I was still wearing a head-to-toe nun’s habit when I got a call from my brother, Clyde. He was at my house in Berkeley, California. I was in London, performing in the stage version of Sister Act at the Palladium in August 2010.
My regular gig, hosting The View, was on a monthlong hiatus, so off I went to the West End to do a limited run of twenty shows. This time, I was playing Mother Superior instead of the role I originated in the 1992 movie, cabaret star Deloris Van Cartier. I was fifty-four now, so I figured the chief nun was a better fit.
I had two shows left before heading home.
Actress Maggie Smith and some of her friends were at the show that night to see me. She had come backstage to my dressing room to say hello and talk, which I loved. When my phone rang and I saw it was Clyde, I thought I’d be telling him I’d call him back.
“It’s Ma,” Clyde said.
“What d’ya mean? What’s goin’ on?” I asked.
“Caryn, Ma died. A couple hours ago.”
“How? Where?”
Clyde told me that she had asked him to go to the store for a newspaper and some More cigarettes. She loved smoking More cigarettes and never wanted to run out of them. When he got back, he found her sideways on the couch with an unlit cigarette in her hand, smiling, but she wasn’t breathing.
“She’s at the hospital,” Clyde told me. “But listen, she’s gone.”
I could hear in Clyde’s voice that he was pretty shook up. Neither one of us expected anything like this. The doctor told Clyde that it was an aneurysm.
He was feeling awful, like he could have saved her. But that didn’t seem to be the case, according to the doctor. A blood vessel had exploded in her brain. She went quickly. Here one minute, gone the next.
I’ve got to say, if there’s one family trait that we all shared, it’s efficiency. We get down to business.
I had been on a FaceTime call with my mom the day before. We had talked about the grandkids, rose bushes, cats, dogs, and Clyde. We had laughed for an hour. She’d seemed fine.
FaceTime had just come out. At first, my mother thought she didn’t want to bother with it. She was fine with regular talking on the phone. But once I showed her how easy it was, she got into it. Even though I was five thousand miles away, we could still have eyes on each other every day.
I talked to my mom on the phone almost every day of my adult life when I wasn’t with her in person. Every conversation always ended the same way. My mother, brother, and I always told each other everything we thought the other person should know before we hung up. If we had any problems with the others, we’d get it out and be done with it. One of us would say, “Is there anything else you think I should know? Anything else going on?” And we’d end every call with “I love you.” We always did that, I guess, as a “just-in-case.”
I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that the “just-in-case” was for real this time.
“What will the hospital do now?” I asked my brother. I wanted to see her.
“I asked them to leave her on support until you can get home,” Clyde told me.
He wanted to make sure I had a chance to say my farewells and kiss her goodbye.
“I’ll get on the first plane I can find,” I told him.
“Don’t rush. She’s not here anymore. It’s okay, Sis.”
I explained to Maggie Smith what was going on and apologized for having to fly home as soon as I could. I’m sure I was walking around in a dazed circle.
That’s when this magnificent woman, Dame Maggie Smith, went from being my backstage company to being my friend through the rest of the night. She decided she would stay with me until I was on my way to the airport. A flight was arranged for me to leave early the next morning. For the next five hours, Maggie sat with me and let me talk her ear off, telling stories about my mom, my growing-up years, and my brother. We laughed a lot.
I don’t know if I was in shock. I had never been in shock before. I don’t think I cried. I didn’t feel anything except a big wave of kindness from Maggie. I’ve got to say, she is one of those people for whom I would do anything. Anything Maggie Smith needs, I got her covered.
I went straight from the airport in San Francisco to the hospital, knowing that my post-Mom life was now starting. She had prepared me for this day, but I would never be ready. I wasn’t ready to not be her kid.
My mom was in a hospital gown, lying in the bed, with the ventilator running. She looked peaceful, not in any pain.
Clyde and I agreed to pull the plug together, turning off life support. The room went silent. And then this nucleus that had been the three of us became the two of us. When I looked at Clyde’s face, his eyes looked empty, like he was gone, too.
We stood by her bed, silent for some time.
I asked Clyde if he knew what was supposed to happen next. We were told that a mortuary should be called to pick up her body. There was important stuff to discuss.
“Do you know what Ma wanted?” Clyde asked.
