Authors: Rosanne Cash
Uncle Joe was the gentlest and kindest person I’ve ever met. He never uttered a bad word about a single soul, not even to condemn his captors—he rarely spoke about his suffering in the POW camp. He always had a smile on his face and never complained. Aunt Louise died shortly after Uncle Joe received the Purple Heart, sixty-one years after the USS
Houston
was sunk. He was presented with the award by my cousin Roy Cash, Jr., who at the time was a commander in the navy, inspired to military service by Uncle Joe, and who had most famously cowritten my dad’s 1958 classic “I Still Miss Someone.”
Uncle Joe and Aunt Louise, Aunt Mamie and Uncle Bud—those were the marriages I held up as a template for my own. “Can I get anything for you, darling?” is a mandate for me in the civilized conduct of an active marriage of minds and hearts—not servility, but charming, even effusive solicitude.
My parents might have achieved that kind of love story, and in the early days of their relationship, they did. There was no recovering their dreams of everlasting love once the endless touring and the amphetamines took hold of my dad’s life, and the anguish and bitterness took hold of my mom’s—even if their marriage might have recovered from it somewhat, they had probably shared too much acrimony during that period for it to be ultimately possible. The emotional debris field between them after thirteen years was enormous, too immense for them to cross toward each other, and by then June was there on Dad’s side, waiting to be his wife, something they both felt was destined, given how, my father’s story went, he told her he was going to marry her upon their first meeting backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, when he was still very much married to my mother.
To counter the enormous strain of their breakup on us children, I developed a philosophical perspective on my parents’ marriage. I remember sitting in my grandmother Carrie’s house soon after my mother had filed for divorce. After showing me a newspaper article that reported my mother had filed on grounds of “extreme cruelty” on the part of my father, my grandmother remarked, with so much sadness in her voice, “Honey, your daddy is
not
cruel.” I knew that. I knew all his impulses of violence and destruction were self-directed. Oddly, my mother was the one who was much more demonstrative with her pain and anger, and the detritus of that fell on me and my sisters. Their marriage couldn’t have lasted, and that did indeed break my mother’s heart, a heartbreak that was complicated by her Catholicism, which in the mid-sixties was inflexible and unforgiving toward divorce. Understandably, she was unable to see the bigger picture, which is that Dad was meant to end up with June. My parents had a classic youngsters’ marriage, one in which each party is blind to his or her own deep character flaws and can see them only in the reflection of the spouse. When too much childhood damage is there—and both of my parents were deeply damaged—then the flaws take on enormous weight and proportion. They could not escape themselves in the eyes—or the heart—of the other.
Dad and June by no means had a perfect marriage, but they understood each other and they shared music and fame together, as well as a deep love and fundamental respect. There were a lot of drug addicts in the extended family who caused tremendous strain in their marriage—not to mention Dad’s almost constant struggle with his own addiction to painkillers and psychotropic drugs and June’s later use of narcotics. They endured through their devotion in a kind of shared foxhole mentality. If notoriety was like an empire they were compelled to tend, they were also each other’s refuge.
Within a few days after the divorce was final, my mother remarried, to Dick Distin, a former police officer in Ventura County, and she settled into a life that was really perfect for her—one filled with friends, parties, clubs, lessons, gardening, and church. She did needlework and she danced and bowled and painted and cultivated a wide circle of close relationships. She was active in her church and her community and became somewhat of a star in her little town. My dad, of course, belonged to the world and had for quite some time. It was excruciating for her to turn on the television and see my dad and June together, talking about their great love and their musical connections. To her credit, however, she never said an ill word about Dad to us children. She restrained herself admirably in commenting about June as well, considering the depth of her resentment, but there were times she tossed off a venomous indictment and I could see the vast well of pain and bitterness she carried. She carried it for the rest of her life.
