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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/2663/full/2663/mother-s-anger-loss-explored-in-poems-about-aids/ <br /><br /> <b>Mother’s anger, loss explored in poems about AIDS</b> <br /> Friday, March 1, 1996 | by <p>LESLEY PEARL </p> <br /><br /><p>Charlotte Mayerson is a Jewish mother. An angry one.<br /><br /> Angry enough to threaten to sue a doctor, "or at the very least call her mother." Angry enough to engage in a quarrel with God. "A very Jewish tradition," she said.<br /><br /> Ultimately, Mayerson funneled her emotion through a pen. The result is "The Death Cycle Machine," a collection of poems on the loss of her son to AIDS.<br /><br /> She will read from her book at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 5 at the Jewish Community Library, 601-14th Ave., S.F., and at 7:30 p.m., Sunday, March 3 at A Different Light, 489 Castro, S.F.<br /><br /> Mayerson, 68 and a former executive editor at Random House, sought out a Jewish venue to read her first collection of poems. "The Jewish community has gotten better [about AIDS]...but it still has to realize people who shop on Union Street get it too," she said in a phone interview from her home in Manhattan.<br /><br /> "I recently came into contact with a group called Mothers' Voices. It's for parents, mostly mothers, whose children have died of AIDS. There's a lot of middle-class Jews in it," Mayerson said.<br /><br /> "There was this man there whose family owned a department store in the community I grew up in. Our mothers planted trees in Israel together and wore their fur coats to Hadassah meetings. Both their grandchildren are dead from AIDS now."<br /><br /> Mayerson's son Robert Henry died six years ago. He was 35, a former business editor at the South China Morning Post, and "one of those people born adventurous," she said. "He once helicoptered to the top of a mountain in Italy to eat a certain kind of cheese."<br /><br /> Mayerson enjoys recalling funny anecdotes Robert's friends share with her—like the famous scientist who claims she would have been a suburban New Jersey housewife if Robert hadn't encouraged her to hang upside-down out her dorm- room window. Or the time Robert taught his sixth-grade class Esperanto so the teacher wouldn't know what they were saying.<br /><br /> Telling these stories balances her anger, Mayerson said. And "The Death Machine Cycle" is filled with her emotion. Consider the poem "Layout":<br /><br /> I didn't consider/When I chose your name/How it would look/On a tombstone.<br /><br /> "Of course it's angry. There is a lot of anger. The kind of anger a mother has when her son doesn't eat his spinach," Mayerson said. "I was angry when Robert didn't take care of himself to beat the disease. I was angry at AIDS—as if it were a person, a personal enemy. I was furious at the medical establishment.<br /><br /> "And I was angry at the people who just didn't understand."<br /><br /> One so-called friend, upon hearing of Robert's illness, said, "I hope this taught him a lesson."<br /><br /> "I said, `Are you a virgin, dear?'" Mayerson recalled. The friend's comment "wasn't very helpful."<br /><br /> Actually, little was. Not writing. "Painful," she said. Not even her Torah and Talmud study at the Jewish Theological Seminary.<br /><br /> "The stories of David and Absalom and of Abraham resonate. But were they a comfort? No," she said.<br /><br /> Besides, Torah study reminded her of reading the Bible to Robert as a child. Having grown tired of children's favorites, Mayerson took the Bible to her son's bedside each evening. However, fearing she was boring her child, Mayerson never finished the tome.<br /><br /> The irony, she said, was that Robert studied religion in college and told his mother he remembered the stories by heart—but only the ones she read him.<br /><br /> "It just proves mothers can't do anything right," Mayerson said with a laugh. It's a heavy sound rather than a light chuckle. But it's a laugh.<br /><br /> Mayerson seems to have found her solace. It's in reviving Robert's memory. It's in the women of the Holocaust, whom she also wrote about.<br /><br /> Without the women of the Holocaust/Who saw their children ripped asunder/I could not go on<br /><br /> ...Who, because they could not/Save their young—/Hide them in a safe place—/Became outlaws,.../Without those women/Before my eye I would die now—/In the right order—/while he's still alive.<br /><br /> "Very often as I thought I was going under, I thought of these women," Mayerson said. "I realized my experience [of not being able to protect my child] wasn't unique. Other women of our tradition have gone through this too."</p> <p> </p>

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