July 2008

…but while I breathe Heaven's air,
and Heaven looks down on me,
And smiles at my best meanings,
I remain Mistress of mine own self
and mine own soul.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Foresters (act IV, sc. 1)

We lost D’s mother a few weeks ago. Although I never asked her, I believe that July 4th—Independence Day—might have been her favorite holiday. Fiercely independent until the end, she spent her last weeks in great pain, but on her terms: at home. Although she was attended to by her children and various care givers, she remained “mistress of her own self and own soul,” just as Maid Marian does in Tennyson’s The Foresters.

But even before she became ill, her independence was bounded. By the time she’d taken her first breath, her fate was decided; like most all girls of her generation, she was headed for marriage and maternity. And though she carried out both duties without complaint, I—as an outsider—saw that she may have, given the chance, exercised that independence on a wider stage than wifedom and motherhood.

She had that flinty edge, that crystalline grit ineffably and intrinsically a part of so many Irish women. Daughter of a prosperous butcher and wife of a successful business owner, she nonetheless had the DNA of generations of poor but straight-backed Irish women who faced life’s adversities head on. She was frugal. She didn’t express regrets, even if she felt them. She was not sentimental (although she did bake batches of chocolate chip cookies each and every week for almost sixty years). And, as D has said, she “didn’t have a religious bone in her body.” Quite simply, she was practical, no-nonsense, and sure of herself; had she been born in 1960 instead of 1920, she would have made a formidable business woman.

Independence is such a keystone of the American experience, it is a little surprising that the holiday has come to be called simply “the Fourth of July” in place of the more meaningful “Independence Day.” As a nation, we value our individual and collective freedoms enough to wage war to protect them. As individuals, we yearn to remove the training wheels, to move into our first apartments, to become our own bosses. Ours is a country of 300 million little presidents, all demanding to call the shots in their own lives.

And yet, for all that standing alone that we do, we strive to create, maintain, and reinvent the ties that bind. Marriage, children, dinner parties, sporting events, worship services—all are attempts to connect, to fit together into a cohesive whole. Perhaps that’s why D’s mother didn’t express regret. Perhaps she saw that her individual independence was subservient to the part of her that knitted together her family, that her “best meanings” were as mother to five children and wife to a man who worked six days a week until he was 80. Maybe her independent self knew that her interconnected soul was the sweeter prize.

And maybe that is a good lesson to carry forth out of our grief—that our souls, with their ties to others, trump our stand-alone selves. That the connections are more valuable than the autonomy. That personal liberty is best when exercised for the betterment of others. D’s mother had other things to do besides bake thousands and thousands of chocolate chip cookies, but as Mistress of her own self and her own soul, she chose the cookies.