My Once-A-Year James Taylor Binge

I can’t stand James Taylor’s music. Despite his obvious musical skill and plain yet wonderful melodies, it is a one-way trip down memory lane that I’m not always prepared to handle. Luckily, I’m usually able to avoid that emotional minefield, as I have enough of an eclectic taste in music that it rarely spontaneously occurs on any of my Spotify or Pandora stations. Some of my more dear friends who are in on it will belt over elevator music to keep me from accidentally falling down the rabbit hole if it’s on while we’re out in public.

Except today.

Today, this one day every year, I seek out James Taylor’s 1976 album “Greatest Hits” and try to listen to it in its entirety. I’m not a masochist, I don’t enjoy forcing myself through things I can’t stand. But this is therapy, and it’s the kind of therapy that you really need sometimes. It is that of the primal scream, bare your soul, finally hit the shiny red button and see what happens sort. See, the reason I can’t listen to Mr. Taylor’s musical work is that his songs were the soundtrack to the bizarre years that I spent living with my mom. She was one of the most dynamic people I've ever met; she was also clinically insane. And today, the day after what would have been her 60th birthday, is the sixth anniversary of her losing her battle with Pancreatic Cancer, exactly half of the painful anniversaries that haunt me every year.

Believe me, the course of her cancer was most definitely a battle. There was nothing about my mother that would go quiet into the night, were it good or otherwise. Her whole life was a war. The particular mental ailments that plagued her were what were then known as manic depression, paranoid schizophrenia, and borderline personality disorder. It manifested in some weird ways. I can remember once when I was six, and my brother was three. It was during the winter right after my dad had left, and my mom was particularly gripped in the throes of her delusions. She woke the two of us up in the dead of night, bundled us up against the cold, and walked the two miles to the next town’s police department because she thought there were people in the house and our town’s PD didn't believe us anymore. There was another instance where she packed my brother and I up and drove from our central New Jersey home to our grandma’s house in south Jersey, and then up to our aunt’s in Binghampton, NY in one night. It was 327 miles of driving with two young children in a pretty crappy secondhand car. When I asked her that night why we were driving around so much, she told me that it was so we could be a safe and happy family together. I also have very vivid memories of her standing on the front lawn of my dad’s house, demanding to see her children for so long and at such a volume that she usually had to be dissuaded by the police. And yes, all of this was to the sweet and quiescent soundtrack of James Taylor playing somewhere in the background.

She wasn’t a monster, though. Far from it. Her baseline and manic sides were glorious to be around. She was a wonderful artist, skilled in what seemed like everything. She had been a professor at SUNY Binghampton in fiber arts, drawing, pottery, and sewing. She taught me how to do everything, from prepare a meringue to weave a cloak to throw a bowl on a kick wheel. And she had the biggest heart I’d ever seen. Every time she saw my brother or I, there were presents. Christmas and birthdays had so many glorious packages to open that oftentimes we couldn’t see the living room rug. If came to visit or and she knew we were with friends, there’d be something for them too. Everyone was always welcome on adventures, even if it was just stuffing eight kids into her Ford Taurus station wagon and driving us the three miles from the high school to the local park so we misfits could have somewhere safe to hang out. And the books! The greatest singular gift she gave me was my imagination and sense of wonder, and I can easily trace that to all of the amazing books she read with me.

I find myself needing to point out something I’ve realized since my younger days- everything that she did, she did for the well being of myself and my brother.

If you Don Quixote this- meaning, if you take the viewpoint that she held and accept all of her delusions as our actual shared reality- then you should be sufficiently in awe of this woman. She fought tooth and nail to make sure that her children had everything they needed to be safe and happy, even when they weren’t in her custody. Reading her journals after she passed, I was dumbstruck by the sheer odds that she faced daily- people sent to spy on her, a cast of thousands sent to be the backdrop for her daily life, the secret society that was pulling the strings behind her misfortunes- it was like the Truman Show and Homeland all rolled into one. She never revealed how far the rabbit hole went, but to know that she went through all of that every day for the sake of her kids… for my sake… that humbles you real fast.

In retrospect, her cancer was an inevitability. She had been self-medicating with Carlo Rossi Rose and cigarettes for the better part of fifteen years, and once you add in all those pharmaceutical attempts to balance her mental chemistry, and there’s only so much one endocrine system can do. We discovered her ailment because my aunt had driven up to visit her, and upon seeing Mom, she was absolutely shocked. My mother had turned the same shade of a mostly overripe banana and never noticed. Upon taking her to the hospital and running the tests, it turned out she was in almost complete renal failure, her liver had all but shut down, and where her pancreas used to be was a tumor the size of a cantaloupe. Had my aunt not found her, she would have been dead in days.

Granted, with proper care, she only lasted another four months, but every one of those borrowed days were a gift. I have to admit, her psychiatrist was pretty brilliant. When her oncologists were dispensing her various pills and medicines to treat her cancer and aid the chemo, he instructed my aunt to put the pills in unmarked bottles so my mom wouldn’t know what was what. That way, she took her mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics along with her painkillers and various other treatments, and for a glorious 16 weeks I had my mom back. The same woman who made my three year old self french toast in the mornings and took me to meet famous children’s book authors had finally resurfaced from the haze of delusion and warped reality, and I wasted it.

