The spiral staircase of time

May 17 is my Dad’s birthday, so I’m remembering him today even though he’s dead. Earlier this week, while looking for postage stamps, I opened an old stationery box where I keep a random assortment of papers. In that box, I found a handful of pictures of me, my Dad, and both my parents: photos that are filed away as memories in my head, but that I hadn’t looked at in a while.

Grief is both cumulative and cyclic, not linear. One loss builds upon the next, so losing my Mom last December stirred the grief of losing my Dad in 2019. Instead of unspooling as a straight line where the more time that passes, the further away you move from the initial shock of loss, grief is like a spiral staircase. Today’s steps build upon earlier ones, and you circle through the same space again and again and again as you cycle up and down from one loss to another.

I am agnostic when it comes to the afterlife, so I cannot comfort myself with a foundational belief that my parents are together in Heaven. That’s a pretty thought–a story with metaphorical power–but I can’t say I literally believe it. Instead, I believe in the power of memory to keep loved ones alive. My parents may or may not be together in Heaven, but I know for a fact they are together in my heart and head, and in the memories I carry up and down the spiral staircase of time.

 

The mom you never had

Today is Mother’s Day–my first since my Mom died–and it’s a holiday that’s always been complicated.

Women face so much guilt and social pressure around motherhood. There is social pressure to have kids–I’ve felt this as a woman who chose not to–and a pervasive sense that whatever you do or choose, it will never be right.

You’re wrong if you have children and choose to continue working, and you’re wrong if you have children and stay at home. You’re wrong if you have children too soon or late in life, wrong if you have too many or too few children, and especially wrong if you choose not to have children at all. And of course, anything you do once you have kids is wrong: you’ll be blamed for being too stern or too lax, and you’ll be blamed for your children’s bad behavior or poor choices, no matter how old they are.

Years ago, my Mom told me that being a wife and mother means there’s always someone who hates you: your kids hate you when you’re too strict, and your husband hates you when you aren’t strict enough. No matter what you do, she said, someone will disapprove…and this bit of motherly truth gave me permission to choose my own child-free path. If someone is going to judge me no matter what I choose, why not do what I want?

Mother’s Day is complicated for children as well as moms: there are expectations for daughters, and I have unfinished business here. I have never regretted my decision not to have kids, but I continually regret not being there for my Mom as the Daughter Who Left. I sometimes tell colleagues that my Mom never forgave me for going to college, and what this means is I’ve never forgiven myself. I still regret not being more present during my Mom and Dad’s senior years, and I still regret not being there (because of work, geography, and other obligations) when each of them died.

Years ago when I was going through my divorce, I realized one of the things you grieve isn’t what you had in your marriage, but the things you wanted and never got. When you leave a marriage, you close the door on any possibility that your former spouse will ever give you the things you craved. You’re mourning the death of a dream as much as the loss of an actual reality.

In the months since my Mom died, I’m realizing the same kind of complicated grieving applies in this case, too. When your mother dies, you mourn the Mom you had–the flesh and blood person with all her quirks and characteristics–but you also mourn the Mom you never had, but wanted. Never on this side of the grave will your Mom give you the unlimited affection, attention, or approval you craved, and never on this side of the grave will succeed in being the perfect daughter.

They say a woman’s work is never done, and I’ll add that the relationship between mother and child is always unfinished, always imperfect, and always complicated. No matter what you do as a mother or child, someone will judge you for it, so try not to let that harsh critic be you.

 

Double-time

Tonight J and I are going to a library fundraiser featuring remarks by Drew Gilpin Faust and George Mumford. I always try to read the most recent books by the keynote authors at this event, so over the past few weeks I listened to audio versions of Faust’s Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury and Mumford’s Unlocked: Embrace Your Greatness, Find the Flow, Discover Success.

In order to finish both books by tonight’s event, I listened to them at double-speed: a trick I learned from one of my former students, who several years ago wrote a literacy narrative about listening to audiobooks at double- or even triple-speed as a way of accommodating his ADHD.

In my case, I don’t have a problem listening to books at normal speed…but given that I read faster than most people talk, speeding up an audiobook more accurately matches the speed at which I read. And when I’m in a hurry to finish a book, speeding up the audio is a no-brainer.