My dad did not just happily move on. He became much quieter and more reflective during the dissolution of their marriage, particularly once he was off the amphetamines and barbiturates and was thinking clearly. Many years later, when I was in my thirties, he told me that, after the formal split from my mother, when he’d first left Southern California and taken occupancy of his house on the lake in Tennessee, he’d walked the ground floor of the vast house, still nearly empty of furniture, late into the night. One time, he said, he’d walked from one end to the other, from the round room that overlooked the lake to the round room at the other end that was fitted into the side of the hill, feeling he was searching for something.
What’s missing? Where is it?
he kept thinking. Suddenly he stopped in the middle room of the long floor and cried out my name at the top of his lungs. That was a powerful image for me, because at the time of his departure, in my twelve-year-old mind, I thought it had been easy for him to leave, and that he had not looked back.
Over thirty-five years later, a few weeks after his death in 2003, when the house had been emptied of decades of collected furniture and dishes and paintings and instruments, some sent off to each of us children and the rest dispatched to Sotheby’s for sale, I walked alone on the ground floor, from round room to round room, and when I was sure that the lawyers and my siblings were busy on the upper floors and could not hear me, I stood in the middle room of the long floor and called out his name. It felt good to answer him, the echo of his voice reaching me so many years later, the echo of mine going back to the past and ending in that moment. It seemed that he heard me, and we both acknowledged the losses.
I had never been a girl who fantasized about weddings or having babies. Having come of age in the sixties, I thought there was something regressive, and repressive, about the whole idea, and my friends and I were all convinced that after high school we would just stop shaving our legs and move to a commune in Santa Barbara. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to do something transcendent and special with my life. The idea of settling down to the laundry every day and having children and getting together with other bored mothers for recreational activities truly terrified me. I remember a dream I had at age thirteen in which I was playing cards with my mother and grandmother in a small house. I was old and aware that my life was nearly over—a realization that left me desperate with regret. When I woke from that dream, I made a vow to myself, as serious as any vow I would make as an adult, that I would not permit myself to lead an unconscious existence, that I would not become complacent, that I would not allow my life to be defined by the petty and mundane. Even at that early age, I recognized that the card games in my dream represented some form of intellectual atrophy. (In my current life, I have enjoyed plenty of games of poker on the road with the guys in the band without seeming to court imminent spiritual disaster, and sometimes doing laundry is as calming as a Zen meditation. Flexibility is as essential as principle.) It was music that kept the passion for transcendence alive in me in the succeeding years.
Even when I was only ten years old, though my friends and I all worshipped the Beatles, I was conscious of feeling something more powerful and more adult about the band—a territoriality and identification that didn’t make sense. I couldn’t articulate those feelings to anyone, but I knew that they represented the kind of inner life I wanted—the songwriting, the liberation, the backbeat. My mother must have sensed this fervor in me, and even respected it, however little she might have comprehended it. The night the Beatles first appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, my mother kept my sisters out of the living room, where I was glued to the television. She shushed them, saying, “Rosanne’s watching the
Beatles
.” My dad did understand the appeal and the kind of energy they aroused in me, on a lot of levels, and brought autographs of all four Beatles home to all four of his daughters. I still have mine.
If my commitment to a higher ideal kept me from fantasizing about marriage, it did not preclude fantasies about love. I found it first with Rodney. Marriage started to seem a natural stage in the progression of a romance, and besides that, my parents were eager for me to make our cohabitation legal. We married in 1979, when I was twenty-three years old, and I effectively ended my childhood with him. We were not only perfectly suited to help each other resolve the most egregious character traits left from our difficult childhoods, but we bonded in exhilarating creative and philosophical exploration. Unfortunately, we were both fairly untethered to anything earthbound and, finally, were too similar. While we ruminated dreamily on philosophy and music and metaphysics and art, neither of us knew where to find a post office, or how to change the oil in the car, or whether we even owned a key to the front door of the house. Ultimately, we both had to belatedly grow up, and we recognized that we couldn’t do it together. We had four daughters, and it was excruciating for them, and for us, to split, but today each of the girls has told me on separate occasions, “I can’t believe you and Dad were ever married. You’re so unsuited to each other!”
