By DONNA MARCHETTI
THE PLAIN DEALER 

"I love you. I hope you have a good life," Eileen whispered to Barbara, the baby she had given birth to three weeks before. Then she turned around and walked out of the Glasgow adoption agency. It was 1955. A 17-year-old unwed mother was expected to do such a thing.

 Forty-three years later, Eileen lay on her deathbed. "Tell this story," she said softly but insistently to her ex-husband, Campbell Armstrong. "You know - of Barbara and me."

 "I Hope You Have a Good Life" is the story of mother and daughter, separated by social convention, lost to each other for over 40 years, and reunited for a luminous few months.

 After Barbara’s birth, Eileen met aspiring writer Campbell Armstrong. The two married, and against the backdrop of a troubled relationship, had three sons. Despite heavy drinking, Armstrong sold novels and landed a job in publishing. But as if he were trying to escape his own personal anguish, Armstrong uprooted his family in a series of moves, each new place farther and stranger. Eventually they settled in Arizona, where Armstrong taught English at a university and Eileen found fulfillment working with mentally disabled children.

 Armstrong disliked teaching and became increasingly unhappy. Set on a self-destructive path, his life unraveled in a haze of alcohol and drugs, accompanied by a string of extramarital affairs. When one of the affairs turned serious, Eileen met with the other woman, Rebecca. Later that day she told Armstrong, "I just gave you away." It was the second time she had reluctantly given up someone she loved.

 Armstrong and Rebecca married and left to live in Ireland, where Armstrong apparently curbed his drinking. Eileen stayed in Arizona. Their lives were separate, though they maintained cordial, if distant, communication.

 Meanwhile, Barbara grew up in England, the adopted daughter of loving parents. But it wasn’t enough for her. Driven to find her birth mother, she combed through public records and followed paper trails that led to one dead end after another. Finally, after years of searching, she found Eileen’s brother, Sydney. When she called him to find out her mother’s location, he was hesitant. It might not be a good time, he said. Gently, he told Barbara that her mother was dying of cancer, far away in Arizona, that the shock might be too great for her. The news would have to be broken to her slowly.

 There may not be much time, replied Barbara. "I have cancer too."

 Barbara flew to Arizona and with an intensity born of urgency, mother and daughter ignited an immediate bond of love and intimacy. Ignoring her own illness, Barbara spent hours talking to her mother and holding her hand, and later, when Eileen was much sicker, singing to her or simply stroking her cheek.

 In a vigil of death, the other family members - Armstrong, Rebecca, Rebecca’s daughter and Eileen and Armstrong’s three sons - arrived to wrap Eileen in a cocoon of comfort and support. Though Barbara had to return to England before her mother’s death (and shortly after died herself), their brief time together had been charged with happiness, the culmination of a yearning that had tugged at both for decades.

 Armstrong has written this story with candor and deep sensitivity. He hasn’t cringed from the truth - not about his own shortcomings, the turmoil of his marriage to Eileen or the brutal reality of death. In the end it’s not just about a mother and a daughter. It’s about a family who came together in dignity, love and forgiveness to face a painful past and an imminent loss. It’s a beautiful story, beautifully told. Marchetti is a writer in Cleveland Heights. 

©2000 THE PLAIN DEALER. 

Heartbreaking and beautiful, Armstrong's memoir turns on a family drama fraught with savage irony: a mother and the out-of-wedlock daughter whom she abandoned shortly after birth are reunited after 42 years--but both are suffering from advanced cancer. The mother in question, Armstrong's ex-wife Eileen, was 17 in 1955 when, at her parents' insistence, she gave up her baby, Barbara, for adoption (the baby's 28-year-old father dropped out of the picture). "I love you. I hope you have a good life," Eileen whispered to the infant, devastated. 

Barbara's momentous weeks-long reunion in Phoenix with her dying mother, whom she spent years trying to locate, is deeply moving. Glasgow-born novelist
Armstrong had a troubled marriage with Eileen amid his bouts of heavy drinking and affairs, leading up to family counseling that failed to extricate him from his love affair with the woman who is now his wife.

Having remained in touch with his ex-wife, Armstrong was also reunited at Eileen's deathbed with their three sons, and ruefully examines his own failings as a father. Barbara, still fighting her own illness, becomes an integral part of her half-brothers' lives, almost a surrogate mother.

A masterful diagnostician of the human heart, Armstrong writes sensuously, with ruthless candor and wisdom about the wilting of relationships, the courage ordinary people muster to survive, the way tragedy can bring a family together, and how we all die alone. Few will read this intense book with dry eyes. 

(Aug.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|