I said, “I might know. Remember when the three of us were talking about someone who passed recently? Ma had said, ‘I don’t want to be put in the ground and take up space. I don’t want people to feel they have to come visit. Just put me in the microwave.’”
Like I said: efficient.
Clyde kind of remembered that being her attitude. Now, we had to figure out how that could happen. Was a huge microwave an actual thing? We started making phone calls. The first two funeral homes we called acted like, “What the fuck? No, we don’t have a giant microwave! And as a matter of fact . . . no one does.”
Then, the third one we called said, “Our microwave is broken down, but come and see us and we will do our best to take care of you.”
Off we went to see this place that wasn’t afraid to help us out. It seemed they understood folks in grief who had never had to deal with the death of someone close before.
In the front lobby of the mortuary, Clyde said to the director, “We are going to need . . .”
The man finished his sentence and said, “. . . a coffin. Come downstairs.”
There were a bunch of coffins. My mother was clear about not wanting a funeral plot or a funeral, not wanting to be buried in the ground. That was only one of many decisions. Somehow, my brother and I did everything that was needed in order for the cremation.
Clyde and I sent some of her ashes to a whole bunch of folks that she loved, but the response wasn’t too great. Most of them were pretty annoyed that we weren’t having a memorial service. But Ma had made it clear that she didn’t want that. She never wanted people to go out of their way or interrupt their plans or their day. As she had put it, “Memorials are for other people, not the dead person. It’s not like I care. I’m not there, anyway. So, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not.”
In September, on what would have been her birthday, Clyde and I took most of her remaining ashes to Disneyland, one of her favorite places.
Disneyland was a place Ma always wanted to take Clyde and me as kids. Every Sunday night, we would watch Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color on NBC. The opening titles had Tinker Bell flying across the screen and leaving splotches of color with her magic wand. I knew if my mom could’ve figured out how to get us three to Disneyland, we would’ve gone.
In the mid-1970s, when I was in my early twenties, I had some steadier jobs in San Diego. I saved enough money to buy a round-trip ticket for my mom to fly out from New York to see me. It took a while to get the cash together, but I had a plan in mind.
A day after she arrived, we got in the car and took off on the highway. We were driving along and talking for about an hour when she asked me, “Where are we going?”
“Oh, I’m looking for this park I heard about,” I said casually. “It’s probably coming up.”
Somehow, she missed seeing the Disneyland sign that was on the exit I took.
After driving down Harbor Boulevard for a couple miles, she said, “Caryn, I’d really like to get out of this car now.”
So, I said, “Let’s pull in here. This looks like a good place to walk around.”
I turned in on Disneyland Drive, and she looked around, saw where we were, and burst into tears. My mom almost never cried, so I knew she was feeling it.
“I was supposed to do this for you and Clyde,” she said, looking over at me.
“Ma, it doesn’t matter who did it for who. We’re here now. Come on, let’s go see it.”
I took her to everything in Disneyland. I bought us some Mickey ears, and we wore them around all day. We stood in lines, rode every ride we’d heard about, hugged the characters, and took in all the attractions. She was knocked out by it.
She especially loved the “Small World” ride. It was her vision of what human beings should be, these children of the world: all colors, religions, and cultures together. Disney had made it seem possible that all the kids of the world would hold hands in unity.
When we got off “It’s a Small World,” she told me again, “I wish I could have done this for you.”
I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to take her to Disneyland again. I hoped so, but who knew?
The day Clyde and I took her ashes to Disneyland, it’s possible a lot of her went into the “Small World” ride, her favorite. We were subtle about it, kind of sneezing Ma out here and there when no one was looking. We didn’t get caught, but I confessed it later to a park employee. They weren’t surprised, and they certainly were not happy about it.
I later learned that it’s pretty common and that a lot of family calcium phosphate has been scattered here and there in Disney parks. (The employees are seriously on the lookout for it now. I’ve been told it’s a HEPA cleanup issue. You might find yourself escorted to the parking lot pretty quick. Don’t do what I did. I’m sure you don’t want your loved one’s final resting place to be an industrial vacuum bag.)
It took a while to settle in on me that my mom’s death has been the most devastating experience of my life. It was an acute trauma. I still think about her every single day.
My mother held her cards close to her vest. I didn’t know much about her childhood until I was in my forties. Clyde and I must have caught her on a talkative day when she told us about growing up in Harlem.