Whenever I start a new audiobook, I initially listen at normal speed in order to acclimate myself to the reader’s voice and mannerisms. Once I have the narrator’s voice and natural cadence in my head, I experiment with speeding up the audio: does 1.5x speed sound natural and brisk, but not hurried? What about 2x speed?

Once I find a speed that doesn’t sound too much like The Chipmunks, I listen at that speed until the almost-end of the book, when I return to regular speed, which subsequently seems ohhhhh… sooooo… slooooow.

 

Save a place for me

Last night, for the first time since my Mom died, I dreamed about both of my parents. We were watching the eclipse from the broad lawn outside a tall office building where I was employed, not either of the colleges where I work in real life.

As we were milling about, I ran into a neighbor and introduced him to a coworker who had the same name as his wife. My Mom and Dad mingled with the crowd of eclipse-watchers while I wandered off to look for crescent-shaped shadows on the sidewalks beneath a small patch of ornamental trees.

After the eclipse ended, my Mom, Dad, and I decided to walk to a nearby restaurant for an early dinner. I got a text saying either my Mom or Dad and I had to sign some important financial paperwork at CVS (?), but we figured we’d do it the next day since they’d probably be closed by the time we got there.

On the way to the restaurant, I got separated from my parents in the crowd of people leaving after the eclipse. Arriving at the restaurant alone, I found it packed with people, and my parents were nowhere to be found.

I claimed a table by the entrance to the restaurant and sat waiting, wondering if my Mom and Dad had gone to sign the paperwork without me. After spending almost an hour searching the faces of every customer entering or exiting the restaurant, I stood to leave.

As I gathered my things, I saw Mom and Dad sitting in a booth at the rear of the restaurant I hadn’t seen when I’d arrived. Before them were the empty plates of their finished meals, and at the end of the table was the untouched burger and fries they’d ordered for me.

 

Something more than money

This morning my sisters and I spent some time texting back and forth. My sister in Ohio was going through some jewelry she’d taken from my Mom’s house before it sold–costume jewelry, not anything valuable–and she wanted to know if my sister and I wanted anything from the lot.

My sister in Floria claimed several pearl necklaces she remembered Mom wearing; I claimed a sunflower pin I think had originally been mine and a blue flowered pendant that might go with one of the dresses I wear. The rest will go to Goodwill along with so much of the rest of my Mom’s stuff.

This process of sorting through and divvying up my Mom’s things has been interesting because it points to the different ways people value things. None of the belongings in my Mom’s house are valuable in a monetary sense, but there are other kinds of value my sisters and I find in these objects.

My sister in Ohio, for example, recently mailed me the original real estate listing, buyer’s agreement, and mortgage from when my parents bought the house we just sold. These pieces of 45-year-old paperwork have no monetary value, but having them means something to me because they capture a moment when my parents were in their prime, moving from one house to a nicer one while expanding the number of rental units they managed. It was a moment of upward mobility, and I have the papers to prove it.

Another piece of paperwork my sister set aside for me is my Dad’s old Teamster union card and dues booklet. These, again, have no monetary value: my Dad retired years before he died, and any other person would have tossed these items long ago. But my Dad had kept both, so they, too, have sentimental value to me. They remind me of my Dad’s decades of back-breaking work as a truck driver: a working class job that enabled him to support my Mom, sisters, and me.

On paper, these pieces of paper are worthless. But in my hands and heart, they are tangible artifacts of my parents that mean something more than money.

 

Shook

Yesterday was memorable on two counts. Yesterday morning, one of my sisters signed the paperwork on the sale of our Mom’s house, acting as power-of-attorney for me, my other sister, and both our spouses (in observance of Ohio’s archaic dower laws). At approximately 9:30 am, my sister texted to say the closing was done, so Mom and Dad’s old house–the house I’d grown up in–was officially sold.

Then, almost exactly an hour later as I sat writing, everything on my desk shook. I shrugged, figuring it was just a leftover gust of wind from this week’s nor’easter, until J emailed from the attic asking if I’d felt the tremor that had set the shelves in his office swaying.

