My mother died last October, on Friday the 13th. I put off buying my ticket for the dedication because it meant the anniversary was close. Now it’s close enough that the seasonal signposts are telling me it’s almost here. The Halloween decorations around the neighborhood remind me of a walk we took looking at them with the kid on her last visit. The butterfly bush in the yard of the house we had just moved into is blooming and attracting the fake monarchs like it was on that visit. Even the silly signs for ComicCon remind me of the storm troopers that came by the pizza place where we ate what may have been the last restaurant meal we shared. And even the hellacious news cycle: trying and then failing to avoid the Kavanaugh hearings I’m reminded of when I logged on to my social feeds after being away for the funeral and saw, for the first time, a ripple of two-word posts from friend after friend whispering #metoo, mixing my private grief with private and public pain.
When my mother and I disagreed about politics it was mostly a matter of temperament: her liberalism was born of her desire to believe the best of those in positions she was raised to respect, especially academics and scientists. She saw my more radical distrust of institutions as a kind of cynicism, I think. I think of how hard she tried to follow the rules, how she would have liked to have been a scientist or a lawyer and likely would have if she had been born a little later, and how much she revered the well-educated, and the spectacle of the assholes who are running things is that much harder to take. As a radical I think there’s something illuminating and potentially useful about the emperor’s new clothes moment we are in; as a daughter, it’s breaking my heart.
The joyful milestones, too, are tied up with the anniversary: the baby who was born six weeks after her death seems to have arrived yesterday, and seems to have always been here. Since October 13th has been forever and less than a day. I told a friend recently I feel like grieving is another item on my to-do list I’ve been avoiding. I haven’t read the books everyone suggests. But as Grace Paley once wrote, it’s possible to write about anything but ” the slightest story ought to contain the facts of money and blood in order to be interesting to adults. . . blood — the way people live as families or outside families or in the creation of family, sisters, sons, fathers, the bloody ties. Trivial work ignores these two facts.” In other words, you don’t have to go looking for mothers, whether in your writing or in your life: like death and money, they are everywhere in any conversation worth having.
In my fiction writing classes we start by reading “Borges and I” and talking and writing about our names: who we were named for, different names we have been called, if we feel like our names describe us. It’s a good way to get students engaged and a good trick for me to learn their names.
My mom loved talking about names. She didn’t love Abby – she thought it made her sound older, of her mother’s generation. She noticed when it came back as a baby name and she started to hear it in grocery stores. She tracked my older son’s name on the Social Security site to see if it was coming back. I never called her “Abby” or anything but mom but now that seems like the right name to call her. Abby, your new grandchild is named Abraham, for you. Eli is at a new school he loved where the principal is named Abbe, with an E. You would have found that variation interesting. The butterfly bush is blooming. We’ve fixed up the house. Abby, I don’t believe the world is as good as you thought it was and I am wavering in my belief in how it can mend and what role I can play in the mending, but on this October 13th I may go to synagogue or I may take Eli to karate and I will go to the school fair in the park and I will take some pictures of Abe I will think I should send to you before I remember.