…In coming to know Soph, I also came to know her mother. Here was her mother’s favorite cocktail bar, her favorite French bistro, her childhood neighborhood. Not only did Soph know New York at least as well as I did, but she knew it through her mother’s eyes. I envied the way she casually slotted her mother into everyday conversation, including and honoring her, as if it cost nothing.
“It’s different,” I said. “Your mom was sick.”
“Your mom is also sick though,” she told me.
I wondered what it would be like to honor my mother in the same way: to honor her with the kind of absolution we usually reserve for the dead. To mourn not who she had become but who she had once been — and not worry whether it was a grace she deserved.
And so I did exactly that: I tried to relearn how to talk about my mother. How to say that she was a professional chef by trade who had served powerful people in cities all over the country, including New York. That simultaneously she had been the kind of mother who paid her taxes, blanched her broccoli with good kosher salt, texted Bitmojis that said, “I’m So Proud of U!”
I started pointing out things that reminded me of her. Work clogs worn with dresses. Joan Osborne and Joni Mitchell. Any storefront that used to be a Dean & Deluca. I wished I knew even more — like where, so many years ago, our mothers could have passed each other on the street…
It was only then, as things go, that out in Arizona my mother entered the hospital for late-stage liver disease. First the doctors guessed she had two or three years. This became a month. I booked a flight for a week out. And then finally, as I took the subway to Queens to meet Soph’s grandmother, it became days…
The next day, I flew to Tucson. By the time my plane touched down, after two layovers, my mother was unconscious. I haven’t decided if this was her version of grace. I still don’t know what I would have said, besides “I love you” and “I forgive you” and “Why don’t I know your favorite cafe downtown? Why won’t I ever know?”
I have no choice but to believe this was enough.
Like love, there is not much to say about death that hasn’t been said before. It is often a lot of waiting around. I gathered with aunts and uncles and siblings as my mother lay in hospice. We discussed whether we liked the eggplant curry we had ordered better than the chicken. We played board games and listened to my mother’s breathing, quieting to hear it slow. Ultimately, we lost her too.
Lately, when I am asked how I’m doing (in that particular limp tone that we use for terrible things), I try on grief truisms like old jeans. I say I am fine — and also cut open. I am Little Red Riding Hood lost in the woods.
In my best moments, though, I am learning to use these questions to continue the work I started, which is to say: I use them to talk about my mother. I attempt past tense. She was beautiful and successful and sparkly. She took her chardonnay with ice.
At the end of each day, on the phone with my girlfriend 14 hours in the future, I ask her questions.
“Did you know — ?” I ask with urgency, about the smell of death, about old voicemail messages, about all matters of grief.
“Yes, I know,” she always says.
She says she likes the idea that someone only dies the last day someone says their name. I like this truism best of all.
She promises me that we have forever to master talking about it. I think we must spend forever trying.
