by Laura June
My mother’s boyfriend had said when my mother died that she had, at some point during her last year of living, sat down and written letters to each of us, her four kids. What on earth these letters could possibly say was a mystery. I envisioned, as we drove a small box truck to her apartment in anticipation of taking away whatever we were going to take with us, finding diaries, notebooks, papers stacked in the attic. I envisioned finding a letter addressed to me that might, somehow, unlock the mystery of who my mother was to me. Who she was beyond being the mother I had known and loved and fought with.
I imagined carting away notebooks and reading them, finding out the secrets of her life the way that anyone who dared dig among my own stash would discover the best and worst thoughts I’ve had in my years on this planet. The mundane observations, the lists of books I am reading, the to-do lists and the homework assignments—I’ve saved all of it. My father is a dedicated shredder of documents and paper. I am a pack rat. I thought my mother was more like me, so as I got closer to her home, I allowed myself to fantasize that I might find something of value, something that would help me make sense of everything.
But there was nothing. No letters, no diaries. I got her handwritten recipes, her address book from the 1980s, and a few scraps of things her kids had made her. I found a few pieces of paper that I walked away with as though they were gold simply because they had her distinctive, terrifically neat cursive handwriting on them. The cursive that she taught me, painstakingly, the year before I went to first grade.
My mother’s secrets, if she had them, were never written down.
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Every so often, I sit down at my desk, take out stationery, and write Zelda a letter. Sometimes, it’s just a little “What’s up, how are you?” Sometimes, I document new words or skills she has learned. Sometimes, I tell her things I would never say aloud. That I’m having a hard day. That I cried for no reason I could figure out. That I didn’t want to get out of bed. I tell her these things in handwritten letters in the hope that she will want to read them. Even if she waits until she is fifty years old, I hope that someday these little missives have value for her.
I mail the letters from our house back to our house, so that they have postmarks, so that I can keep them in order in the shoebox I store them in. I do this partly because it appeals to me, partly because I want her to know how much I love her every step of the way, and partly because I wanted so much to have something written, something direct, something specific, from my own mother. I think this was part of the reason I began writing about her. I would have given almost anything to have insight into my own mother, to have known what she thought about me, but also more than me. To know anything and everything.
Someday, I hope Zelda knows that the many thousands of ways I have exposed her person in my writing was all because she gave me the power, if not the permission, to do so. She made me, to a great extent, the writer and person that I am. I am thankful for that, and I hope that she is never too embarrassed of me for it. But I also want Zelda to know that my mother, her grandmother, made all this possible, too.
I am realistic about all of this. I know that where I am disappointed at how little my mother left me in writing, my own daughter is likely to be disappointed, or to not care about, how much I am giving to her. But she is her own person; she’ll figure it out.
CHAPTER 19
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On a Thursday at the end of January in 2007, at around 3:00 in the afternoon, I stood on the 7 train in my bulky wool winter coat. I’d been living in New York for less than a year by then, and it had been the happiest under-a-year of my adult life. I had a job that paid me well for not very much work. I loved my apartment. I was writing music again; I was thinking about going back to school. I’d left Pittsburgh in a rush, having just earned a master’s degree but without having made any plans for what was next. After almost a year in a new place, I was finally thinking about what was next. The letter I had written to my mother had been weighing on me since I sent it, but most days my worries about it were momentary. I had had what I thought were good intentions in sending it, and it had done one—but only one—of the things I had hoped that it might, closing off a chapter for me. I felt as though I were moving on from my mother and that after years of avoiding her, I was now simply living without her.
Josh and I had been engaged for two months, and the engagement ring, as I stood there on the subway, still burned my finger a little bit, a constant presence that wasn’t quite at home on my body yet. The subway was almost empty. It was not yet rush hour, and I think the city was still sleepy from the holidays that had recently ended.
I worked as an assistant to an executive at a commercial real estate firm. It was, as my coworker Maranda said, “the kind of job that is temporary forever.” In fact, I had taken the job as a temp staffer through a temp firm. Probably half the admins at the company were temps, people who were paid fairly well—I think I made $20 an hour, which seemed like an enormous amount of money to me at the time—to have asses in seats. We answered phones; we managed calendars and wrote emails. Through the staffing agency, I wandered from job to job, most of them in Midtown, some on Wall Street. They were always admin or front desk jobs, usually lasting a week or a month. I was offered a full-time position within about a month of starting at the real estate place. I accepted because Josh, who was still producing music with his brother in the studio in our apartment building, didn’t have a steady income and because our rent was cheap enough that this salary would mean we were more well off than I’d ever been.
I’d probably been working there for five months on that day in January when my brother Daniel called me. He called my cell phone, which was a Samsung flip phone I still have. This was well before the phone was glued to me at all times, and so I missed his first call, away from my desk for a coffee break with Maranda. I came back to my desk to a vibrating phone.