My mom, Emma, was an only child, and her cousin, Arlene, was like her sister. The two of them lived with Emma’s mom, Rachel, and Arlene’s mom, Ruth, who were actual sisters. Their moms were as different as day and night. Ruth was a five-foot-tall force of nature. She carried around a small Louisville Slugger so her husband, Slim, listened to whatever she had to say. If there was a problem, Ruth and her Louisville had no issues kicking some man’s ass.
Emma’s mom, Rachel, was not as strong-willed. When her husband, Maliki, decided to leave the marriage, she knew she had to let him go. I think it was disappointing to my mom as a little girl. The split-up of her parents left a huge hole in her heart.
Ruth and Rachel raised their daughters like exact equals. What was given to one was given to the other. They had identical dresses and Polly II shoes, dolls and games, and got the same number of gifts under the Christmas tree so there would always be peace in the valley of Arlene and Emma. But they didn’t look alike. At all. Arlene was a true redhead, with hair that fell in ringlets and light-skinned with freckles. She looked like a darling Shirley Temple doll.
My mom did not look like Shirley Temple. She was chocolate brown, all long legs and arms, with wide chocolate eyes. Not many relatives called her Emma. Folks would call her “Monk,” short for monkey. When she told me that, I was pissed off. I wanted to get that Louisville Slugger and kick some ass of my own. What the fuck? How mean can you be to a kid?
My mother just shrugged as she told the story. It didn’t seem to bother her, at least not anymore. She was more like an actual monk. She seemed completely able to embrace the golden rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. That’s the way she lived, despite a lot of stuff she went through for the whole first half of her life that could have made her resentful as hell, which I found incredible.
Her dad married the “other” woman, a nice lady named Margaret, who had an ice cream shop in Harlem. They had one daughter together. When Emma visited her half sister, dad, and stepmom, I think she felt unwelcomed. It wasn’t that anyone was mean or said anything to her, but the climate had changed.
On Easter Sunday, as kids, my mother would make sure Clyde and I were dressed up, and she’d take us on an uptown bus to visit our grandfather and Margaret in Harlem. The best part of the day was sitting at the counter of her ice cream parlor to have a soda fountain drink. My grandfather, who liked photography, took to Clyde and taught him a love for taking pictures. I don’t remember him doing anything special with me. I think in those days, attention was paid more to the males in the family. I also do not remember it bothering me at the time, so . . . there you are.
I do think my mom felt that same rejection from him. Even after her father died and she was grown, she felt that she was still treated like an outsider. Her father’s family sorted through his belongings and decided what my mother should be given. She was never asked what she would like to have. No one ever got in touch with us again until I became famous. Then they all reappeared. But my mom never spoke badly about any of them. She dealt with it.
My mom’s saving grace as a girl was her grandmother, Emmaline, who loved everything about the movies. She would take her namesake along to see new releases at the local movie houses. My mom’s first nine years of life were during the Depression, and movies at that time were affordable getaways from problems. The two of them would catch the first feature in the morning at 9:00 a.m. and then stay all day long until dinnertime. They’d see Clark Gable in Too Hot to Handle, Bette Davis in Jezebel, Charlie Chaplin movies, The Philadelphia Story with Hepburn and Grant, the first run of all the Abbott and Costello movies, Disney’s original Fantasia, and The Wizard of Oz on the big screen. My mom became a fan of Judy Garland. The movies gave Emma a view of the bigger world and everything going on outside of her life in Harlem. They made her curious about other places and times in history, so she would check books out of the library to learn about it all. My great-grandmother was the only one in the family fascinated with showbiz, so I guess I inherited her genes.
Since Ma was on a roll, telling Clyde and me about her parents and grandparents, I thought I’d ask her more about our dad, Robert Johnson. But it was not a conversation she wanted to have. She was from the old school, where everything was on a need-to-know for kids and young adults. So I didn’t get much information on that front, but here’s what I surmise . . . my mom was on her own to raise the two of us.
My mother didn’t talk about the marriage ending because she stayed married to him until the day he passed, nor do I think she ever thought of it as a failure. It turns out that my dad was gay. Which couldn’t have been easy either.
I’m telling you, he had many gigs—he was a diamond merchant and spent time working in the post office. He was raised in a strict Southern Baptist household, and his mother, Hattie, was one of those ladies who wore the nurse uniform to the church service and revived the folks who fainted when they were overcome by the spirit.
