In Memoriam George Edwards
1943 - 2011
George Edwards (1943-2011) died on October 23.
You are invited to make a donation in his memory to either Well Spouse
or
The Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration
Plans for a spring memorial are pending.
It’s a beautiful summer day and we’re out towards the “project,” as my father called the patch of ground he’s reclaiming from the for lawn and wildflowers. Three of us, probably--my parents and I. I’m seven, maybe. My dad’s got his trademark pipe, the one I’ll learn in school a few years later is bad for him and so complain to my mom, prompting dad to quit. This sacrifice will go unnoticed for months, ‘til one day my mom will say “honey, I’ve been cleaning fewer ashtrays lately...have you been smoking less?” An utterance which, understandably, will prompt one of their infrequent fights. (“Damn it Rachel, I could start a heroin processing plant on the dining room table and you wouldn’t notice!”) But this sunny summer’s day he’s got his pipe loaded with Balkan Sobranie. My mom’s brought out some bubble stuff, and before long my father’s combined the joys of soap bubbles and tobacco smoke: the shimmering, nearly opaque orbs drift across our little uneven badminton court (which occasionally doubles as an even more
drastically unsuitable croquet court). When they hit the grass or the lilac branches, they burst to let a wisp of grey smoke out into the day.
Winter in New York City. My beleaguered mother’s gotten a call that George is being discharged from the hospital. We beat him back to the care facility, a swanky and somewhat claustrophobic place on the Upper East Side. I always hated the Upper East Side and as a high schooler prided myself on only ever having been there a handful of times (excepting Fifth Ave and its museums). I suspect my father shared my distaste for its boutiques, fur coats, and pampered purebreds, but here we were, at his latest home, waiting for him to arrive. We wait in his room, a cramped space that just just fits a bed and TV and chair, or maybe out in the common area with the other ‘residents,’ as I’ve learned to call them. This is the second floor; for a few months George had been a resident of the Ninth Floor, but recently it had been agreed upon that he needed a higher level of care. In the common room his floor mates loll around in wheelchairs or in front of the big TV, blaring away to some station selected by one of the aides, presumably. Many of the people here are unconscious, and all of them look extremely elderly. After a while, my father arrives. I don’t remember the arrival itself, but he must have been brought in on a stretcher, because he’s been sedated into a stupor. This apparently is the hospital’s solution to agitation amongst their charges: massive doses of who-knows-what tranquilizers. George is medicated all the time, but not like this. As we sit around his bed, he starts to come around, opening his still vivid blue eyes. No hint of recognition as to where he is or why; his gaze is blank. On his best days, he clearly still seems to recognize his wife and son, is occasionally up for throwing a tennis ball back and forth for a few minutes on the patio, may focus on the TV for part of an old Fawlty Towers episode (a longtime family favorite)or some tennis, will even utter a word or two. This is not to be such a day. But as the meds start to wear off and he inches towards what lucidity can be expected of him, something interesting happens. He starts to babble. He talks, in fact, without self-consciousness, without filter: syllables, words, sentences, whole paragraphs spill rom his mouth. The rise and fall of the speech is natural, the pauses feel about right, and we in the room with him look at one another. He’s speaking more than he has in years, beautiful mellifluous syllables, only it’s all gibberish. In the sea of nonsense, occasionally there emerges the suggestion of a recognizable word.
In the shadow of a medieval castle, my father and I crouch at either end of a marble bench. It’s autumn in the Provencal village where my parents have rented a house for a couple of months and where I’m attending kindergarten and learning to ask for “une galette, s’il vous plait” at the bakery around the corner. It’s not yet too chilly, but we’re the only ones at the playground. Dad flicks a flat stones across the bench towards me and it teeters on the edge for a second before falling into my hand. “Close one,” I might have commented. I flick the stone back, naturally, because this is how Polish Table Frisbee is played. A few days or weeks later, I ride atop his shoulders to watch cement mixers pour beaten eggs onto a wide metal sheet; this is giant omelette at Bedouin, and when the world record-setting breakfast is cooked we each get a plateful.
I’d been depending on memories of my father for years before he died this past week, quite suddenly though he was far from well, in his fifth care facility in half that many years. Many of those memories involve games of one sort or another (a playful but competitive spirit being something I’ve inherited from him, along with my lean, tall frame, tastes for Italian wine and Bach and Beethoven and Chopin, and a sometimes acerbic wit). Tennis on the local Vermont courts in the summer, honeymoon bridge in the living room of our Upper West Side apartment, hundreds of games of chess. (These he never let me win. Even after his linguistic mind was starting to fail, he’d beat me as often as not, although sometimes he’d start to pick up a rook or pawn of the wrong color). Frisbee or running bases in Riverside Park and, for a couple of short years, West Side Soccer League in Central Park. Even when he wasn’t playing something, he was watching Serie A Italian soccer on TV (his Sunday morning stand-in for Church), or Braves
baseball (having grown up in Boston with an older brother who had already claimed the city’s A-team, the Red Sox, for his own). If not that, then he was making conversational play in the form of rapid-fire puns. Still, what he did more than anything else was not play at all, at least not in any conventional sense, but an intensely concentrated kind of work. He was a brilliant, gifted composer who wrote what he once defiantly called “ugly music.” Angular, complex, dense pieces for piano or horn trio or chamber group or orchestra, all worked out second by painstaking second on our Yamaha upright in New York or the nearly unplayable, weathered old piano in the Vermont house. For hours at a time he’d labor with an intensity that my mother describes as a “forcefield” (another quality I’ve inherited from him--the ability to concentrate on what I’m doing to the exclusion of everything else). Alternating between the piano and the table where his manuscripts and electric eraser were laid out, he’d compose and then copy everything in his beautiful, musical calligraphic hand.
It’s fitting that his work--both the music and the equally sharp and witty essays he wrote, mostly in the way way of music criticism but not shying away from politics and literature--is what remains and what, to whatever degree, will be remembered after his family and friends and composition students, too, are gone. The work remains in focus, well-defined, having lost none of its original sparkle, even it has been appreciated by relatively few. The man aged not so well, a fact that his survivors are left to deal with as we sort through the years of confusion, alienation, bitterness and pain that he left in his wake. The man he was in his prime has been elusive these past ten years; the hope now that the last, awful chapter of his life has come to a close is that the perspective gained will allow the earlier memories back into focus. For me, this means delving back into the sunlight-infused mists of childhood, for by the time I was emerging from thosemists, he was beginning quietly to sink into the murky and insidious waters that were to steal his voice, and his memory and that, ultimately, were to swallow him up.
Jonathan Hadas Edwards
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