‘Tell Me a Story About Her’
To write about someone, to make them come alive on the page, requires a deep, active form of remembering. You cannot look away in order to protect yourself.
My mom died two years ago this month, a week after Mother’s Day. I am grateful whenever someone—usually a close friend, usually someone who has also experienced a life-changing loss—will say something like, Tell me a story about her. It’s a gracious, open-ended invitation, letting me know that whether I talk for one minute or 30, whether I share too much or just the rough outline of a recollection, they earnestly want to hear it. Sometimes, though, I find that I don’t know how to talk about her. Most of the people in my life didn’t know her well, and I often feel as though I’d need to explain so much before they could even begin to imagine her or understand who she was. I worry that I am about to burden someone with a long story for which they have no point of reference. I worry that I won’t do her justice.
If I have sometimes struggled to talk about her, for a long time after she died, I found it even harder to write about her. It would be wrong to say that I avoided it because I didn’t want to be reminded of my grief—I felt it with every breath I took; there was no need for reminders. Still, to write about a person you miss, to make them come alive on the page, requires a deep, active form of remembering. You cannot shy away from recalling their features, the timbre of their voice, their movements and gestures, the way they expressed love and anger and sorrow and self-doubt. You have to remember how they were, what they said to you, in their worst moments and their best. You cannot look away in order to protect yourself.
When my father died suddenly in January 2018, I was wrapping up revisions on a memoir about my adoption and my search for my birth family. I remember asking my editor if she thought my dad’s death should be part of the book—I didn’t feel ready to write about it yet, but was it dishonest, somehow, to leave it out? In the end, we couldn’t see a way to include it, as the publication timeline was moving too quickly. After the book came out and I went on the road to talk about it, I shifted from a state of private grief, at home, to a public-facing existence that required me to field questions about my family every day. Most readers did not know that my father was dead. Only several weeks into my tour did I realize that I kept referencing my parents, plural, in the present tense, as though he were still living—Yes, my parents have read my book. Yes, they’ve been very supportive. Perhaps I did this because I was not yet used to him being gone. But I think it was also because, in the book I had written, he was alive, and this was oddly comforting in a way I would not have expected.
Five months after my mother died, I found that I could write about her again. Her birthday was coming up—it would have been her 69th—so I started by writing about that, because some part of me wanted to. Just a few minutes, a few sentences at a time. This practice gave way to entire days, and eventually tens of thousands of words.
If you were here right now, sitting with me at my kitchen table, most likely I still wouldn’t find it easy to talk to you about her. But I know that I could write you a story.
I’m under no illusions about the limitations of my own perspective, or of the portrait I draw from it. I can do my utmost to ensure that my depiction is true, but I know it can represent only one truth, because I am one person, deciding where the light will fall and leaving many corners and aspects unexplored. Sometimes, too, I have to suppress a feeling of guilt, because my mother never thought of herself as a main character, the subject of a story—she didn’t even want an obituary.
But writing is and has always been how I explore, preserve, keep a hold of things that matter. I want to be sure to remember how she spoke; her often dark and filterless sense of humor; the way her deep anxiety somehow coexisted with the sure belief that my life would be secure and blessed; the fact that, no matter how little she had to spare, she preferred to give rather than receive. I want to recall how she looked in sickness and health. The things we sent to each other when we couldn’t visit. The last conversation we had.
At some point, as I grieved, the need to remember and hold on to all of this overrode my desire to protect myself. Sometimes the work of summoning her in such imprecise, imperfect language is still painful. I don’t find it especially cathartic or healing—that’s never been why I write. But that doesn’t mean there is no joy, no purpose, in it. My writing is now one more place where I encounter my mother. It keeps her face and her voice in my mind. It is how I share her with others and keep her memory alive. To write about her now is to spend a little more time with her, in one of the only ways left to me.