Everything that Happens in Life is Somewhere in War & Peace
I listened to a book with my mother. At least one of us got a lot out of it.
A few months ago, I took a cross-country road trip with my mother. I handled all the driving, while my mother rode in the trunk, in a box from Palmetto Cremations of Batesburg-Leesville, South Carolina. The package came in a midnight blue velveteen bag, presumably to lend funereal solemnity to finely ground soot. If this sounds disrespectful, know that aside from one good line — ashes, to ashes, dust to dust—there’s nothing poetic about what the death industrial complex terms “cremains,” be they in a Grecian urn or a Hefty bag. Dust, by its very nature, is irrelevant to the point of invisibility. Try as you might, you just can’t get too worked up over it.
Not to cast aspersions on Palmetto Cremations, but barring CSI-level lab work, there is no way of verifying that the cinders I transported across several state lines once constituted my human mother. For all I know, they could be somebody else’s mother, the sweepings from a random fireplace, or a significantly reduced raccoon. Without getting too gummed up in metaphysics, my mother’s presence on this odyssey was debatable. That said, I couldn’t help feeling that somebody who’d breathed ferociously among the living until recently might be inclined to linger.
In my family, my mother’s official title was Mummy. If we can be said to be from anywhere, it is begrudgingly from Ohio, so this will strike the discerning reader as affectation. Anyhow, somewhere on I-70—let’s drop a pin between Wakeeny and Kanorado— it struck me that Travels with Mummy might make a good title for something. Personhood is finite, but a great persona is forever, and Mummy had one of those. For most of our shared existence, she proudly leaned into a characterization that a canceled casting director might call The No B.S. Latina. That is to say, she was avowedly not from a namby-pamby, no-slap, Nordic-type culture. Therefore, I assumed my mother was with me, speaking Castilian Spanish and casting an evil eye.
With all this fogging my brain, we rolled down the highway. The timing was auspicious. My mother’s calendar was suddenly wide open, as was mine. Like most people during the Great Pandemic, misfortune nested in both our trees like a noisome murder of crows. My stepfather, upon whom my mother depended for everything, died within a month of lockdown; I experienced a rather cinematic betrayal; my mother was revealed to have hidden Parkinson’s disease among other ravaging maladies; my novel was suddenly out of sync with the tastes of acquisitions editors; my mother, who once discoursed at length on the Wars of the Roses, was keeping company with an imaginary chocolate Labrador; I tripped and broke my wrist; my mother begged for death, which took an excruciating time coming. Suffice it to say, we needed a reset.
She’d been happiest in California, where she’d been an H.R. director at a Silicon Valley company, but by various turns, my mother ended her days in South Carolina. It made sense for me to fetch her because I live in Los Angeles, and had time. My siblings and I discussed scattering her ashes near Pescadero, a little coastal town she loved. This was just guesswork, as the world was upside down. I could have unrolled my window in the Ozarks, and let her ashes swirl in the damp wind. I could have let them seep into the frigid Colorado River and be carried to her beloved Mexico. Who would know but the Colorado Rockies, or the green hills of Kentucky? She left no instructions.
I’m not crazy enough to pose questions to a velveteen bag, and even under ideal circumstances, my mother wasn’t a talker. So, we settled into a long-established routine, sharing the road in silence, vaguely discomfited by one another’s company. I never left the parcel in the car at night, which might have been interpreted as a sign of disrespect. What if a thief broke in and absconded with what was labeled to be her? That might make for a funny story if you have my sense of humor. Hard experience has taught me that this sense of humor is not for everybody. My mother, for one, never cared for it.
At night, the box accompanied me to a succession of hotel rooms, and I’d find a sturdy cabinet to stow it in, so both of us would be spared embarrassment when I took a shower, and I could sleep, however fitfully, knowing that my mother wasn’t looming over me in judgment. Now, I consider myself a man of science, if a man of science can have no aptitude for science. Of course, I knew that my mother was in no condition to see. But you know how it goes: Once you’ve been assigned a mother, whatever state she may be in, you are never going to shake her.
