Diane Keaton is Going to Live Forever

One of my earliest memories of the television is Diane Keaton on a dusty VHS of The First Wives Club. My parents have rented it from the Blockbuster and I'm watching from around the corner in the kitchen after dark. I blink. My mom is curled up on the couch on Christmas Day. The house is warm from the oven but she's clutching a blanket anyway, crying as the credits roll on The Family Stone. She turns to me on the floor with my book, stars in her eyes. "Will you miss me even after I die, someday?"

It is a morbid question to ask an eleven year old, but there was a force to Diane Keaton's impossible humanity that demanded the immediacy of her answer. Of course I'd miss my mom — my best friend, the funniest woman I've ever met, a woman of infinite contradictions and an enormous capacity for love and sadness and hope. Just like Diane Keaton, laughing her way through Something's Gotta Give and Because I Said So on the television, or later in my life, with the striking look on her face in Marvin's Room, or The Godfather, eyes full of stars herself in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Crimes of the Heart, the smile back with Father of the Bride, bending again towards Annie Hall, despite everything around it.

That same question became something of a tradition during the holidays, when the camera inevitably pans to the picture of Sybil by the Christmas tree. "Will you miss me when I die?" Of course we'd miss our mom, who'd spent the day cooking, who'd rearranged her entire life to be a mother despite working full time. A woman who gave everything she had to her kids and her career, a woman who sat still just once a year to watch her favorite movie with her favorite actress. She'd burst into tears and then brush them off. I'd spring up from the floor to get her more coffee, hoping to smooth over the moment so we didn't have to think about mortality much longer.

The lights at Christmastime stretch the shadows of that mortality quite long across a family, and Keaton embodies the contradictory fragility and strength of my mother. She is, forever, a mirror reflected back at the both of us.

Following the news that Diane Keaton had passed away over the weekend, at the age of 79, my mother was the first person to text me. I almost couldn't respond, overwhelmed as I was by the passing of time and Diane Keaton's mortality , my mother's mortality. Our relationship has become strained as I've grown older. I'm more stubborn than the child on the floor, waiting for my mom to ask the question each Christmas, desperate to smooth over the jagged edges of our relationship with a cup of coffee. I've become the politically agitated daughter striking against her politically incongruent parents whose appearance at the holidays is a surprise, not an promise.

Still my mother waits for me by the phone despite my bruises and boundaries. At last, I text her back halfway through The First Wives Club.

I cannot write about Diane Keaton without writing about my mom because Diane Keaton is my mom — heartsick and raw, unflinching in her humanity, contradictory and at times infuriating. My own mother gave her entire life over to her children and would do it all again. When I underwent what is colloquially known as "bottom surgery" and was hospitalized for eight days, she refused to call me. My mother still evades questions and conversations about it in our fragmented correspondences, 12 years into transition.

Diane Keaton was among the most prolific and influential American actresses in history, exposed to so much humanity and history in Hollywood and across the world. In her final years, though, she stood by Woody Allen, despite the seemingly irrefutable evidence against him.

I do not mean to conflate, but I have grappled with these contradictions in the days following news of her death. She is the woman whose work I am perhaps most acquainted with; she is the woman whose choices I cannot stand for. How does one love another through the betrayal? Keaton is an actress on the television, removed enough that the stakes of the answer become almost irrelevant. For my mother though, I feel those stakes closer than ever.

The brilliance of Keaton's humanity onscreen is in that aforementioned fragility — it is easily broken, easily repaired. She held this spark of life that roared into flame with age, never diminished. The wide eyed look that changed the course of American filmmaking in Annie Hall grew only wider, brighter. She played hopeless romantics and lovesick and heartbroken and contradictory women in their twenties and in their sixties.

In her later films, I still see the young girl that became Hollywood's leading comedic ingenue. In her later films, I see my mother, and in my mother's face now, I see the young 20-something with multiple kids and her whole life ahead of her. I see the teenager and the young woman and the middle-aged mother still trying to figure it all out. I see myself, a mirror reflecting back at me through time.

Diane Keaton is going to live forever. My mother is going to live forever, too. Of course I will miss her when she's gone, but while I have her, I should probably call her and tell her that.

Images via Getty