The Color of Life

She wore green the way I wear blue—quirkily, comically, compulsively.

Her bedroom closet was stuffed with lime green button-down shirts, emerald green turtlenecks, pea green sweaters, Kelly Green polyester pants—all grouped according to their hue and hanging neatly on molded plastic white hangars. Sometimes she paired these shades with pinks and purples, but mostly she wore her greens monochromatically—light with dark, dark with light, giving her a checkerboard effect, as if she were a walking display of every wavelength along the green color spectrum. Her grandchildren, who called her by her childhood nickname, Gigi, made up a special color just for her: Gigi Green.

If you asked why she loved green—and even her puffy down parka from L.L. Bean was chartreuse, as was her malachite-colored raincoat, rain hat, and matching umbrella, making her look like some bloated, aging Elmo whenever she bundled herself up for a trip to the Piggly Wiggly, and she never went anywhere, even in the heat of Florida, without bundling herself up—she would tell you that green was the color of life. She would not talk about Greenpeace or Green buildings or “greening your routine” because these things were as foreign and newfangled as e-mail and I-pods. But she would tell you that her father was Professor Emeritus of Forestry at the University of Michigan and that he was “way ahead of his time,” and that one tree—and she was good with the names of trees, could point out evergreens, firs, blue spruces, silver beeches and sugar maples—one tree could produce more cooling air than ten air conditioners running 20 hours a day. She would have made a face if anyone had called her a tree hugger, and yet she often said that trees were like people, and that cutting one down—even though it was rotting and sick with Dutch Elm disease, like one very old moss-covered Elm in our back yard that she kept going long past its time--was like killing someone.

When she moved into a condo in the retirement community near my sister in New Hampshire during the last year of her life, she was asked to fill out a form, giving information about herself that would be published in the monthly newsletter. She had to include where she was born, where she went to college, what her profession had been, how many children and grandchildren she had. Proudly, she listed her graduation from Smith College in 1948, as well as the names of four other family members--her aunt, two cousins, and niece—who had graduated from Smith.

“But what do I put down for profession?” she asked. The other residents included retired doctors and college presidents, and she was worried about not making the grade, about making a fool of herself. “The only job I ever had,” she said, “was when I worked as a model at the J. Conover Agency in New York before I married your father, but if I put that, they’ll think I’m a birdbrain, a lightweight.”

“Just put housewife,” my sister advised, and Mom agreed, adding that it was the truth, and there was no shame in that.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste, yelled the message on a billboard that I passed riding the bus to school every day. It was for the United Negro College Fund, and the child pictured was an inner-city kid with a tear rolling down his cheek and huge, bright eyes, who was poor and couldn’t learn all the things I was learning, such as how to spell chlorophyll and why it made plants green. But whenever I passed the billboard’s screaming message, all I could think of was Mom, and how she was home alone with the shades pulled in her upstairs bedroom, sunk beneath a burial mound of Hudson’s Bay green-and-white blankets. Downstairs, Mrs. V. did the laundry and the cooking and the cleaning, and sometimes she and Mom chatted when Mom padded down in the middle of the day to boil an egg or eat a bag of potato chips, but mostly Mom stayed upstairs in the dark room, getting over a bug.

The bug was her depression, which no one had ever named, and which would not be diagnosed until many years later. Mom was a Christian Scientist, and so she rarely went to doctors. She had her Christian Science practitioners, to whom she talked for hours on the telephone, but they gently instructed her to think of herself as a perfect child of God: If she imagined herself to be such an emanation of Divine Love, then the illness would disappear, just as if she’d taken a course of powerful antibiotics. The practitioners said that Mary Baker Eddy herself had suffered from many ailments before discovering Christian Science. Mrs. Eddy had injured her spine after falling on an icy sidewalk in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1866, and was briefly hospitalized. But once she discovered the Truth, the practitioners reported breathlessly, which was that all sickness was an illusion, the manifestation of error, once she had written Science and Health and founded the Mother Church (“And did you know,” they would marvel, “that she was 87 when she founded The Christian Science Monitor?”), why she went on to live a long, healthy and productive life. Mom could be healed too, they promised, if only she knew the truth.

Mom tried to know the truth, or ‘k the t’ as she quaintly put it, her whole life—seeking help from practitioners through her divorce, her moves from Massachusetts to Connecticut, Florida, Virginia, and New Hampshire, her trips north every summer to Canada. As she grew older, she finally supplemented her CS treatments with doctors’ visits (Mrs. Eddy said that Christian Scientists could seek medical help in certain extraordinary circumstances). In her early sixties, Mom discovered that she had Type II Diabetes as well as high blood pressure and depression. Her doctors prescribed Sinequan, Ambien, and Glucovance; they also advised her to lose twenty pounds and start exercising, advice which she largely ignored, though she did purchase a three-speed English bike, along with a fluorescent green Avanti bike helmet, both of which she stored in the attic of her summer cottage in Canada.

But even though Mom took her medications, she never respected doctors of medicine the way she did her non-degreed CS practitioners. The Latinate, multi-syllabllic, oft-repeated abstractions of Science and Health gave Mom comfort, the way mantras pacify students of transcendental meditation. Mary Baker Eddy permitted Mom to tell the story of her life not in psychological, medical or sociological terms—Mom’s mother, a housewife and amateur artist, had suffered from depression and neglected her two girls, much the way Mom neglected my sister and me, passing on the legacy of depression—but in the high-minded, neo-philosophic language of 19th century American Transcendentalists, giving Mom’s all-too-female, multi-generational tale of underachievement and blight a gravity and purpose that was as fictional as any bodice-ripper.

After she died, my sister and I went through Mom’s closets and gave away all the green turtlenecks, sweaters and pants to the local hospice shop. But I kept the fluorescent green Avanti helmet, which was in excellent condition, mostly because it had rarely been used. At first, I stored it on an upper shelf in the closet, thinking superstitiously that it might be bad luck to wear it (having inherited her depressive illness, I have always been afraid of becoming like her). But after I lost my blue helmet last summer (in a typical Attention-Deficit-Disorder lapse, I left it beside a computer in the library), I started wearing the green Avanti Helmet.

And here’s the big surprise: I get compliments about it all the time. Just last month, as I was pedaling furiously along Elm Street in Northampton, late again for my writers’ group, a man started honking. I assumed that he was angry because I had failed to use a hand signal when turning into the oncoming traffic. Imagine my chagrin when he rolled down his window and shouted, “Cool helmet, Dude!” and then gave me a thumbs-up. And just last Monday, which would have been Mom’s 84th birthday, I was unlocking my bike from a rack on Green Street near the campus of Smith College, when a spry, elderly woman walked past.

“My dear girl,” she said, “Where on earth did you get that helmet?”

“It was my mom’s,” I said, “She always said green was the color of life.”