All that matters

When my mom died, people said about six million different awkward things to me. That's just a rough number. There were probably many more. Some of these things were awkward because people just don't know what to say when someone dies. Most of these things were awkward, however, because of an assumption.

Most everyone except my nearest and dearest assumed that I believed in god.

My mother was one of the most devout, yet one of the most wonderful, Catholics I've known. Usually you can't be good at being Catholic and also be wonderful. The misogyny gets in the way. But my mother had managed to find her way past that in her journey through elementary, middle, high school, and college in the Catholic education system. And she stuck with it. She made her living as a church musician. My childhood home was always vibrating with the strikes of her piano pedals, or the air passing through her glass flute, or her voice echoing off the ceiling fans. We had a family dog that would howl along. I would be upstairs in my room doing homework, reading, or practicing karate and it would be to the soundtrack of Catholicism. The sounds of a cathedral would mix with those of the garbage truck or sprinkler system outside, and suddenly my middle class suburban house was not the cookie cutter it appeared to be. We were a little bit strange.

I was raised in the church myself. As early as I can recall though, I remember going through the motions during Mass thinking, I better do this in case this heaven and hell stuff is real. But it never actually sunk in, I never actually believed it, it never resonated. And it became a real problem once I started doing theatre and made many gay and lesbian friends. I'd have shows Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday matinee, and then I'd go to Mass. And I'd know that everyone around me would be sickened by my friends. I know because they said so. That's how I knew, if you were wondering. It was no longer okay to pretend, to play along "just in case." Because not only did it offend me, but it didn't seem plausible. Sometime in early high school I was able to let go of the fear of it being real once I started reading philosophy and Greek mythology. I couldn't help but see that the early Greeks created stories to explain a world that left them scared and without explanation; what was the Bible, if not the same endeavor?

My mom didn't like that I left the church. But she accepted it. Afterall, she had encouraged reading and learning in our home. She had bought me the books that led me to my disavowal. She became downright supportive after a time. When I was in late high school I fell in love with Mandarin. I took several years of the language in school and while she hammered away on the piano downstairs, I was upstairs humming along while I practiced writing characters. This led her to suggest that I study Buddhism. I checked into it, but it was still too much for me.

Sometime my first year out of her house, at the age of 18, I picked up my first book by Christopher Hitchens. Nothing made as much sense to me as this book. His words led me to Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Julia Sweeney and these voices gave me the courage to call myself what I'd been all along: an atheist.

Like coming out in the gay community, this was a defining point. I was nervous and I was committed. I felt alive, yet squashed by the expectations around me.

These expectations were never more present than at my mother's funeral. People I did not know, people who had no reason to assume that they knew anything about me, assumed something huge: that I ordered my life in the same way they did, that I chose the same book they had to guide me through life, that I believed in a place vaguely assumed to be situated somewhere up north where my mother would now be. And if I were to correct them, somehow I looked like the asshole.

I have never attended a funeral and assumed the bereaved were atheists. "Well the good news is, she's not suffering anymore, and that she's just gone. She's not able to see you, or watch out for you, and you don't get to count on seeing her again when you die." I would never say that. Are you kidding me? But that is exactly what I believe. When my mother died, she died. I didn't have any lingering, nagging feeling that she might meet me when I die, and that I better work toward that as a goal. Whenever people said she was watching over me, I resisted the urge to say, "Like, all the time? Because there are definitely more intimate times I'd like her to not see." I like to think that I handled most of these moments with the grace my mother instilled in me, but when someone at my wedding, just four months after my mother passed away, said, "Oh, she's here. And she thinks you look beautiful," I called upon all of the acting lessons my mother had ever paid for and opened my eyes wide. "This is awkward," I started. "But maybe you didn't hear. My mom died about four months ago. She's not here." This of course sent the other party spinning, trying to explain that they knew, but that they meant she was looking down on me from heaven. Obviously. It's when you ask someone to explain something so fantastical, yet that they have thus far assumed to be known by everyone, that shit really gets strange. I recommend it as an amusing way to extricate yourself from conversations you no longer want to be a part of.

My point is, people really thought they were being comforting and helpful. Many people reminded me that they were praying for me. Most everyone, actually. These things only worked to further my stress and anxiety. Not only am I grieving, which for me meant that I was having to think very hard about how to stand up and and remember to shower and eat daily, but I also had to deal with either outing myself and being subjected to a lecture, or how to avoid the issue. But of course avoidance actually only meant that I was avoiding making the other person feel uncomfortable, while I was left listening to someone place upon me a set of rules and beliefs that I have never believed, and that have brought a lot of pain to people I love.

