In praise of mom and dad
Honouring parents easy, understanding them takes more time, thought
Between Them — Remembering My Parents, by Richard Ford, Harper Collins, 175 pages, $27.99
There’s a stage in life, just past middle age, when our parents have died, and questions about who they were go unanswered.
For most of the earlier years, we saw them as parents first and only dimly as adults with an identity and character of their own. Now that they’re gone, and especially as we raise kids of our own, we wonder what made them tick, and how their personalities shaped us.
Or I did anyway. And Richard Ford’s memoirs of his mom and dad, written 30 years apart, inspired these thoughts and questions. Ford, author of seven novels and five short story collections, won the Pulitzer fiction prize for “Independence Day” (1995). That book and his 2012 novel, “Canada,” are two of my favourites.
Edna and Parker Ford, both from Arkansas, were married in 1928. He was 24 and she 17. She gave birth to Richard, their only child, in 1944. What was it like to go from a twosome to a threesome after 16 years of life as a childless couple? Parker was a travelling salesperson for a starch company and they lived in motels and diners across the South. They continued their life on the road for a few years after the baby was born, then rented and later bought a house in Jackson, Miss. Parker was still away from home Monday to Friday. When Richard was just four, Parker had a heart attack; 12 years later, in 1960, another one took Parker’s life.
So, for most of his childhood, Richard’s father was absent, and his relationship with his mother was predominant. The male urge to really know our dads is I believe universal. The task is frequently impossible; certainly it is more difficult for an only child with an absentee father. Not to mention the burden of becoming “the man of the house” when he dies. But the picture of Parker (affable, not introspective, kind but not affectionate) that emerges bears a strong resemblance to Frank Bascombe, the central character in five of his novels.
The second memoir, about his mother, is more detailed of course; Richard had many more years with her, from his youth until her death from cancer in 1981. As a teen he had difficulty in school, his dyslexia not diagnosed till long after high school. He spent summers with his maternal grandparents who ran a hotel in Little Rock, Ark. His bereaved mother took a lover, a married man, for a time. When Richard, drunk and frightened to not find her at home one night, disrupted their tryst, she ended the affair.
Parker’s death shut down “the part of herself that loved him.” Richard is more ambivalent about its impact on him. But he admits its role in choosing a writing career. “His sudden departure, the great, unjust loss of his life, handed me a life to live by my own designs, freed me to my own decisions.”
There are so many passages I read two or three times, as much for the pure pleasure of Ford’s writing as for pondering the questions about my own parents they inspired. In the epilogue, he explains why he wrote these memoirs, one just after his mom’s death, and the other, 55 years after his father’s. “The future is unpredictable and hazardous, but our parents’ lives both enact us and help us distinguish them. My own belief in life’s final lack of transcendence always turns me to thoughts of my parents. In difficult moments, long after their deaths, I often experience the purest longing for them, for their actuality.”
I admire the “memory work” Ford has done on his parents. Every life deserves such a story, lovingly told.