This is an attack, an aggressive act of cultural vandalism dressed up as warmth and support:
My father didn’t particularly like his mother, who was not particularly a nurturer. She lived for 89 years (at 89 pounds) on black coffee, cigarettes, and grim stubbornness, hating more or less everything and announcing her irritation with considerable regularity. She didn’t do anything well, and the famous Thanksgiving turkey with the plastic bag of giblets cooked inside it can stand in for a lifetime of stories. Dying, surrounded by her Catholic family, she didn’t want the comfort of last rites, because priests are all a bunch of crooks. She said it a little more colorfully than that. She was not where you went for comfort and support.
But when he was dying, my dad closed his eyes, stopped talking to us, and started talking to his own long-dead mother. “Mom, I’m in trouble,” he said, and the rest of the family snapped back like we’d been stung by bees. “His mother?”
Yes, his mother. The body you were born from. Hurt, scared, dying, you run for home.
How much will God comfort you? So much, says Isaiah, that God’s comfort can be compared to a mother’s comfort. If he drowned at sea, Rudyard Kipling wrote, “I know whose tears would come down to me,” and of course it would be his mother. The scholarly literature describes the centrality of the relationship in slightly dryer language: “All mean effects were in the expected direction, with higher maternal bonding contributing to infant developmental outcomes, including higher attachment quality (r = .35) and parent-reported lower colic rating (r = .22), easier temperament (r = .19), and positive infant mood (r = .27).”
As they died, Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy watched their mom cause them pain. Their mother’s face was the sign of their destruction. The nurturing body where they expected their greatest safety and comfort brought their suffering and death. And now a bunch of mothers are making a loud and sustained public display of the degree to which they’re just like Lindsay. They’re cheering her like she’s a winning quarterback.
Everything in the realm of politics falls before the reality of sick, empty, soulless culture. Nothing you vote for can save you if family evaporates. The spectacle outside Lindsay Clancy’s trial is a loud and clear alarm. To borrow an image from Paul Bowles, it’s like a hole is opening in the sheltering sky, exposing us to the darkness that waits behind it.
