreading. But at what emotional cost?
On a bad day, her parenting style was a lot like her teaching style. On a good day, she kept her more pathological inclinations in check. But as a general rule, what Anne did when she was awake and in the company of other people, if she wasn't playing music, was talk. She talked, and others listened. If you didn't respond occasionally and try to interject some kind of comment, she'd accuse you of not paying attention. If you did make a comment, she'd accuse you of interrupting her.
This way, no matter what you said or didn't say, you could always be doing something wrong. If you interjected with a comment that was merely agreeing with something she said, she could still manage -- almost every time -- to turn your agreement with her into something to argue with you about.
The biggest problem with people who are virtually unable to ever stop talking is, by definition, they're terrible listeners. If anyone ever manages to say anything in their presence, the obsessive talker then finds a way to turn whatever they said into something that happened to them in their lives that they can then hold court about. The other biggest problem is the incessant talkers generally have very little to talk about, in relation to their need to keep talking. They run out of things to talk about and start repeating their stories, over and over again.
I assume I'm not the only one who knows a lot of people like this. A great concentration of people like this can be found in New York City, especially among Jewish women of my mother's generation, and Jewish women of the next generation before hers as well.
Anne wasn't Jewish, but that's not the point. You don't have to be Jewish to act like that, it's just that in my world most of the people who do act like that are Jewish, and female, and elderly. I'm sure there were historical reasons why this kind of behavior became so commonplace, and maybe it had positive applications back in the shtetl that are hard to understand in the modern era.
By the same token, the stoic, reserved, introspective men like my father, and his father, have been another archetype I've grown up with, and probably emulated to a huge extent as well. It represents just as much of a stereotype of a certain kind of New York Jewish man as my mother, or my father's mother, represented another stereotype. I'm sure if I were more familiar with other subcultures I might make similar sweeping statements about them, too, but I'll save those for someone who knows what they're talking about. I only know certain little corners of certain subcultures at all well, such as certain elements of New York society from whence my parents came.
The impact, of course, of being raised by someone who talks incessantly like a broken record and has no real capacity to engage in a meaningful way with her children or with most anyone else who doesn't just want to be talked at, is devastating. I wouldn't change my past if I could, and I've always felt that my reaction to this kind of parenting, which involved escaping into the solace of my internal world, probably helped turn me into who I am today, which is hopefully a good thing. But it's like being raised by a bulldozer, and the recovery has been long and slow.
I have always been grateful for the presence of my father growing up. Although it was always clear that Anne was in charge of everything, Howard always treated his children not only with affection, which Anne was also full of, but also with a keen sense of the importance of the dignity and respect that Anne so regularly violated.
Anne had been my earliest and biggest introduction to progressive politics, though it wasn't until I was probably over 50 that I really began to take in what a profound influence she had on me as far as the development of my worldview went.
Howard's interest in Taoism, Buddhism, group therapy, dream analysis, and all sorts of New Age stuff like that presented me with good tools for trying to work through having been raised by a bulldozer. Psychedelic drugs helped a lot, too. My daily cannabis habit has always been a coping mechanism, to try to maintain an even keel, of the sort that my mother could never have.
Although Anne spent much of my childhood dismissing what she called "popular music" as some kind of primitive and uninteresting slop, in relation to real, classical music, and although she frequently expressed her special contempt for people who picked up an instrument and just improvised on it, when her son stopped playing classical music and developed an interest in various crass forms of popular music, Anne was supportive.
Although she couldn't be supportive as a parent in the way that every child craves -- to be listened to and respected -- Anne always strove to be supportive of her kids in other ways. When the public elementary school didn't seem to be good for her kids, she sought out a wonderful hippie private school for us. The first time I went into a real music studio to work with real musicians and record an album, Anne paid for the whole thing. When it became clear that public school was not the place we wanted to send our kids in Portland, Anne volunteered to help pay for us to send our kids to a Waldorf school. I could easily go on with more similar examples.
One of the most valuable lessons I learned from growing up was that I never wanted to treat people the way my mother or my grandmother treated people. When I walk into a store or a restaurant, I don't want people to be glad when that terrible customer finally leaves. And when I have children, I thought, I want to treat them like these fragile little people matter.
The best book I eventually read about raising kids was titled Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves by Naomi Aldort. One of the most interesting things about reading that book, from the title onwards, was how much I learned about the various bad ways to do parenting, with so many of the examples being so familiar to me, from my childhood with Anne. I strove never to be dismissive or insulting towards my kids or anyone else, since being raised on dismissive comments and put-downs myself. I wish I could say I have succeeded in this endeavor, but the programming learned from this kind of childhood has ways of manifesting itself again and again.