I only saw her twice before the end. Once was to visit her when I first found out about the cancer, the second was to drop off things I had cleaned out of her apartment that she requested. I will never forget my reaction when I first saw her the first time- it was if she was a walking corpse. Her waist long and glorious spring-curly hair had been chopped chin short and dyed a mousey limp brown. Her sparkling hazle, green, and brown eyes were grey and lifeless. Her usually thin body was now just a husk. I gritted my teeth in the best smile I could muster and told her that she looked great and it was great to see her. She patted my cheek and told me I was a liar, but it was good to know that I loved her enough to say so. Mothers always know when you’re lying somehow. We played board games, and she showed me the scars and incisions that now crisscrossed her torso, and we talked about everything we could think of. I was almost relieved when we drove away, free of her corpse, however much the specter of guilt haunted me. That same guilt plagued me into the second visit, where she was too weak to do anything but lie there and talk. That was the first time in my whole life I saw her break under the weight of her burden. She started crying when she realized she wasn’t going to be able to make my wedding dress or meet my children. The nurse kicked me out of her room and gave her a sedative to make her sleep, and I curled up in a corner while my heart broke. When she woke up, I scrunched to my smallest, and she did her best to hold me. It was almost comical- a 6' tall, 275lb woman curled up in a hospital bed next to a 5'4" barely 100lb shell- but I will treasure that memory for as long as I have it. My needs regressed to early childhood- I had my mom, and that was all that mattered. I kissed her on the top of the head when my aunt brought in dinner, and I resolved to do my best to make our time together the happiest I could. My last memory is of her perched on the edge of the seat in her room, laughing and smiling about some stupid thing I said… but best of all, her eyes were alive.

One of my greatest regrets is that when she passed away, she was alone. It was the weekend of my cousin’s wedding in Colorado and my aunt had flown out for the festivities, so there was no one to visit with her. I was trapped working in retail hell and had begged and borrowed and stole favors from my coworkers to arrange to visit her later that week. The nurses said it was a blissfully quick end for her with no further indignities, she just went to sleep and never woke up. They told me that every night after she entered hospice care, she would tell them to tell my brother and I that she loved us and she was proud of us. I can’t tell you how thankful I am that I called her on her birthday to hear it myself. Likewise, I can’t tell you how ashamed I am that I only called her because it was her birthday.

I’ve had this album on repeat since I sat down to type this three hours ago. Since then, it’s repeated four times, and it brings me to the two songs that I associate most with my mom- Fire and Rain and You’ve Got A Friend. The first is a myriad of stories, as most of his songs are, telling a mixture of his shock and grief at the death of a friend, and his struggles with both addiction and depression. That’s the song I sing when the only thing I can find when I think of Mom is the regret and the grief- “I always thought that I’d see you one more time again” sums it up pretty perfectly. But the latter, You’ve Got a Friend, is a song of loyalty and support. That’s the love she had for my brother and me, and the way that she taught me over and over that the best thing that you can give to people that you care for is yourself. The chorus is the best illustration- “You just call out my name, and you know wherever I am, I’ll come running to see you again. Winter, spring, summer, or fall; all you’ve got to do is call and I’ll be there, yes I will. You’ve got a friend.” Most years, listening to these two songs today is like a punch in the gut. Most years, all I can hear in them is the grief and the guilt and the loss that I have left in this gaping hole in my heart where she used to be. Most years, I make it halfway through the album, cry my eyes out, shut off the music and crawl into bed, miserable and defeated. But this year?

This year is so much different.

I’m still crying when I hear these songs, but I’m not defeated by them any more. Now, I cry because I know it’s going to be okay; that she can be proud of who I’ve become and what I learned from her; that she knows that I am going to raise my daughter, Bera to be the most awesome human I possibly can- certainly the best Bera in the whole world. I am finally at a place in my life where I see that . It’s reflected in the caliber of people who I’ve collected over the past years to be in my life (yes, even those precious few from waaaaay back) to stand with me, to make and take the sacrifices that come from the challenges that we face together, and to rise above all of the trivialties and stumbling blocks by lifting each other up. My mom was always amazed by the people I managed to surround myself with, and I have every faith that she would be no less glad to meet any of them. If you’re one of them, new or old, thank you.

I’m not going to claim that I can tell when people who have passed are looking down on me, but I like to think that she can read this somehow and know how much she will always mean to me. If she can, then Mom, please never doubt that I will always carry you in my heart. I love you, Mom.

Eileen M. Goss- 9/25/54–9/26/08

If the sky above you should turn dark and full of clouds
and that old north wind should begin to blow,
keep your head together and call my name out loud.
Soon I will be knocking upon your door.
You just call out my name, and you know where ever I am
I’ll come running to see you again.
Winter, spring, summer, or fall, all you have to do is call and I’ll be there.
Yes, I will.