Winds of the Great Shame

“And as she lay on her death bed, as she must have felt a cancerous tumor slowly taking her life, she would also have looked around her and seen the stern and damaged but also joyous legacy she would leave behind.”

My mother died in the small house she and my father bought in 1959, the house in which she had raised nine children, and from which she had watched her husband drive away. It was a mild afternoon with light cloud cover, but the small room full of adult bodies was warm, and the sun was directly overhead, so the light was dim. Ruth Lillian Jackson Overby lay in a hospital bed provided by the hospice service, sedated and relieved by a combination of her daily drops of CBD oil and just the amount of morphine she could manage while remaining lucid. The nine of us gathered around her that day have nine very different personalities, and thus had nine very different responses to the moment, from the boisterous and pointed to the somber and silent. We were there for more than an hour before she drifted off to sleep, the divisions in our large family set aside, surrendering to shared laughter and reminiscence.

Later, when I had my private moment with her, I leaned in close, knowing this was a final goodbye. She spoke fondly of my wife and my siblings, and, no surprise to me, she recounted distant memories of her father. “Daddy wanted me to become an actress,” she said, placing a finger to her lips as if to silence any dissent. “And I would have been a good one, too.” I had known this—it was something she had told us before—but in that moment, our last moment together, the thought of it raised questions in my mind. The image of Frank Jackson admonishing his third child, my mother, had always been a vague one that I’d spent far too little time imagining or interrogating: my mother, a young, beautiful woman—I’d seen many photographs—and her father, an incurable, though gentle, alcoholic, expressing his ambition for her. How would he have expressed it? What ambition might he have had for his other seven children? And most of all, how did a man like Frank Jackson, a man of Irish descent who had died from the drink at the young age of 57, how did this man muster ambition for his daughter in the midst of what must have been a shameful existence of his own?

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My mother, the third of Frank Jackson’s eight children, was 20 when he died. He was, by all accounts, an affable, unremarkable man whose wife Lillian, my grandmother, never remarried after his death. At Lillian’s funeral, a family friend described Frank Jackson to me as “just a really, really good person who unfortunately had that one demon,” by which he meant alcohol.