When I was 18 or so, my parents got divorced. I had been encouraging my father to leave her for years, because it was obvious to me that no one deserved to be treated like this. I guess my hope was that he'd leave her, and take the kids with him. I hadn't really thought that part through, in retrospect, but I wanted him to be in the kind of relationship I thought he deserved. When he finally did leave her, it was under circumstances he hadn't planned on -- an affair exposed.
My hope for my dad to get into a good relationship happened, and he lived happily ever after (now aged 89, and no longer reading essays like this one, but still playing the piano beautifully).
Anne spent the rest of her life after her divorce living alone, in a perpetual state of loneliness, as far as I could tell. She continued to teach, participate in various social events and committees, play organ at church, and for probably 15 different summers she rented her house and spent the summer traveling. She went to Israel, Romania, Greece, France, and many other countries, including 10 summers spent in Ha Noi, Vietnam, working with classical musicians there.
But although she seemed to clearly have a desire to have a partner in life, and talked about this in one way or another often when I visited her, along with her continual feelings of betrayal and resentment towards her ex-husband, she never hooked up with one, to my knowledge. She had some friends who she would see now and then, but over time it became clear that mostly she talked about these friends, and didn't really see them much at all. They were more like friends in her mind, people she liked to think of as her friends, but not people she actually spent time with much at all.
Over the decades, her tendencies towards being the center of the universe only worsened. A number of her old friends, who I've known since childhood, confided in me about how Anne was getting even more crotchety and difficult, to the point where they couldn't stand visiting her more than once a year or so.
The tracks on the broken record included certain repeated themes. One was about how she never planned on having a divorce, and how much her ex-husband sucked for having an affair. One was how much electric instruments of all kinds suck, and how society is going down because it's no longer commonplace for people to own real pianos. One was about how only some people were real musicians and everyone else just played music. One was about how saving the planet is the responsibility of all of us to cut down our consumption, which was a vehicle for her to complain about most other people for not doing that. Another was about how if she is going to die, she doesn't want to be resuscitated.
All of these subjects were obsessions for her, that she talked about every day, to anyone who would listen. They involved repeating the same stories from her life that involved some kind of realization or discovery about these subjects. They often began with "stop me if you've heard this before," which was a pointless gesture -- the story was going to be repeated no matter what you said at that point.
Her death was one of her obsessions. She began to talk with my sister Bonnie and I about this eventuality many decades ago, on a very regular basis. She didn't want to be a vegetable, or to lose control of her body or mind. Even if you're not a control freak to begin with, this is a very understandable orientation, and one that I share. I agree that there's little point in living once you have no quality of life left, I feel the same way. Of course, whether you agree, understand, or even have a great deal of expertise related to this or any of the other things Anne has opinions about didn't matter. You're going to hear about it again anyway.
As Anne got older, her hearing began to decline. This, of course, is a common human experience as we age. It's also very common for people at first to think these damn young people just don't know how to enunciate anymore, before they eventually come to realize that it is in fact their ears that are the main problem here. Anne never got there, despite eventually very severe hearing loss. Right up until the end, she insisted that anyone she couldn't understand was suffering from bad diction, including her own children. Other people could hopefully have been entertained by how ridiculous her behavior had become, especially as she began to experience cognitive decline.
She had glaucoma in one eye, a bad knee, and few teeth remaining in her head. She had been feeling like it was time to die, just because of these sorts of health conditions. Then on October 10th, on the way to New Bedford, Massachusetts, riding with Bonnie and a car full of other folks to hear Kamala and I do a concert there, Anne had a mini-stroke of some kind, where she was speaking in tongues for twenty minutes or so. She then decided she didn't want to go to doctors to figure out what had happened or get diagnosed or treated, she just wanted to call it quits.
Anne invited Kamala and I to have dinner with her in her granny flat beneath my sister's home in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. This dinner, she told us, would be her last, and it was. That was October 13th, I think. The three of us had a tasty quiche kind of thing with lots of kale that Anne had made. Afterwards we all had some vanilla ice cream, which was Anne's last dessert.
Anne had long ago talked about Scott Nearing, and how he died by stopping eating. Since then she read another book about VSED -- Voluntary Stopping Eating and Drinking.
My sister got the word out to family and friends of Anne's, some of whom Anne hadn't seen in decades. Over the next couple weeks, Anne's surviving younger sisters came from New Jersey and California, Reiko and my kids all flew in from Oregon, and various friends and relatives from Connecticut and elsewhere came to pay respects.
If Anne had been planning to do the whole VSED thing, she altered her plan a bit, happy to have all these visitors. Finally, perhaps for the first time in forty years, she had people around her at all times, all of them apparently happy to sit quietly and listen to her talk.
Given how thirsty all this talking made her, she moderated the VSED program to the extent that although she was spitting out most of the water she was sipping on to keep her mouth lubricated, she was drinking enough of it that she lived much longer than people typically do when they actually stop drinking water as well as eating food.
