Rose and Juliette
Updated: Sep 19
*Juliette loved a good laugh, the streaming-eye-inducing kind. Not least when it involved an off-color joke, well told.
She loved blueberry muffins at breakfast, lipstick and heels, mother-henning.
Her piano. The brittle sheet music of her childhood, now aged to the color of weak tea.
Loved Scrabble, family keepsakes, Christmastime, and every handsome dog she ever met.
Juliette is the mother whom I lost before I turned 50. Due to her progression into Parkinson’s dementia, she was largely lost to herself — and to us — in the year leading up to her death.
In my Mom’s and my final interaction, the one before the hospice morphine administration got underway, she looked at me wonderingly and inquired whether I was still in the eighth grade.
A Depression-era child, Juliette was born to a Franco (of Québécois heritage) family in a mill town in Maine; my hometown. The Francos — Catholic, working class, rooted in their francophone way of life — largely lived in that tension between their “little Canada” sense of belonging and the expectation to assimilate. The prodding to scrub off their Frenchy accent and ethnicity.
My mother, habituated from a young age to feeling less-than, put this occasional question to me right to the last decade of her life: I sound Frenchy, right?
Juliette and my father, Raymond, raised six children and then watched with great glee as five of us sprouted twelve, all told. As I was the youngest in the roster, Juliette was seventy by the time that my younger daughter Chloe bobbled her way into two-year-old life.
My daughters Eva and Chloe, the subject of fraught custody proceedings between their father Brent and me, lived out the officialese of the custody calendar from their pre-school lives onward. We had a Midwestern home base, and meanwhile my elderly parents had cast off Maine winters in favor of Florida residency.
Though my parents lived for nearly twenty more years, they had perhaps a dozen weeks of Eva-and-Chloe contact time altogether (if I squint).
Juliette and Raymond were keenly aware that my daughters’ yearly calendar contained two protected summer weeks in the Pacific Northwest. Time with their paternal grandparents, who were nearly fifteen years my parents’ junior.
My parents were not asking me why the paternal grandparents merited this sacrosanct summer privilege. They were asking why they did not merit similar regard. They grasped the sobering arithmetic of their fifteen fewer years.
In their final year of life, it was the cascading effect of relational cutoff that foreclosed last moments together for Juliette and Raymond, Eva and Chloe.
Eight years ago, at the time that my college-aged daughters severed ties with my husband Noah, there occurred a painful miscalculation. Eva and Chloe were looking to my family of origin, the Perron family, for a base level of familial support in the midst of deeply complex circumstances.
I believe they were looking for aunties or cousins who would listen to their grievances while seeking to better understand. With a mindset inclining towards curiosity and away from reflexive judgment. The affirmation that they needed at that time might have looked something like this:
We’re so sorry that this has happened.
We can see how upset you are.
We want to understand what this has been like for you.
We love your Mom and Noah, and we love you as well.
We are not going to abandon you.
The severing of Noah was at its three-month mark when Chloe dispatched an anger-filled mass email to the Perron family. My parents were included in the distribution. My age twentyish daughter — here a niece, a cousin, a granddaughter — was lashing out in her pain.
She and Eva had apparently recognized what was plain to see: that the Perron family validated Noah’s and my heartache. But Eva and Chloe had been judged; had been left with the perception (not off-base) that this family’s love was conditional and could be rescinded.
Chloe would not have been aware that her letter landed at a time when my mother’s health complexities and caregiver needs were mounting by the week. Given all, my father Raymond was beside himself. Nearly 90 and blind via macular degeneration, he required a scribe — in this case, my sister.
Over the phone, my father shared with me his intention to reply to my daughters. This grandfather wanted to have his say. An old man cognizant of his lifespan, he believed in this prerogative.
To express his anger pertaining to the role of Eva and Chloe’s stepmother Carla, a person in the mental health field. It had not taken long for many of us to discern the degree of her involvement in the run-up to this ordeal, and questions had been raised.
When my father informed me of this intention, I panicked. In this moment of crisis, there was acute need for words that would help bring down the inflammation. I pleaded with him to reconsider, and he capitulated. It was wrong of me to interfere:
My father — blind, distressed and anxiety ridden — had my sister Bridget tap out an email reply to my daughters requesting that they no longer contact him again.