And here’s where my fantastic memory fails me. I don’t remember what my brother said to me. I remember, awkwardly, only that for the few minutes that the conversation went on, I was acutely aware of my surroundings. Jackie to my left, Maranda and Casey on my right, chattering away about something I couldn’t make out. The artificial light seemed very harsh suddenly as I struggled to grasp the gist of what he was saying. Daniel never called me. I knew before I picked up that something was wrong.
The gist of what he said was this: come home, come quickly, something happened to Mom, and there isn’t much time.
I didn’t ask for details. I said okay and hung up the phone. I stood up and walked down the hall to the office of the HR manager. I told her I needed to leave, that something was wrong with my mother, and that I would let her know in the morning when I would be back.
I went back to my desk. I told Maranda and Jackie, who flocked around me. I think I said, “My mother is dying.” I don’t remember that either. I remember the shoes I was wearing. The skirt. I put on my coat and went into the bathroom and started to cry. I stopped myself. I left the bathroom and the building, stopping outside to smoke a cigarette before walking the few blocks up to Forty-Second Street, where I got the train.
As I stood there on the subway trying to get home to tell Josh that my mother was dying with my earbuds in my ears, pretending to listen to music but in reality listening to the train’s mechanical hum, my eyes met the eyes of a stranger standing directly across from me. I realized then that I was visibly crying, tears just streaming down my face. I didn’t typically cry in public. But I didn’t care at all.
“Are you okay?” a kind-faced, chubby, middle-aged man standing across from me mouthed to me. I know he didn’t say the words out loud because my iPod wasn’t playing any music.
“No,” I said, and as the word came out, so did a sort of low howl. It was the kind of sob I have only heard once or twice in my life. When I was in eighth grade, my grandfather died after being diagn
osed with cancer just two months earlier. My father cried like that then. It sounded, I think in hindsight, like an animal dying. I didn’t care. I continued to cry, and the man nodded at me as I got off at the next stop in Long Island City, left to walk alone across the Pulaski Bridge back home in silence.
I am ashamed, somehow, to remember that I considered not going anywhere; I considered staying home. My instinct told me to hunker down, to stay in New York where I was safe. I did not want to go back to Pittsburgh to face my dying mother.
“We have to go right now,” Josh said. He wanted details. He wanted information I didn’t have.
“What happened?” he probed me. I didn’t know. I didn’t want to ask too many questions. I didn’t want to know. Was it not enough to know that she was in a coma? That she was on life support?
But we left an hour later, packing up my dog and some clothes. I remember packing clothes that I thought would be funeral appropriate, gray wool pants and a sweater. I smoked a cigarette out the window. I packed my journal. I didn’t know that I wouldn’t be able to write in it for the next two months.
And so a long, coffee-fueled car ride during which Josh and I did nothing but talk carried us back to Pittsburgh. I rambled on and on, telling him about my mother. It seemed so important suddenly, now that I realized he would probably never meet her. We got to his parents’ house at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and collapsed for a few hours before heading to the hospital where my mother was. To her boyfriend, who couldn’t speak, and to my two brothers (David wasn’t there yet), my uncle, and my grandmother.
My mother’s death certificate says that she died of liver failure. Though I know that when I arrived at the hospital I saw her before I saw the doctor who was treating her, I remember the doctor at the hospital better. He explained, and made a small, very bad drawing to go along with his explanation, that my mother’s liver had stopped working. She had a coughing fit in her living room, spit up blood, and her heart stopped. Her boyfriend called 911. She was resuscitated. I don’t know how long her heart was stopped. The doctor gave us no reason to hope that she was going to live. She couldn’t breathe on her own. She wouldn’t wake up. Her brain was damaged. Her organs were done for. It took me several minutes of listening to his explanation to realize that he was asking us—someone—to make a choice. The question of who exactly was her next of kin mattered greatly, all of a sudden.
We passed that day together. We sat there staring at her, sitting with her. I remember that, when my grandfather died back in 1989 when I was twelve years old, we spent what seemed like days pent up in the funeral home before the funeral actually happened, in a small stuffy room with his body. At one point, my three brothers, our two cousins, and I went outside and ran around the parking lot as though we were animals that had been set free from the zoo. I remember thinking then how out of joint time was: it was a weekday, I should be in school, but there I was, in a sad, other zone. A zone that mattered very much, where emotions, usually hidden, were on display. Where men cried and people let go of old grudges. Though I was an adult now, standing there staring at my not-very-old mother, rather than a middle schooler, I immediately got the same cooped-up, jittery feeling.
I hadn’t seen my mother in two years or longer. The fact that I did not and do not remember the last time I saw her bothered me enough that I did not focus on it then, when I was seeing her. “What could it possibly matter now?” I thought.
Seeing someone in limbo is hard, especially if you haven’t seen them in a long time. One tries—well, I did, anyway—to distinguish what parts of her looked different because she was dying and what parts because she had changed and aged since I’d last seen her.
