Composed (14 page)

So, today, from a bereft husband, seven grieving children, sixteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren, we wave to her from
this
shore, as she drifts out of our lives. What a legacy she leaves; what a mother she was. I know she has gone ahead of us to the farside bank. I have faith that when we all round the last bend in the river, she will be standing there on the shore in her big flowered hat and long white skirt, under a June-blue sky, waving her scarf to greet us.

For Dad’s funeral I chose a black knee-length Armani skirt and a Philippe Adec jacket with sweet black-on-black appliqué flowers on one shoulder. I wore black stockings and the same Prada satin pumps, which still had bits of dried mud on them from June’s funeral four months before.

I fainted at the funeral home. I came to on the floor with my aunt shaking some sense into me and my husband yelling at me to breathe. Tara waited until I was on my feet and fully conscious and then reprimanded me, and rightly so. “Get a grip. Your children are here,” she said.

The eulogy I delivered at his funeral, in the same vast church, was not nearly as articulate as the one I wrote for June, since over the course of the previous four months I had lost a good deal of the natural grace and power of my vocabulary:

I have no words that can say who he is, or what we feel.

But on behalf of Kathy, Cindy, Tara, John Carter, and myself, we mourn with the very essence of mourning the loss of two connected but separate Beings: Johnny Cash and Daddy. The larger-than-life qualities of this luminous soul—his poetry, his voice, his compassion and humility, his pure love and equally pure pain—if those qualities were distilled down to a series of small, private, and precious moments, that is where we found our daddy. It was not the scope of his artistry and his remarkable body of work which made him great. He was already great. The music just came out of it. He was not famous when he taught us to water-ski, or fish, or how to make ice cream out of snow. He was not a performer when he walked us down the aisle or stood by us at our weddings, or sang his special song reserved for his newborn grandbabies (which went, “Boom-ba-ba-Boom, Boom-ba-ba-Boom . . .”). He was not an icon when he told us how he loved us, how beautiful and handsome we were, how proud he was. He never criticized, he never condescended to us, never forced his will on us, never raised his voice or lectured. He offered advice only when we asked for it, and then he would measure his words with respect and kindness. He respected us as much as we respected him. He was so modest and humble, and so willing to live with the weight of his own pain without making anyone else pay for it.

He was a Baptist with the soul of a mystic.

He was a poet who worked in the dirt.

He was an enlightened Being who was racked with the suffering of addiction and grief.

He was real, whole, and more alive to the subtleties of this world and the worlds beyond than anyone I have known or even heard of.

He was the stuff of dreams, and the living cornerstone of our lives.

I can almost live with the idea of a world without Johnny Cash, because in truth there will never BE a world without him. His voice, his songs, the image of him with his guitar slung over his back, all that he said and sang and strummed changed us and moved us and is in our collective memory and is documented for future generations.

I cannot, however, even begin to imagine a world without Daddy.

The best thing I could wish for him now is that all his beliefs are coming true.

For my stepsister Rosey’s funeral, six weeks after my dad’s, I wore a short, black felt wool Club Monaco skirt, my twenty-year-old Yohji Yamamoto collarless jacket, black tights, and knee-high boots. I could not face the satin Prada pumps one more time. Her widower spoke to the congregation, in the modest funeral home parlor, about the vast quantities of drugs Rosey liked to ingest, and proceeded to tell the story, infamous in our family, of the Thanksgiving dinner when Rosey was asked by her mother what she would like as a gift for Christmas that year. She replied, staring at my brother without a trace of humor, “I guess I’d like a penis, because that’s the only way anybody gets any attention around here.” It was at that moment in the service that I decided that an extemporaneous eulogy was in order. Leaning over to my sister and brother to tell them I was going to speak, I quickly got up out of the pew. I don’t remember what I said then; I just wanted them to forget what
he
had said. I was utterly exhausted. I absolutely could not take anymore, I remember thinking, with some anger. This was not a taunt to some higher power to see how serious I was about having reached my limit, but it was perhaps taken that way, as things turned out.

In 1977, I was on a flight from Munich to Montego Bay. There were a few legs to the trip: Munich to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to New York, New York to Jamaica. My dad and June were already at Cinnamon Hill, where I planned on joining them for a few weeks of vacation. When the plane stopped in New York, an agent from the airline got on and came to my seat.

“Miss Cash? We have a message from your father in Jamaica. He says to tell you to get off the plane. There is a hurricane in the Caribbean, and he is concerned about your safety.”

I got off the plane. I had only about a dollar in my purse. Fortunately, I had a single credit card, which apparently worked, and which I used to check into a hotel near JFK, where I waited a couple of days for the hurricane to pass before getting back on a plane to Jamaica.

That little incident might well stand as representative of what happened to me constantly when I was coming of age, which I recall as a series of bizarre interruptions, rapid changes of plans, stops and starts, occasional great events, and temporary but intense confusion. I was always without money, but somehow I managed to travel the world first-class; find comfortable places to live and unusual, interesting people to stay with and go out with to restaurants and music clubs; sign contracts for grand ideas; work my way into peculiar circumstances in remote locations; and generally live off the grid, and outside the normal patterns of young adult development. This template of constant change and inverse experience stayed with me through my twenties and thirties. It resonates less now, though my life is no less chaotic and full of travel, but my internal discipline and sense of structure override its influence.