My mother Juliette died eleven months later. Within three months of her passing, my father too was gone.
This year has marked my ninth Mother’s Day spent in deep, midnight blue sorrow. With physical symptoms that I attempt to describe as a flu-like achiness. Grief for my mother; heartache over the relational rupture that left a grandmother and her granddaughters without a farewell; my own anguish as an estranged mother.
With the loss of Rose, the heartache is now fourfold.
Rose, Noah’s mother. A woman from an urban Midwestern setting whose life of hardship was part of her architecture. In the last two decades of her life, depressive symptoms had deeply intertwined with her rheumatoid arthritis.
Rose had mossy hazel eyes and hair that was dyed almost burgundy. Not a forgiving color, but she was committed to it, and for this reason it worked. Her voice was low in register and textured with a smoker’s rasp.
Noah and I knew that Rose delighted in mischievous or bawdy humor; we rarely turned down an opportunity to serve some up, as her bouts of throaty laughter were a reward all their own.
Rose had raised sons only. So when Noah and I united, thus adding two little step-granddaughters to her world, Rose was mesmerized. When she visited our home, there were assemblies of sparkly baubles and hair accessories to present to Eva and Chloe. Rose beamed.
Eight years ago, when Noah and I made my daughters’ severing of Noah known to her, she cried.
And for the remainder of her years, she did not let a conversation with us pass by without venturing to ask whether there might be progress towards healing. A few weeks before her May passing, Rose put the question to Noah, one last time.
Rose died in the predawn hours, two days after Mother’s Day. On Mother’s Day night itself, her three sons had kept vigil in her living room, Rose diminutive in her sleeping recliner, heavily dosed with morphine.
Thus it came to be that I spent this year’s Mother’s Day, here in our Maine home, without Noah’s presence — for the first time since the daughter rupture.
By evening, here at my desktop computer, I began to sort out my initial thoughts on the content of Rose’s obituary, which I had offered to write.
Within my mind there was a split-screen.
There was Rose, about to slip away. Like my mother Juliette, she was going to die without any semblance of a parting ritual involving my daughters. My mother-daughter rupture had bled its heartache into her life, and now here was the finality.
Then there was Judy: Carla’s mother. Eva and Chloe’s other step-grandmother.
In her respective step-grandparent role, Judy had gone by an affectionate pet name, roundly endorsed by Eva and Chloe. I met her on one occasion and grasped that she was very gracious to my daughters, for which I was grateful. Among other loving gestures, she fattened their childhood savings accounts, for which I was also grateful.
I knew from the low-contact correspondence with my daughters that Judy had died six months earlier. And I knew that her Memorial had taken place this very Mother’s Day weekend, with both my daughters in attendance.
Carla: the stepmother who helped undergird my daughters’ cutoff of Noah, who has put no discernible effort into toning down her animus towards Noah and me. She was the beneficiary of my daughters’ presence on Mother’s Day weekend.
She was the stepparent whose mother, Judy, suffered no relational rupture as collateral damage in an act of severing.
I began to commit the structure of Rose’s obituary to a Pages document. On this night of deep heartache, it seemed as though the list of her survivors might be the task to which I could best apply myself.
I set down the names of my two stepsons, Ben and Ian. And then I faltered, the cursor blinking its benign indifference at me for a long moment. For twelve years, Ben and Ian had been half a quartet:
Ben, Ian, Eva, Chloe.
In all these years since the severing of Noah, in the low-contact correspondence where news items are briefly exchanged, my daughters have offered not a word in acknowledgement of Rose, Ben, or Ian. That is a tell, is it not?
If Eva and Chloe viewed these three humans as merely peripheral, excisable along with Noah, then I need to examine my own past failures in this matter. I failed Rose. She claimed Eva and Chloe as her own, and it had not been reciprocal.
I set down my daughters’ names in the obituary. For Rose’s sake, I want there to exist an indelible record that her step-granddaughters Eva and Chloe had mattered to her. Greatly.
*All names are fictionalized
