Story Frame 73 – The Best Conversations

Back in 2013, not long after I moved into my Under the Appalachian Sun house, Robin Melanie Leacock contacted me to see if I would help get her film about her mother – Stella is 95! – on the air on PBS stations around the country.

Robin is the daughter-in-law of cinema verite pioneer, Richard Leacock. Her husband is documentary filmmaker Robert Leacock. I had already worked with her on an earlier film, A Passion for Giving and knew whatever film she had created would have a big heart.

This time Robin had turned her lens on her mother, Estelle Craig, a lively character who’d lived an interesting and remarkable life. At 95, she still had stories to tell, an active social life and was in the midst of writing a play.

Robin’s documentary gave me insight for dealing with my own mother’s last years. Mom was 92 at the time and I remember watching Stella is 95! and wondering how many years together we had left. As it turned out, she died just three days before turning 96.

Throughout my life, I’d had a complicated relationship with her. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it wasn’t.

Having already raised two children, a boy and a girl – the perfect family – I was the straggler, that awkward third child, born unexpectedly a decade after my sister and eight years after my brother, the one who held her back from having the unencumbered adult life she hankered after.

A child of Danish immigrants, she’d grown up during the Great Depression. She was the kind of girl who married her college sweetheart before he went off to serve in World War II.

By contrast, I was a child of the sixties. I came of age during Woodstock, Haight Ashbury, Carnaby Street, rock ‘n roll, miniskirts and Vietnam protests.

She was a world traveler, but I am more open-minded than she was, and even more adventurous. In retrospect, I think it was my free and creative spirit that worried her. I can’t even count the number of times I made one of my pronouncements to her, like the time I said, a mere twenty minutes after arriving in town – “This is it, I’m moving to Asheville” – and she looked at me as if I was from another planet.

Over the years, we knocked heads many times over many things. Her criticisms never failed to highlight the ways in which we were two very different people. Infuriating as they could be, I think these criticisms were rooted in her desire to protect me – both from others and from myself. In retrospect, I wonder if she was scared, and perhaps just a little bit intrigued by, the freedoms of my era.

In many other ways, however, she was a good mother – positive and upbeat with a passion for art galleries and museums, interested in seeing films (especially if Jeremy Irons was in them) and chatting about geopolitics. She was good about staying in touch with family. She loved chatting over meals out, welcoming people over to her place for cocktails and meals, and was always up for a travel adventure.

She was a mother who couldn’t say “I love you,” so she expressed it in other ways. Throughout my childhood, she’d kept me supplied with a steady stream of thought-provoking books – The Chronicles of Narnia, Little House on the Prairie, The Hobbit, A Wrinkle in Time, My Side of the Mountain, and so many others. Books that got inside my head and sparked my imagination.

Growing up, I had a lot of freedoms. At just eight years old, I was walking a mile each way through the streets of Chelsea all by myself to school. By eleven, I was riding a combination of buses and trains by myself back and forth from one side of London to the other daily to get to another school.

When I was a high school senior in London and she noticed me spending hours listening to Joni Mitchell and writing poetry up in my room, she took me to see classical guitarist Christopher Parkening in concert. Then she bought me a guitar, which I still have.

A few months later, she and dad gave their approval for me to spend two weeks traveling around Russia with some of my classmates and one of our teachers. After high school graduation, I went off to college in a different country. At nineteen, I moved to Paris for the summer to be a nanny.

These freedoms she encouraged and never seemed to think twice about or doubt my ability to pull off. As I grew older, she took me to concert halls and art museums. In my adult years, we took not just one, but three sixteen-hundred-kilometer travel adventures together around Denmark, one per decade, visiting friends and family.

But ‘mumsy’ – in the words of Michael Caine in the film, Alfie – she was not.

Like a fine wine, however, my mother improved with age. She turned out to be a better grandmother than she had been mother – warmer, more enthusiastic, more interested, hugging and loving than she had been with me. And so, when she asked if she could live with me in my ‘Under the Appalachian Sun’ home in Asheville, I said okay.

She was 93 when she moved in and 93.5 when she moved out. Living together at this point in our lives turned out not to be easy for either of us.

She moved into a garden flat in a retirement village in the nearby town of Black Mountain. The separation established a peace and acceptance between us. It was here that we finally learned to live together – as long as we were 20 miles apart. We continued to do many small adventures in and around Asheville, as long as they were limited to just a few hours.

I took her out to small, local art galleries and cafés for coffee or wine. Sometimes we just stayed in Black Mountain and had Reubens and beer at the Dark City Tavern. Some evenings we went to Asheville to listen to big band music at 5 Walnut Wine Bar.

Unfortunately, she soon made up for her 93 years of good health with a rapid-fire streak of health disasters. A stroke was followed by a heart attack, then a bad case of shingles. She went from living independently in her own little garden apartment, to assisted living, to skilled nursing, to hospice care – punctuated by two more trips to the emergency room and another unexpected surgery. I found myself living in a state of suspended animation, with peeled back awareness of my imminent loss, holding my breath in anticipation of the next emergency, the next phone call with more bad news.

She never lost her sense of humor, however. Just weeks before she slipped away, I wheeled her into one of the living rooms at her retirement village, positioning her in front of a large television set so she could watch the men’s finals of her beloved Wimbledon Tennis Tournament. Roger Federer, her favorite, was playing Marin Čilić of Croatia. Federer won his eighth Wimbledon tournament that afternoon, which made her very happy. After the presentation of trophies, I turned to her and said, “He has a nice smile, doesn’t he?”

