I saw how, when my brother smoked reefer, it made my mother cry. He was 16 at the time. And I saw that she broke down and cried. I never wanted to hurt my mother, so I kept away from drugs.
Then l learned to play guitar and l started writing songs and my mother formed for me a publishing business, so we started publishing and managing artists.
Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement. I will not try it. Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother.
He had written my mother once that he wanted her to be the first thing he saw every morning and the last thing he ever saw. And that's how it turned out.
I was brought up by an Episcopalian father and Presbyterian mother in nondenominational Army chapels all over the world and never really had much religious experience.
Then my mother had several strokes and my father, who was 85, couldn't handle it, so Donna came back and we went through the same thing here. She lives in Mill Valley; her group is organizing this event.
If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.
Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you.
I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.