In the spring of 1978, I got off a flight from Munich and was kept in customs for three hours in Los Angeles because I had failed to declare some clothing I had bought in Germany. When I finally left the airport after paying a heavy fine and having my name entered into the computer with a red flag for the next seven years, making every international trip a miserable inconvenience, I went straight to my stepsister Rosey’s apartment, in a very unfashionable section of Los Angeles off La Brea Avenue. She was not at home, so I removed a window screen, forced her window open and slipped inside, took a shower, and went straight to a record release party for my stepsister Carlene at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. There I met Rodney Crowell, and that was the night that began our romance, after the unrequited love on my part, and the demos we made together that got me the Ariola contract. We remained together from that night for the next thirteen years.

Then, my mother. My youngest sister and I sat with her body, alone, for an hour after she died, both of us surprised that the nursing staff let us remain. I went with my stepdad, Dick, to pick out the casket and the headstone, wrote the inscription for the headstone, and submitted it for my sisters’ approval. I went to the funeral home with all of them and decided on the format of the services, I agreed to the autopsy, and I wrote another eulogy. By now both the Armani and the Jil Sander were out of the question, as none of my clothes fit properly. I was swollen with shock and fear. I wore pearls and an old black blazer and a black skirt that was coming apart at the seams, and I resurrected the damnable black satin Prada pumps. I got them out just a few days ago, and they are still encrusted with mud.

The last eulogy I wrote was for my mom, on May 24, 2005. I delivered it at Sacred Heart, her longtime parish in Ventura:

My mother was a gardener. She loved flowers and plants and everything that bloomed, and everything that bloomed loved her back. All of nature seemed to blossom in her presence. She had no prejudice—she treated the industrial boxwood or hedges with the same care as the fragile orchid or the jasmine, or her prize roses. I always stood in awe of what my mother could do with things that grew in the earth. It seemed that just her presence had an energizing and nurturing effect. And so it was with us, her children. During our fragile moments, our struggles, and our dark nights of the soul, she treated us with the extra care she would a hothouse orchid. She was attentive, and kind, and gave just the right amount of nurturing—not too much to suffocate, or too little to starve. When we were wayward and rebellious, or ill-mannered and negligent, she was not afraid to prune us like an errant vine with the authority of her voice and command;
she
was the gardener and we would grow according to her design. The plant did
not
talk back to the gardener. And how grateful we are for that today, as grown women with children of our own.

When I woke this morning, my husband and I were talking about the difficult day ahead, and about my mother and her legacy to us. And John said, “Your mother was the definition of a life well spent. She was always engaged, in her children, her friends, her faith, and her whole community. It’s inspiring. That’s how we all should live.”

It’s so true. I can look at the beauty in my life, the sacred space of my home, and the faith in my heart, and witness the love, consideration, and good manners of my children, and I have to thank my mother. She taught me how to do that. She taught me how to find the beauty, how to teach the child, how to be fierce and loyal, how to love unconditionally, and how to be happy—which by itself is an extraordinary gift. There was no higher calling to her than making a home and being a wife and mother. She was as devoted and confident as a wife, first to my father for thirteen years and then to Dick for thirty-eight years, as she was as a mother. And then, as a grandmother, she was exalted. She filled in all the gaps, she ordered their universe on a foundation of love.

When I was a teenager, my home was always open to my friends, at any time of day or night. My mother never required advance notice or permission. She was always effusive in her welcome, interested in our lives, entertained by our teenage wackiness, and, if we went too far, as my friend Peggy and I did when we left school one day and took an impromptu trip to Mexico, she was imperial in her fury. I was grounded for months. Thank you for that, Mom.

My mother was the source of endless love and constant devotion, but she was also the immovable wall, the firm limit and the guiding light, until we were wise enough to provide those things for ourselves. Some of us took longer than others, even well into adulthood, but she never wavered in her example of strength and wisdom, and in her belief that we would show up clean, perfectly groomed, well mannered, and a productive and vital member of society. I will spend my life with those expectations ever in front of me, and thank God, and Mom, for that.

My mother died on my fiftieth birthday. The day before, I saw it coming. I could see where she was headed, and I was devastated at the symbolism, which I could not even begin to understand. I could not imagine why her soul, and her plan with God, included linking her departure from this earth with the day I was born. I felt as if I were in a dark cave, groping at the walls for direction and meaning. Over the last few days, I have begun to get a glimmer of understanding, although it may take the rest of my life to fully decode the profound message she gave me. She loved birthdays. They were extraordinarily important to her—not just the birthdays of her husband and children, but her own birthday, and that of her extended family and friends, even acquaintances. She remembered the birthdays of people who were long passed, or people she hadn’t seen in years. She would remark that it was someone’s birthday, and oftentimes we wouldn’t even know who that person was. In fact, I know that she had birthday cards carefully signed and addressed to different people, for Dick to send out after she was admitted to the hospital. The day of a person’s birth was significant to her, even if the person was only marginal in her life.

She died on Tuesday, May 24, almost to the hour of the moment she gave birth to me fifty years ago. She completed a magnificent circle, in perfect symmetry. She had a career as a mother of exactly fifty years, to the hour. She let us know, in no uncertain terms, that she defined herself as a mother, that it was her great passion and her proudest accomplishment, and we will never be allowed to forget that, because her passing is permanently linked to the moment she became a mother. It is written in stone now. It is written in our hearts, as well. I feel humbled by the distinction and the honor that my mother’s soul was born into heaven on the day I was born into the world. And I also know she’s saying, “I did my job, baby. Fifty years is long enough. Time for me to rest, now.”