Hattie was the one who helped my mother get an apartment in the projects when they were newly built because she might have known or worked for somebody who was organizing it all. I think about what those apartment buildings must have looked like when my mother first moved down to Chelsea from Harlem. I can’t imagine what that relief must have been like for my mom, finding a place she would be able to afford where she could be with her family.
She made it really clear to Clyde and me that we needed to keep the apartment as clean as possible. I guess my mother thought if it was messy at all, it would reflect badly on my grandmother or some crazy shit like that.
Most of the families in our building worked their asses off to maintain their apartments because, in those days, people thought that folks who lived in the projects and were poor must be dirty. The city let the buildings get run-down, but the occupants did their best to keep their homes looking good because they didn’t want the stereotype. When you read about the kind of insane racism in today’s news, it’s nothing that hasn’t been here for a long time.
My father, being a gay black man, couldn’t have had it easy in the 1960s. (Hell, it’s still not easy.) In those days, you could still be thrown in jail if you were at a gay bar. I think he loved my mother, too, but couldn’t stay in the marriage and be true to himself. I liked that about him, but he let my mother carry on alone as a single mom. Yet she never had a bad word to say about him.
I would only see him occasionally. He would have Clyde for a weekend once in a while. He definitely had more to say and do with his son than his daughter. Come to think of it, neither one of my parents ever filed for divorce. I think he was the love of my mom’s life. She never dated or showed much interest in any other man that I know about.
When I was a kid, I’d ask her, “Ma, do you want a boyfriend?”
She’d say, “Do you think I need one?”
I’d say, “No, I don’t think you need one, but do you want one?”
Then I would start to sweat because I was a little kid and I didn’t actually know why she would want one. This was way before I understood what all that entailed. But I’d get to where there was no info coming from her and no more questions from me, so it would end in a standoff. No boyfriend . . .
I do remember asking this about my father: “Ma, why doesn’t he like me?”
She would say, “Of course he likes you. But he is who he is. And I can’t answer that question. The next time you see him, you must ask him yourself.”
One of my mom’s pet peeves was when people wouldn’t be direct about something. She thought people should answer for themselves and take responsibility for their choices and reasons. This was not one of my father’s strong suits.
Still, I thought I’d see if she would answer one question that had to do with her. It was after my father passed away in 1993, so she couldn’t tell me to ask him directly.
“When and how did you know he was gay?”
She lit her cigarette and said, “I never thought about it.”
What that meant coming from my mom: I know, but I’m not talking about it, and this conversation is now done. It was another mystery, and it was going to stay a mystery.
Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates did a PBS show about my lineage in 2007. A lot of black folks in America had their history stolen and have no idea where their ancestors started out. What Dr. Gates uncovered in my case was that my great-great-grandparents became Florida homesteaders through the “forty acres and a mule” congressional act. These ancestors, William and Elise, showed up at the land office and didn’t leave until they got forty acres and a mule for him and forty acres and a mule for her. Over one hundred thousand black people were emancipated after the Civil War, but only about six thousand became landowners like my great-great-grandparents. It was damn hard work. Dr. Gates told me he could understand how I got my feisty DNA. I found it fascinating, but my mother never wanted to hear about it or watch the show. She was not at all interested in our family history, even the distant past, in any way. There was a reason for that. One that very few people knew.
Besides, nobody in the distant past or even the recent past was going to help her take care of herself or her two kids. She knew she had to be okay on her own.
Because of what happened to my mom when I was nine years old (coming up—I know you’re going to look ahead, but come back here) and due to what she taught me as a kid, I learned how to be okay on my own, too. It framed my life.
But here’s the thing that my mind won’t wrap around. This is why my mom’s death became the most devastating experience of my life: she really dug my brother and me. She was the most remarkable person I knew. A couple of days after she died, I realized that there would be no one on this earth who loved me as much as she did. I wouldn’t put that kind of sparkle in anyone else’s eye. She and my brother were my first loves.
I know she would be pissed off about me feeling this way and say, “Really? No one else loves you? Really. Come on. Get out of here.”
Okay, I know I’m loved, and I’ve got those I love unconditionally. She’s right. So, I got over myself. But I’ll never get over her.