The quiet is here with us, for now. It’s the silence of her exhaustion, 93 years deep. I am with the woman who has married four and buried four, as well as a daughter—a sentence that should belong to mythology, not a mother.
And I often wake hearing the echoes of that Sound.
Recently, we had a birthday. A confluence of numbers. A cosmic joke. My partner, Sean (No. 6), was thirty. I was sixty. My mother, ninety. Three lives, three stories orbiting the same sun, separated by three decades—yet, strangely overlapping. With a dark humor I appreciate, she sometimes calls our conversations "30-60-90."
She spoke vaguely of her life at thirty, what it meant at sixty, and now 90. My life now, at sixty, feels like a distorted overlay of her early years—the struggle, the seeking. Yet, I look at her now—and see the omens of my own ninety. And we both live vicariously and learn so much from Sean’s fresh perspective at thirty.
30
In her 30s, my mother was consumed by efforts to keep her family safe—consumed by holding it all together—protecting her children from the chaos. As mothers have done through history, the peace offering to my father was another child. A new start. I was the decade child, the desperate flourish, the attempt to patch the tarnish. But I was a precocious, effete almost alien child who only drew my father’s silence and indifference.
She drew me in closer. Consciously. She filled the void he carved. Later, she’d ask, eyes wide and bewildered, "Did I make you?" As if love could be the engine of difference. “No,” I said. “I was born different. I was the foreign object already in your womb.”
In 1970, I heard the cry for the first time—is cry the right word? What does one call that sound? That sound that starts so deep inside—a low-frequency moan born of the pain of inconsolable loss that crescendos into this blood curdling primal scream. Over the years, I would become far too familiar with this sound—as well as my subsequent failure to sooth or comfort her in those immediate moments to follow.
We had all lived for years with my fathers alcohol abuse—but this time he left his mark. Suicide by gun, leaving himself for my mother to find. Suicide. It was an act of terror, perpetrated against his wife—his children—his family. How did she manage? How did she find a way forward?
She remarried within months. A new, hopeful future that was still never to be. And eleven years later, cruel karma visited again. I was with her when she lost her second husband—and again the Sound—the heart-wrenching sound of profound loss. That day, there was mourning in the evening.
In my thirties, after the loss of so many of my close friends to the pandemic, I similarly began my work to start anew—to transform and grow. But then the diagnosis—and the dark years when I became homeless. A period during which it seemed I had lost everything—everything except a mother’s loving support. I not only found myself with debts to pay, physical and psychic—but I had to atone.
When I met Sean, my No. 6, we openly discussed the implications of a 30-year age gap. My goal became to “gay it forward”—to share as much of my experience as I could - maybe to ease his path. And he has such wisdom of recent youth to share—secrets of negotiating an ever faster changing world. The pace of change exerts its centrifugal forces that would seemingly fling us all into oblivion. But then Sean is there to ground us - challenge us to adapt.
60
Now I am sixty. I have had six partners. She has had 4 husbands. We are our constant.
The bond intensified through my own tragic losses and through her subsequent grief. The third and fourth husbands—gone. And then my sister. For the third and fourth time, I had to endure that Sound—the sound I had grown to dread—and again there was mourning in the evening. Yet, as always, she rose again and moved forward - buttressed by her faith, her family and friends. For many years now, they are the framework of her life well lived.
People say we are unnaturally close. But would they if they knew? If they thought about it?
My life in my sixties is defined by this honour—to lovingly support her.
The script: When my mother was this age—sixty—she moved in with her own mother to care for her in her final, independent months. The role, the setting, the deep, exhausting purpose: it was all predetermined. I am simply fulfilling the destiny she forged.
At 63, my body, having survived the plague and endured the bureaucratic war, demands a crucial adaptation. The furious pace of my younger life has given way to the necessary compromises. But I, too, enjoy a life well-lived.
Sean, my mother and I now also share a shift in our emotional architecture. I like to say I'm becoming more "delicate," but the truth is a creeping sensitivity, an assertion of anxiety. And my mother seems so much more fragile—she openly worries in a way I’ve never seen in her. Sean sometimes seems pushed beyond the breaking point. But alas, as always, we find a way forward.
I have comfortably settled into the identity of a (tongue-in-cheek) well-dressed, somewhat erudite older gay man. I'm happily in my 10th year with my partner, No. 6. I often remark to Sean, in defense of my actions or choices: "You'll see when you're 60." He just shrugs. It's like he can’t—or won’t—consider the idea, much less accept it as a defense. He lives in the fierce present. But I, bound by memory, am always looking forward and back.
90
Now she is ninety. My partner is thirty. Combined, a full life spectrum.
I look at her and I have premonitions of my own decline. She describes to us what it is like to be ninety—the age when most all the people she's loved are gone. The joy and the darkness that comes from reflecting back on a life full of unspeakable horrors, profound love, happiness and growth—but with recognition of how few days are left for her - and the acceptance of the sheer complexity of her history.
But what remains is the sound, that terrible, echoing Sound.
I started the blog, John's Dura Mater Blog, because I needed a defense. A philosophical scaffolding to help me understand and express the wonder that is her legacy of endurance and resilience.
I am her son. I am the observer and the participant.
Albee wrote: "Writers have this schizophrenic ability to both participate in their lives and, at the same time, observe themselves participating in their lives."
If I have learned anything from her over the years, it is the human’s ability to grow—not just change, not merely become something else, but to become something more.
Sean and I are similar in that we cherished the example set for us by our elders - those who forged the way for us.
That’s what this is. This is my attempt to observe my mother, who married four and buried four, who filled the empty space, who loved me fiercely through the chaos. I am finally in the first row, not just watching, but holding the space around the sorrow, waiting for that inevitable moment when that sound will one day be mine.
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