Kinsey and Me: Stories by Sue Grafton

I focused on the 13 sketches in the last third of this book (pp. 211-283): "In these pieces," one Chicago Tribune reviewer wrote Grafton "revisits the traumatic events of her early adulthood, when she was called upon to take care of her mother, who was well into the process of drinking herself to death." The sketches focus on her mother's presence in life (pp. 211-231), her illness and death (pp. 233-243) and how "Kit's" life evolves afterward--with her mother gone from the world, but never far from Kit's thoughts (pp. 245-281).

Certainly one could find many themes in these brief 70 pages, but one irony kept me rapt: Grafton was truly great in crafting a mystery; I wrote a few comments about one of them here. Yet one recurring mystery she would never personally solve was the mind of her dying mother.

Judy Belushi once wondered, of her self-destructive comedian husband, "What could be going on inside this person to make him so unhappy?" (Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, page 11). Grafton repeatedly finds herself confronted by a similar--unsolvable--mystery:

page 213: "all the time, [she] lay there, saying nothing, moving not at all except to smoke. What went on inside that head? What could her mother think of hour after hour, day after day? ...What was the woman angry about?"

page 220: "I have no notion in the world what has happened to her between that time [of a seemingly happier youth] and this; only that some battle must have raged somewhere to take such a toll from that once sturdy frame."

page 222: "The X-ray will show it. One soul, sadly cracked in a way that no one can mend. Perhaps the doctor will prescribe lots of alcohol, who knows?"

pages 236-237: "And you understand in that moment how like a prison this [hospital] is also, how like a prisoner she is, shut away in the captive silence of her head. And you understand that she's always been this way, locked away from you, locked away from life."

page 247: "Somehow, at some point, and for reasons unknown, the woman in the photograph, looking fresh and pleased with herself at thirty-two, became no more than a pile of rags on a dark green spread."

page 277: "I've even thought of...send[ing] for her medical records in New York as though in the cataloging of heart, lungs, and temperature, I might learn something new about who she was and how she's related to me."

page 282: "What you say to [your father] is this: we did, yes, fail in our lives, the four of us: you and [mother], [sister] and me. We died of all the unwept tears and all the things we never understood."

And this last observation reminds me of something Dr. Sheldon Kopp once observed, mourning a patient he was unable to reach: "Now I cared, now that it was too late. The other men in group mourned Norman as they might a handicapped brother who had died, a child lost somehow because no one knew how to ask him where it hurt" (If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him: The Pilgrimage Of Psychotherapy Patients, page 158). 

Marriage manuals all tell us that relationships die from a dearth of communication. So do alcoholics.