When she first decided to stop eating, I commented to her that if there was anything I wanted to talk about with her, I should do it now. She was very intentional about making space for her and I to be alone, to facilitate that, which was very nice. But I also knew that I had given up on trying to talk about her behavior towards me or other people a long time ago. Not for lack of effort, but because it was obvious a long time ago that she was completely unable to see what she was doing. She might be horrified to see someone else treat others the way she did, but her blind spot around these things included herself, in her entirety.
During the time her grandchildren were visiting, her last opportunity to have a chance to hear what her grandchildren's voices sound like was once again squandered by ignoring them, while talking about how beautiful they are, to the adults who were old enough to know how to shut up and listen to her.
In the course of everything else, while I was being continually triggered by this maddening behavior, there were many touching moments.
Anne was reminiscing about aspects of her daily life in JP that she said she enjoyed so much, that she would miss. I'm not sure how much she really enjoyed these things, and how much she was working on developing some kind of daily routine to try to not be too miserable, as she lived alone in Boston. But she talked about how much she loved her daily trips to Cafe Ula nearby, to sip a latte and read a book, and her walks through the park around the corner where the Tibetan Redwoods are growing, and her trips to hear student recitals at the New England Conservatory a short T ride away.
So once she was no longer able to walk, Bonnie borrowed a wheelchair from somewhere, and we took Anne to have her official last sip of a latte at Cafe Ula, and to have her last walk through the park, and her last concert at Jordan Hall. Last Tuesday, we wheeled her to the place where she could vote in an election, for the last time.
One of the things Anne talked about that she had never mentioned before related to a relationship she was in with a much older married man when she was in her twenties. In lieu of being able to tell this long-dead lover of hers that she still loved him, Anne felt moved to contact his children, now in their eighties, like her, to tell them that she still loved their father. They were so gracious in their response to her, telling her that he still loved her, too. This was both so touching, and so mind-boggling, at the same time, knowing that this was a woman who to no small degree defined herself as a jilted divorcee, whose husband was stolen by a younger woman with whom he had had an affair. To learn that she had once been the younger woman having the affair with the married man was very interesting.
I have spent more than two years now watching a livestreamed genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinians, especially in Gaza. I have been watching people starve to death. I have seen how long a fragile old person's body, or a fragile child's body, can survive without food. I have seen picture after picture of what they look like just before death. Those famine-stricken Palestinians was what kept on going through my mind as I watched Anne's body become more emaciated day by day. (Not that there's otherwise anything in common between people who voluntarily stop eating and those who stop eating because no one is letting any food in.)
Anne's death came on the 26th day after she stopped eating. And incidentally, the 38th day of the longest government shutdown in US history.
Once she became too weak to speak, there was a peace that fell on her apartment. Rather than a place where a bunch of people took shifts looking after Anne and listening to her talk, Anne's apartment became a gathering place for friends and family to hang out, while she died. Her apartment was now a space where other voices could be heard, and many good conversations then took place there.
The occasion of Anne's death, pre-planned as it was, has been a wonderful time to see people I hadn't seen in a long time, and to spend more time with folks like my sister and her family, who I so often just see for a night or two and then I'm off somewhere else, on a tour. This time, I was also on a tour, but I never took the return flight home to Portland. Soon I'll head back to my kids on the west coast, if the travel chaos currently at the airports allows.
In conclusion, if you're going to write a good remembrance about someone, sometimes it's probably best if you didn't actually know them all that well. I would not have wanted Anne to read these words when she was alive, which is why I didn't write them then. Mark Twain didn't publish his autobiography until 100 years after his death.
Anne brought a lot of beautiful music into the world. Somehow or other she raised a couple of great kids. She supported all the good causes, along with some of the hopeless ones. Like most of us, maybe even the vast majority of us, she did her best.
I knew that when she was alive, which is why I didn't want to hurt her by pointing out the many ways she did harm to her children, to so many of her fragile young students, and probably other people as well, while she was alive.
But at least now that she is no longer with us, I think all of those people, wherever they are, deserve to know that whatever insulting or dismissive comment Anne made to you, it was not true. You should not have been treated like that, just because you wanted to learn how to play the piano, or your parents wanted you to.
Knowing what I know, if I were to just say nice things about Anne's contributions to the world, and ignore the rest, I would feel like I was gaslighting those other children, and overlooking their very real trauma. But none of us deserved to be treated like that.
In what seems like a very intriguing twist of fate, just about one hour after Anne's passing, a Chihuahua was wandering around on the street in front of the house. It looked lost and cold. John picked him up and brought him inside. The dog had no collar or other identification, so someone called the animal shelter to see if there might be a chip in the animal. The address of the shelter, it turned out, was 26 Mahler.
Mahler was the composer of the last piece of music Anne played, several days ago, before she was too weak to see or sit up. It was day 26 of her fast. The Chihuahua seemed like some kind of parting gift. Who knows.
