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When I first wrote about the end of my mother’s life, it didn’t feel like I had a choice in the matter. Writing was the only way I could make sense of the great awfulness of it all. Writing was the only way I could keep track of my thoughts from one day to the next, or chronicle the details of the recent time I’d spent with her knowing the memories would inevitably fade and new moments would not replace them. In the early days of losing her, I managed to see friends and family, to keep most of life’s basic needs and responsibilities met, but I don’t remember much of it. My memory of the first three months of her absence consists of filling one navy wide-ruled notebook day after day. It didn’t feel good to write; it just felt necessary. I’d write until something had been expelled from my pen that released a feeling or a thought that yearned for expression and a sense of relief would follow, one that allowed me to break for a time to eat or sleep or cry or watch seven consecutive episodes of The Wonder Years, all by myself, in the middle of the night. What can I say: grief is a weird process, and so is writing for that matter.
Writing about my mom felt downright lousy, but also quite selfish, and even a bit confessional given the traumatic circumstances of her death. Logically I knew that I was entitled to my point of view of her life, her sorrows, and her struggles with addiction and mental illness. But my mother was not around to confirm or deny my side of things, nor could she defend herself, and this brought on a deep sense of guilt about exposing her life for public view. As I sifted through my notebook, I would stop to collect relevant materials, medical bills, pictures, emails, evidence to back up my version of events, formulating a way to prove a case I was fighting in my head. I thought the defendant and judge were both some kind of mental projection of my mother’s spirit I’d invented, but instead, I was justifying the truth as I saw it against the scales of my conflicted conscience. It was scary enough to anger my mom when she was alive. It turned out that fear remained long after her death.
As uncomfortable as that feeling was, I wrote what I had to write and it didn’t feel like a choice. I did, however, have a choice in sharing her story with others. It felt risky, but at least it was a risk I had poured my whole heart into taking, using a skill she had fostered in me and loved about me. Even if the ghost of my mother disagreed with every word I wrote about her, if I produced a strong and meaningful piece of work, there was a chance that she might forgive me. Eventually.
I had no idea the number of people who would read and listen to her story, which turned out to be in the hundreds of thousands. Since my mom hasn’t communicated from the other side, sent a message or given me a sign, I’m not sure what she would say. What I have instead are the voices of people who’ve written me to share their own similar stories. Each note is different by varying degrees of length, emotion, and formality, but each one carries the same central message, thank you. Each person wanted me to know that my mother’s story helped them and meant something to them. I cherish these notes and I’ve kept every single one; they belong as much to my mother as they do to me. I respond to all of them, which is a great luxury of being a writer who is neither widely accomplished nor famous. I’m just a daughter who lost her mother in a traumatic way like so many others who have lost loved ones under painful circumstances.
Last week, on October 23, NPR aired an interview with Khizr Khan, whose son, an army captain, was killed while serving his country in the Iraq war. In the interview, Khan, who is quite famous and widely accomplished was asked how often he thinks about his son now that he is gone. His answer, as I was listening in my car, took my breath away. He told a brief story about his wife, Ghazala. He said:
“A similar question was asked of Ghazala, and this is what Ghazala said: ‘Why
do these people ask me that? ... I see him every day. I hear him every day. He
is here.’ ... We feel the presence of Captain Humayun Khan every
moment, every day.”
My mom hangs out now in my kitchen. She takes the form of a stained-glass angel I bought at an art fair I happened upon last Mother’s Day in the community garden across from where she lived. She loved to go there to walk and sit and read the paper. She dangles elegantly in a sun-filled window by delicate beads the color of her eyes. She is blue and she is beautiful. This angel is not a judge or jury. She’s a presence that stays with me, every moment, every day.
My mother was never able to write her own story, but her story wrote itself, and continues to receive letters of gratitude and condolence and healing and hope. It has been my honor to be the person, the medium, through which her life continues to bring meaning to others, whether she likes or not.
An excerpt from a reader’s letter that I go back and read often is this one:
“Thank you for your humor and your honesty. I'm writing this . . .
full of gratitude for the gray areas in life where nothing is wonderful,
nor horrible, but beautiful all the same . . . I'd like to think our mothers
will find peace in the next life they always searched so hard for
here on earth.”
