My life полностью

“She’s gone, Bill.” After a perfect but exhausting week, Mother had just gone to sleep and died. I knew it was coming, but I wasn’t ready to let her go. Now our last phone conversation seemed too routine, too full of idle chitchat; we had talked like people who think they have forever to talk to each other. I was aching to redo it, but all I could do was tell Dick that I loved him, that I was so grateful to him for making her last years happy, and that I’d get home as quickly as I could. Hillary knew what had happened from my end of the conversation. I hugged her and wept. She said something about Mother and her love of life, and I realized that the phone conversation was just the kind Mother would have chosen to be our last one. My mother was always about life, not death. I called my brother, who I knew would be devastated. He worshipped Mother, all the more because she never gave up on him. I told him he had to hold up for her and keep building his life. Then I called my friend Patty Howe Criner, who had been part of our lives for more than forty years, and asked her to help Dick and me with the funeral arrangements. Hillary woke Chelsea and we told her. She had already lost a grandfather, and she and Mother, whom she called Ginger, had a close, tender relationship. On the wall of her study room, she had a terrific pen-and-ink portrait of Mother by Hot Springs artist Gary Simmons, entitled Chelsea’s Ginger. It was moving to watch my daughter coming to terms with the loss of someone else she loved, trying to express her grief and keep her composure, letting go and holding on. Chelsea’s Ginger is hanging in her room in Chappaqua today. Later that morning we put out a release announcing Mother’s death, which was all over the news immediately. By coincidence, Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich were on the morning news programs. Undeterred by the moment, interviewers asked about Whitewater; to one, Dole replied that it “cries out”

for the appointment of an independent counsel. I was stunned. I would have thought that even the press and my adversaries would take a time-out on the day of my mother’s death. To his credit, a few years later Dole apologized to me. By then, I better understood what had happened. Washington’s narcotic of choice is power. It dulls the senses and clouds the judgment. Dole was not even close to being its worst abuser. I was touched by his apology.

That same day Al Gore went to Milwaukee to deliver a foreign-policy speech I had agreed to make, and I flew home. Dick and Mother’s house was full of their friends, family, and the food Arkansas folks bring to ease common grieving. We all laughed and told stories about her. The next day Hillary and Chelsea arrived, as did some of Mother’s other friends from out of state, including Barbra Streisand and Ralph Wilson, the owner of the Buffalo Bills, who had invited Mother to the Super Bowl the previous year when he learned she was a huge Bills fan.

No church was big enough to hold all Mother’s friends and it was too cold to hold the funeral service at her preferred venue, the racetrack, so we scheduled it for the Convention Center. About three thousand people came, including Senator Pryor, Governor Tucker, and all my college roommates. But most of the attendees were simple working people whom Mother had met and befriended over the years. All the women from her “birthday club” were there, too. There were twelve members, each with a birthday in a different month. They celebrated them together over monthly lunches. After Mother died, as she requested, the other women picked a replacement; and they renamed their group the Virginia Clinton Kelley Birthday Club.

The Reverend John Miles presided over the service, referring to Mother as an “American original.”

“Virginia,” he said, “was like a rubber ball; the harder life put her down, the higher she bounced.”

Brother John reminded the crowd of Mother’s automatic response to every problem: “That’s no hill for a stepper.”

The service featured the hymns she loved. We all sang “Amazing Grace” and “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” Her friend Malvie Lee Giles, who once lost her voice completely, then got it back “from God”

with an extra octave to spare, sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” and Mother’s favorite, “A Closer Walk with Thee.” Our Pentecostal friend Janice Sjostrand sang a powerful hymn Mother had heard at my inaugural church service, “Holy Ground.” When Barbra Streisand, who was sitting behind me, heard Janice, she touched my shoulder and shook her head in amazement. When the service was over, she asked, “Who is that woman and what is that music? It’s magnificent!” Barbra was so inspired by Mother’s funeral music that she made her own album of hymns and inspirational songs, including one written in Mother’s memory, “Leading with Your Heart.”