Film and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz has a series of essays on rogerebert.com about the people he has loved and lost, including his second wife, his step-mother, and his mother. He writes with grace, insight, and generosity, not just toward the people he writes about but to death itself, and to us, his readers in sharing his own vulnerability.
On April 2 of this year, I lost my mother, Bettye Seitz, with whom I had a long and contentious relationship. On April 27 of last year, I lost my second wife, Nancy, to metastatic breast cancer. That's the same day I lost my first wife, Nancy's younger sister Jennifer, to an undiagnosed heart ailment, fifteen years earlier, on April 27, 2006. Nancy and Jennifer's times of death were minutes apart.
April 25 is the day I lost my stepmother, Genie Grant, a jazz singer and union administrator in Dallas, Texas. The year was 2009. Genie was the most benign and loving parental figure I ever knew, such a bright light that she made up for the conspicuous failings of the others. It was Genie who brokered a series of meetings between myself and my father, Dave Zoller, who had been estranged throughout my youth due to mutual misunderstandings, his own limitations as a dad, and generous doses of anti-father propaganda supplied by my mother and stepfather. Genie's diplomatic, embracing personality brought me and Dad together in a meaningful way for the first time. Her death brought us even closer, because now we had something horrible in common. "This is the month we both lost our ladies," Dad told me. It was very strange being his guide through an emotional experience that I'd had first. It wasn't how things were supposed to work. But Nancy and Jennifer's parents losing their only two children isn't how things are supposed to work, either. As John Galsworthy wrote: life calls the tune, we dance.