“He has a nice everything!” she replied, a sparkle in her eyes. She was definitely still there.

Mom died a few weeks later, three days shy of her 96th birthday.

In the months after my mother’s death, fragments from our chats kept popping into my head, often when least expected.

She had her favorite places in Asheville – Malaprop's Bookstore and 5 Walnut Wine Bar among them. But I think her favorite of them all was Battery Park Book Exchange & Champagne Bar (pictured above.)

There, over a glass of wine and a cheeseboard, she and I would have long discussions about the affairs of the world, my kids, and good adventures from days gone by – hers, mine and ours. We could (and did) talk for hours.

Each week I joined her for lunch or dinner in the dining room at the retirement village and listen once again to the stories. Often, we were there, still talking, after everyone else had left. She loved that.

"We have the best conversations!" she would exclaim when I eventually walked her down the hall to her little flat – even if she had (as usual) done most of the talking.

She'd call a few days later to thank me for coming over and tell me how much she'd enjoyed our visit, often ending with the same words, "We have the best conversations!"

In February, I offered to take her out for a glass of wine in celebration of Karen's life. She started automatically to demur, but when I suggested we go to Battery Park Book Exchange & Champagne Bar, she couldn't resist. And so we celebrated Valentine's Day with memories of my sister there together in the usual way – a glass of wine, some cheese, and of course – stories.

"We have the best conversations!" she remarked happily on the drive back to her place in Black Mountain.

It was to be her last visit to the Book Exchange & Champagne Bar. In the weeks that followed, she became increasingly reluctant to leave her little garden flat.

She did admit, a few weeks later, that she would love to have one more trip there. A mischievous little girl smile of hopefulness and delight lit up her face at the very thought of it.

But somehow, I either didn't have or didn’t make the time. I also wasn't sure she could manage it. It bothered me that I didn't work that out for her. Second guesses and regrets are part of the pain of dealing with death, but I've realized that trying to mentally outwit the sharper edges of remorse is pointless.

Rather, the best antidote to the relentless head-tricks and mind games we put ourselves through in the wake of loss might just be an unexpected little piece of magic.

And so it was one night, several months after she died, that a painting almost hidden in a dark corner of the old Wedge building in Asheville’s River Arts District happened to catch my eye.

I was wandering around a friend's studio during a reception called, “Accidentally on Purpose" that was showcasing her work. Mixed media artist Jacqui Fehl, who has large grey eyes and long ropes of platinum and black dreads, describes her paintings as "a blend of grunge, whimsy and outsider.”

Influenced by music, lyrics, feelings, and stories, Jacqui’s art is unpredictable – playful, colorful and humorous with an appealing edge of darkness. “It is a dance of layering on, removing, covering up and revealing,” her artist statement reads. “I like my work to be loose, a bit flawed and not too precise or perfect.”

Just like my life, I thought.

Even though it was not part of the show, I could see and feel there was something about this particular painting that was very compelling. The colors, the mood of it – it had a storytelling aura and lovely intimacy about it.

Another gallery artist caught me staring at it.

"You like this one?" she asked.

"Yes, I do," I replied. Once again, there I was, standing in front of another painting, unable to tear myself away.

I was curious about – and drawn to – the random appearance of places to sit throughout the canvas. Knowing that Jacqui always gives her paintings interesting titles, I asked the woman if she knew what Jacqui called it. She picked it up from the easel and in the low light of dark corner, squinted at the writing on the back of it.

"The Best Conversations," she said.

I stood there, speechless. So, she said it again, a little louder this time, as if perhaps I was hard of hearing.

"It's called 'The Best Conversations.'"

Remembering the many times my mother had said those exact words, my head flooded with delight – and relief. Finding this painting felt like love.

Accidentally on purpose, indeed.

The Best Conversations came home with me that night. I hung it up in the little writing/breakfast room behind the kitchen that looked over the gardens of my ‘Under the Appalachian Sun’ house – just one of the many places where Mom and I often had our best conversations.

A year later, we’d all moved on – Zoë to a new life in Seattle and Leif to Finland for university.

I sold my ‘Under the Appalachian Sun’ house and bought a little mid-century modern home, the design of which brought back memories – mostly good – of the old Money Pit house Steve and I had renovated back in the late 80s. Fortunately, this one was in much better condition. I could move in without fear of toxic poisoning, cat shit, smoke damage, and broken shards of glass, and take my time fixing it up and re-visioning it. The profit from my ‘Under the Appalachian Sun’ house paid off all remaining university debts for both kids. That was the biggest gift, among many, of that house.

Sad as I was to leave it, after five years I was more than weary of living next to the homeless shelter’s seemingly endless drama.

Fate delivered me the perfect buyers – a former international director of “Save the Children” and her husband, a retired war correspondent for NPR and The LA Times. They’d fallen for each other, they told me, because one thing they had in common was that they were both the ones running towards international crises to help or report on it, when everyone else was running away from them.

A homeless women’s shelter next door? Not a problem! they said cheerfully.

[Photo of me and mom at Battery Park Book Exchange & Champagne Bar may have been taken by Logan Hatchett]

Kristin Fellows is a published writer, world traveler, and a well-seasoned documentary film consultant. When not writing, Kristin can often be found listening to someone’s story or behind the lens of one of her cameras.

More about Kristin @ kristinfellowswriter.com