We needed to fill long days under a yawning sky. When life had been our mutual condition, we had shared a love of books, movies, and British television. It was a neutral zone, where civilized adversaries could parley like the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Prussia. My mother was a proud woman of secrets, who lived her life on a strictly need-to-know basis as if she were an O.S.S. agent clinging to memorized codes until every last toenail was pulled. I assume this is because she was an immigrant child, raised by parents who’d buried messy lives in hot, volatile countries. She found me impertinent, while I found her diabolically enigmatic. She divulged very little, but she unfailingly asked me what I was reading and what I’d seen. When she became very ill, audiobooks were among the very last things she let go of.
So, I chose War & Peace for us to listen to, because a pandemic seemed like a season for Tolstoy, and because I wanted something enormous to lose myself in. Everyone should read W&P before they die, the bromide goes, to which a friend replied: Well, then by all means don’t read it. Live forever! I didn’t know if my mother had made the cutoff. She loved costume drama and European history. It seemed perfect for our trip, and naturally, she didn’t object. The great books are hard to read these days, because they are dense and because we are impatient. But I’ve discovered they are quite wonderful to hear. I like to imagine people obsessively reading Dickens or Tolstoy in the 1800s when there was no media competition, the way we might scroll through our feeds or get agitated by Rachel Maddow. The latest chapter of an unwieldy novel might as well have been an episode of Gossip Girl.
My sister-in-law, who is mad for W&P, recommended a version on Audible that was narrated by an English actor named Neville Jason. Mr. Jason shared my mother’s general circumstance (deceased), which I thought might be of interest to her. In life, his biggest credit seems to be an episode of Dr. Who. Under-appreciated among mortals, he is a posthumous marvel, doing a different voice for every W&P character, an Olympian feat (even if you have never read the book, you likely know that it is overpopulated). He gave Pierre a querulous tone, Natasha the breathless uptalk of an ingenue, Dolokhov a menacing rumble, and Denisov Elmer Fudd’s speech impediment. Even the long boggy parts having to do with Napoleon and philosophy in Book II, though they never flew by, were somehow knitted into the whole by his reading, appearing like rest stops between the exits for the Pavlovna salon in St. Petersburg and the Bolkonsky estate in Bald Hills.
How it swept over us: W&P, as vast as the Great Steppe. There came a point, between Denver and Moab, where particular words seemed to lose form, and we were somehow in the swirl of something huge, absorbing the whole, without having to rest on the details of who was at this name day banquet or that Polish battlefield. Little things would pop out. Why does Tolstoy keep bringing up the downy hair on doomed Princess Lisa’s lip? Did he have a kinky thing for hairy lips? Is Nikolai unhealthily obsessed with the Tsar? Does he have a kinky thing for tsars? Dolokhov is a scoundrel, but at least he loves his mother. Why is it taking Prince Andrei so long to die?
It was all there, somehow: Birth, comedy and romance, bigotry, horror, unpaid bills, refugees, abortion, political corruption, philosophy, betrayal, and death. And yes, tedium. I talked to myself, and I talked back to Tolstoy, and maybe I talked to my mother. How amoral, those Kuragins! What a coy climber, that Mme. Bourienne! Get the hell out of Moscow, Pierre! A book became a new universe, the place I traveled through as I drove across a different continent. I’d call my sister-in-law from the road, just to talk W&P (Dolokhov is a mood. That Sonya can’t catch a break). My mother kept her own counsel, but this sort of thing—tossing around the big ideas from a big, old book, while still reveling in the pure soap opera of it—well, these were quite the best parts of her. They mean far more than ashes.
Like a great many foolish people, I hardly expected my mother to die. Hindsight being what it is, I can see now that she had been working at it for a considerable period, just tucking it away from view. She had a profound aversion to looking weak, and her preferred course of treatment for a terminal condition was to set herself adrift on a metaphorical ice floe. If it were fiction, we would have had a transcendent farewell scene, but that’s not how life is played. Everything ends in death, and death is horrible, so says W&P. But it also says that love hinders death, and I believe it does, just a little. It transpires that we did love one another, my mother and me, in our particular fashion, indelible as a fingerprint.
Before his death in W&P, Prince Andrei thinks, “Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”
We came home to California. We finished our big book. And I began to think, perhaps, that Prince Andrei, who took so terribly long to die, was right.
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