And she had aged. I thought then, I think now, of Yossarian, in Catch-22: “Well, he died. You don’t get any older than that.” She looked as old as she was going to get. Ashen and colorless, bloodless.
The living want to live, and I felt acutely aware that my mother was in limbo: she wasn’t going to live, but she wasn’t dead yet. It felt wrong to leave her so that I could get coffee or a snack, and yet I desperately wanted diversion. I wanted to not be in that busy giant room in an ICU where other people were dying too, where the lights were always low because almost nobody there was ever going home. I wanted to run around in the parking lot.
That night, we went back to Josh’s parents’ house. I sat in the kitchen and talked to his mother, who, though she didn’t know me well yet, was going to have something in common with me soon: she’d lost her mother when she was a young woman, too.
My mother was good at many things. She was always good in the crises that families inevitably go through. I felt acutely then the lack of her presence. No one really knew what to do. The fact that we all so desperately needed my mother when it was my mother who was dying is a true testament to the kind of family we were without her still. I called my father and talked to him for hours, more about the past than what to do in the present. The divorce had meant that, to a great extent, my brothers and I had to be the adults we were. My father didn’t make decisions for my mother anymore, and I resented not him but the world, for a minute, for making it clear that as her only daughter, it was probably going to fall to me.
That’s not accurate in any way, and I know it. But that was how it felt. It felt in those hours and days as if there was a spotlight shined directly at me and as if I was surrounded by hurt, defenseless people who needed my strength. Was this how my mother, the Decision Maker, had felt for years, surrounded by her family?
My grandmother was old and alone. Never mentally stable, she had sunken into a blackness I have never seen before. Because Josh had never met her or my mother previously, I still shudder to think that this was his first encounter with my mother’s family. Peg replayed, in narratives we had all heard so many times before, the deaths of my grandfather and her brothers and sisters. Her father. She said at one point, “I’d have been just as happy if I’d never had kids.” I had to witness my family through the eyes of someone else—Josh—who had to experience them at their worst, not their best.
My mother’s partner of the past decade was a quiet and gentle person whom I did not know very well. I had, however, assumed the worst of him: Who could, after all, live happily with someone so clearly sick, so often not herself? So reduced from what I had known of her at her best? I felt at first puzzled by, then a deep respect and growing awareness for, his feelings for her. He was clearly devastated. It seemed he didn’t view her as the broken and lost cause that I had for so long. I was overwhelmed with gratitude and with happiness to know that she was loved as she was, not as if she was some reduced version of herself. I couldn’t accept her. But it made me happy that someone else could.
The next morning, I awoke clear on my purpose. Though I had quickly accepted the reality of the situation and had no doubt that my mother was done for, Josh convinced me that the smartest thing was to seek the opinion of a second doctor. There was some talk of what ifs, and though I don’t think he intended to give me any false hopes, for a brief hour I imagined a scenario in which she recovered. Where she needed rehabilitation or twenty-four-hour care. Where she was different than she used to be. Where she didn’t drink anymore, like my great-uncle, whose life was changed in a moment when he had a stroke. Maybe her old habits had died with this event. Maybe there was a chance.
I dressed myself and had coffee at 5:00 in the morning, sitting alone in the kitchen of my future husband’s parents’ home. A place that was happy for me. A place where I loved and felt safe. I knew that whatever was ahead of me, the day would be very long and very sad. I didn’t feel like running through the parking lot anymore.
The second opinion came fast and hard; our hopes, such as they were, were tamped down quickly. The staff at the hospital must have been used to eleventh-hour delusions such as these, but in fairness to ourselves, asserting our needs and asks at that moment changed everything that happened thereafter. No
w, it was clear: we were the ones to decide.
And that decision needed to be made. My mother had not made any arrangements for herself. This was not a surprise on any level: she had no savings, owned no real estate. She had nothing so valuable as to require insurance. So it made sense, of course, that she hadn’t left any instructions about what we should do if she died. She was fifty-two years old.
My mother died within two hours of being removed from life support, which occurred after all of us agreed that we were ready to let that life take its course. There was not really any dissent, though her partner had a harder time accepting that this was really the end of her life. I admired his ability to hope in the circumstances. I felt jealous of his closeness to her in the final days of her life. I felt scared to ask about what had happened two days earlier.
She died on a Sunday evening. It was cold, and the trees were bare. The worst time of year in Pennsylvania. I told myself I’d be back in New York three days later. Then I would have time to face what had happened. Now I needed to plan. To make arrangements. To write an obituary.
At some point several hours before my mother died, a woman came to us and talked over what would happen to my mother’s body when she died. She asked if we had a funeral home in mind; we did. She asked if we had known our mother’s wishes regarding organ donation. I think I laughed aloud.
“I mean,” I faltered, “is that an option for her? Is there anything worth donating?” I looked around me. Everyone understood what I meant: surely this body she was about to dispose of was useless to others, so recklessly had she abused it in the past years.