I grew up, and into John. We were “in each other all along,” as Rumi says, but we both had to develop to a point where we could fit each other’s lives. He pulled me back down onto the planet, into the world, and into my own body. He was a pragmatist, a truth-teller, and one of the most extraordinarily gifted musicians I had ever known, a native New Yorker with a deep love and vast knowledge of roots and Southern music—and he was incredibly funny. That combination was irresistible to me. I had little pragmatism and a lot of magical thinking. My sense of truth had always been distorted by my idiosyncratic upbringing and by the secrets that were inherent in my father’s drug addiction and how that had played out in our family life. An astrologer friend of mine looked at my and John’s charts shortly after we got together and concluded with a sigh, “The two of you would make one
great
person.” That assessment used to rankle both of us, as if we had to fill in the other’s blanks, but now I see that relationship as the ultimate in companionship. We revel in the other’s differences now. He is endlessly fascinating to me; unknowable and thrilling, and familiar and safe. I’m always excited to see him at the end of a day.
We were married by Rabbi Joseph Gelberman, somewhat of a star in mystical Judaism in New York. He showed up only minutes before the ceremony was to take place, leaving John about to come out of his skin with anxiety that he wouldn’t actually appear. As a result, the ceremony started in a slightly unsettled state for everyone but the unruffled rabbi. In our meeting with him a few months earlier, John had made it clear that he did not want to speak Hebrew during the wedding since he had never been bar mitzvahed; his mother was Catholic and his father Jewish, but he had not been raised with any religion. The rabbi had agreed, but during the wedding he slipped into Hebrew and calmly instructed John, “Repeat after me.” For the first and only time in his life, John found himself speaking in Hebrew, and even smashed the glass at the conclusion of the ceremony. My father, who also gave a reading, may have been more thrilled than anyone present that day. When I had told him that John and I were getting married, he said with a sigh of pleasure, “Thank God. I’ve been waiting forty years for one of my daughters to marry a Jew.” Shortly afterward, he wrote John an awkward but loving letter, expressing his satisfaction that “a Jew was finally being brought into his bloodline.”
After the ceremony, the entire party walked a few blocks to the Puck Building on Lafayette Street for our wedding reception. While I was on the dance floor, my dad came up to me at the end of a song and pulled me aside. Staring at me intently with a mixture of shock and hope, he said, “You’re pregnant!”
“No, Dad,” I answered, laughing. “But . . . as soon as possible!”
Dad and June went to London to do some shows a day or so later, and John and I headed to Rome for our honeymoon around the same time. On the morning we arrived, we were sitting in the roof-top café of our hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps, having a coffee and reading the international papers, when I saw an item in the
Herald Tribune
reporting that Dad had had some kind of attack on the flight to London and, upon arriving at Heathrow, had immediately gotten back on a plane and returned to the States. Sighing, I threw down the paper, knowing full well that he hadn’t had any sort of “attack.” He had left the wedding reception early, and I was aware that he had been taking a lot of pills recently because of excruciating pain from his jaw, which had been broken by a dentist while trying to remove a cyst years earlier and had been causing him intolerable pain since. I had convinced myself that his drug use was under control, and I felt betrayed again by my assumption that Dad was more or less straight, only to discover how seriously out of it he had become. I had spent virtually my entire life in denial about the depth of addiction in so many people I love—Dad being the first, the imprimatur of my denial. It had caused me a lot of anguish, and my default position had always been to interpret the pain as betrayal. I later came to learn that a drug addict betrays no one but himself, and I didn’t have to become an accomplice in anyone’s personal dramas. But at that moment, in early May of 1995, on my honeymoon, I could only feel hurt. I put down the paper and put my feelings about the incident completely aside and turned my attention to the contours of my new life with John. The next day we traveled from Rome to the Amalfi Coast.