A home closing and an East coast earthquake seem like disparate events, but as a writer–as a person perpetually prone to find meaning in things–I agree with Freud when he said there are no accidents. Selling my Mom’s house was a huge, earth-rattling milestone. In December, my Mom was freed from her body like a bird flown from a cage, and yesterday, just shy of four months after death, my sisters and I sold her coop.

My immediate reaction to the real estate closing was relief: it’s been a great worry to share ownership of a vacant house several states away. Every moment my Mom’s house stood empty, it was a financial liability I wanted to shake off. My immediate reaction to the earthquake, on the other hand, was mild bemusement. J and I felt an earthquake here at home in 2012, and before that, I’d felt quakes in Ohio, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. The realization that the earth sometimes stirs and shifts underfoot isn’t exactly new.

Still, these coupled events seem symbolically linked. Sometime last night, I startled awake with a sudden realization that I’m homeless now. Obviously, this isn’t true, as I was sleeping in the house J and I own, but lying on the foggy edge of sleep, I felt unsettled and rootless, as if the earth had been torn from beneath me like a tablecloth snatched from a table.

For four months, I’ve been processing the realization that I no longer have parents; as Taylor Swift would say, “You’re on your own, kid.” Last night, I started to process the reality of having no parents and no more childhood home. They say you can’t go home again, and as of 9:30 yesterday morning, that is literally true.

Losing a parent, closing on one’s childhood home, and experiencing an earthquake have this in common: in each case, something you assumed to be stable, ever-present, and rock solid proves to be anything but. In the immediate aftermath of such upheaval, it’s natural to feel a little shook.

 

This is me trying

This morning when I woke up, my first thought was to check on Yanny…until I remembered there is no longer any Yanny to check on. Yesterday after J and I got home from putting Yanny down, I put away his special litter box, the pee pads and extra cleaning supplies I’d stashed in the dining room, and his medication and special food. This morning, I had to rework my morning routine now that “Feed Yanny” is no longer an item on my to-do list.

Yanny was diagnosed in late December, right after I returned from the weekend I spent in Ohio trying to make a dent in the houseful of stuff my Mom had spent a lifetime accumulating. This weekend’s almost simultaneous (pending) sale of my Mom’s house and Yanny’s passing mark the end of three months of helpless waiting.

Since December, I’ve helplessly waited while Yanny progressed through the gradual end of his life. During that same time, I sat helpless here in Massachusetts while my sisters continued and ultimately finished the monumental work of clearing out and fixing up my Mom’s house before it could go on the market.

This morning, now that I’ve started to let go of the worry of the past three months, I’m starting to realize how much psychological weight I’ve been carrying. When I was in Ohio, it felt good to have actual work to do, with a feeling of accomplishment coming with each bag filled with things to toss or donate. Likewise, there was a feeling of relief–a sense I was doing something–every time Yanny walked into the kitchen and I set a fresh bowl of food before him. The cat might have been dying, but by God, he wasn’t going to die of hunger–not on my watch.

These past three months–this entire calendar year, and all of the current semester so far–I’ve felt divided and disjointed, working and checking off to-do’s here while being unable to help with the work going on there. No matter how many tasks I crossed off my list, there was always the guilt and (yes) grief for the work I wasn’t able to do: the life I couldn’t save, and the house I couldn’t clear.

Several weekends ago, J and I re-watched Taylor Swift’s Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, and I was struck by the conversation between Swift and collaborator Jack Antonoff about the song “This Is Me Trying,” which describes the huge amount of energy it sometimes takes to fail. These past three months, “this is me trying” has felt like my life motto. I did all I could to help with my Mom’s house and to keep Yanny alive. It never would have been–it never could have been–enough, but it will have to do. These past three months, all I’ve done is try.

 

The house on Weyant Avenue

Yesterday, my sisters and I accepted an offer for my parents’ duplex on Weyant Avenue in Columbus, Ohio, and last night, I couldn’t sleep. Instead of resting in the relief that this Big Task of estate resolution is almost over, the stress of the past few months started to seep from the mental lockbox where I’ve been compartmentalizing it.

My parents bought their home on Weyant Avenue when I was just under eleven years old. My parents wanted to expand their rental investments, and my Mom fell in love with the home’s sunken living room, stone fireplace, and wrought-iron railing along the hallway leading to the three bedrooms.

My Mom cried when we moved out of our old house, even though it was directly across the alley from our new one. The old house, she explained, was where she’d raised her babies. That house was the last place where I lived with my sisters–a full house of daughters–but the house on Weyant is where I grew up. It is the house where I lived alone with my parents as an afterthought-child long after my sisters had left the nest.

While my Mom had fallen in love with the house on Weyant’s living room, I fell in love with the rear bedroom, which had a built-in desk and bookcase. That room was my sanctuary during my moody teenage years, when I’d spend hours holed away with nothing more than my stacks of library books, model horses, and stereo.

Although my parents initially rented out the house on Weyant’s basement apartment, they eventually re-claimed that space, my Mom using the bedroom for off-season clothes and the livingroom for her “store” of soap, shampoo, cleaning supplies, and other miscellaneous goods she bought for pennies during her heyday as a Coupon Queen, then gave away for free to anyone who visited or had any sort of need. When I visited my parents as an adult, I’d stay in that basement apartment, which served as my home just downstairs from my parents’ home.

Like Gollum with his Precious, my Mom clung to the house on Weyant after my Dad died. She had no need for three bedrooms and a spare apartment, but her home was where both her heart and her accumulated stuff were. Before he died, my Dad accurately predicted my Mom would refuse to downsize and move into a condo or assisted living facility. “Your Mom will die in that house,” he predicted, knowing better than anyone how fiercely independent (read: stubborn) she was.

Cleaning out decades of accumulated stuff was a Herculean task, accomplished mostly by my sisters. After I spent a weekend in mid-December merely scratching the surface of my Mom’s stuff, I said my goodbyes to the house I once lived in, knowing my sisters would be the ones to clear and list it.

When the house on Weyant went on the market Thursday morning, I looked at the listing photos in amazement, marveling at how huge and empty it looked. My Mom’s death in December was a relief, but I spent several sleepless nights while the tightly wound spring of grief gradually released. Last night as I lay awake, I felt a similar sensation. The house on Weyant sold quickly, but it will take a while before I (like my Mom) can let go of my clinging.

 

Bet

This is an unpopular opinion, but I don’t get the whole sports betting thing. My entire work life is about making money: how can I monetize my skills and knowledge to keep myself fed? I enjoy watching sports because it is an escape from the rest of my productive and profitable life. Why would I ruin my sports-watching experience by turning it into yet another money-making venture?

This weekend, J and I listened to a store clerk describe his sport betting strategies. He had just installed a betting app the night before to bet on March Madness games, and already he had devised an intricate strategy for crafting a $5 bet that was so far against the odds, he would get a massive payout in the astronomically unlikely event his multi-game parlay actually won.

I quickly grew bored with this random stranger’s overview of how he was trying to game the system by betting on teams that were almost certain to lose and scoring scenarios that would probably never happen. As a sports-betting newbie, however, he was optimistic about his chances, not yet having learned that the house always wins.

***

In my first-year classes at both Framingham State and Babson, we start with five minutes of freewriting. Students are free to write about whatever they’d like, but I post three random words to give students a nudge if they have nothing else to write about.

Today’s post comes from yesterday’s five-minute entry in response to the word “Bet.”

 

Excuse

Ages ago when I was a graduate student at Northeastern, a professor started the last session of our PhD seminar by saying “Tonight some of you will give me a paper, and the rest of you will give me a story.” He accentuated the word story as if it were the most magical thing in the world, not just a synonym for “excuse.”

Excuses are the stories we tell ourselves (and sometimes our bosses, teachers, spouses, or parents) about why we didn’t meet a goal or keep a promise. I wasn’t able to do X, we explain, because Y happened.

Whenever a student comes to class with a cast on their leg or their arm in a sling, I ask, “Is there a good story behind that?” Typically, the explanation for the injury is entirely mundane: the student fell down the stairs or got injured playing sports. I always want to urge the student to come up with a better, more interesting excuse.

***

In my first-year classes at both Framingham State and Babson, we start with five minutes of freewriting. Students are free to write about whatever they’d like, but I post three random words to give students a nudge if they have nothing else to write about.

Today’s post comes from today’s five-minute entry in response to the word “Excuse.”