I never told my mother that I was an atheist. But one of the last times I went to visit her in my hometown, we talked religion over lunch. At this point in our relationship, she had watched me walk away from the church she loved, but had eventually said she understood my moral objections to their teachings. She had admitted that she had used birth control, and didn't understand the undue burden the Church placed on women. When I called her crying, telling her that I was getting divorced, and that I was sorry to disappoint her, she said "Well when the men in Rome have daughters in unhappy marriages, then they can tell me what's right and wrong."

And I shared that last part. In her eulogy. Standing next to the altar, across from the seated priest.

To me, that was my mother. Unequivocally tied to her past, to a faith that made her feel at home, yet able to see the trees for the forrest, to use one of her favorite expressions. She didn't like it, but understood my volunteer work at Planned Parenthood. She didn't like it, but she understood my divorce and only wanted me to be happy. And over that lunch the year before she died when we discussed religion, I said, "Do you really think those abortion clinic bombers are going to heaven just because they think that's what Jesus wants them to do? And that they believe in him?" She smiled, shook her head and said, "I don't. The cardiologist who saved my life is Muslim. And I believe he's getting in before those awful people." She looked at me with a knowing glance and simply said, "You're a good person. And that's all that matters to me."

Sunbeam Mixmaster

My mother inherited

an old stand mixer.

The kind

that swirls

and grinds

and blends

seemingly unrelated matter into

warm scones and soda bread.

It was not her mother's

but my father's mother's---

it was white and black and chrome

and, aged at least 40 years it would still groan

churning

turning

on yet another kitchen countertop.

It is some nonspecific day

in the specific 1940s

and there is a war

and there are ration cards

and there is not enough to eat

when there was already not enough to eat since the 1920s

(before they stopped roaring).

My father has a number pinned inside his clothes.

If the Germans

or the Japanese

or the Italians

invade, this number will help account for my father.

All children have a number.

It is eerily similar to children

in concentration camps.

But instead of wooden, flea-infested bunks

no food

no clothes,

my father sleeps on a cleaner bed---

not clean, but cleaner, as clean as can be managed---

behind blackout curtains

his stomach is mostly quiet

and he has clothes. But they are embarrassing.

His mother spends hours

throwing things into pots and pans

and the mixer

and hoping that whatever comes of the blend

will be enough to feed her family.

She is glad for potatoes and their heartiness.

The mixer also cradles seaweeds,

sent to her illegally from Ireland

so she might make some sort of living.

She makes toothpaste and other apothecary items.

She is the midwife in their small New Jersey Irish community.

Balms and candles

soothing women as they bring another being

to soothe and number

into this unreal world.

I often wonder if my Irish Catholic grandmother

made abortifacients

not because she was "pro-choice"

but because she knew her world

and because she knew the hardships of relying on a

stand mixer

to pay the rent

to feed the children

to be.

It is a specific day in

a specific time

in a specific suburban kitchen of my youth.

1995. My first Communion.

My father is already dead

my mother is thinking about that today,

she wishes he could have seen this milestone

which makes me regretful now,

the adult atheist daughter,

that day meant so much to her.

We spent the morning baking.

The tradition in her family,

a cake shaped like a lamb,

is failing like my Catholicism eventually would.

The head falls off

we prop it up with tooth picks and

use icing as glue

and we try desperately to hide our

desperate efforts

which

of course

makes it look all the more desperate.

Yet this mixer has seen desperation before

and if it were to personify

would likely explain to my mother

myself, and my godmother

that desperation does not come on days

that also see expensive white dresses

clean, flowing curls on

little girls

and a buffet spread out on an oak dining table.

These are not desperate times.

I,

my grandmother's stand mixer would say,

have seen desperate times.

But this is me.

I am this queer amalgamation

of a desperate woman

grinding seaweed so she might buy clothes for her son

in which she will pin his identification number

in case evil men on another continent---

her home continent---

get it in their minds to blow his limbs across the Hudson;

I am also

of a desperate woman

grinding flour and eggs

grinding an axe,

as it were,

with her god.

"I am desperate. This is desperation,"

she might reply to the personified mixer.

"I have a little girl

who has no father.

I have love

and no lover.

Don't let the oak dining table

or the crisp white dress this May morning

fool you.

This is desperate."

The amalgamation,

Myself,

I sit in yet another specific time

and specifically recall the way

I came

to be,

through the women in my life.

And I think about the man

my father

who bridged the gap between those

differing desperations,

three women, all desperate

all tightly wound and all

regrets.

A stand mixer;

the common thread.

Maggie, desperate to make a living

Carol Ann, desperate to find a way to keep living

Mary-Margaret, desperate for that stand mixer that no longer works.

Finally.

After about a 50 year run.

And I am desperate to display it on a shelf

to tell it's story and be near it

to remember it in the well-appointed suburban homes of my youth

and to imagine it in the ascetic tenements of my father's youth

and to cling to it,

desperately,

as those who have touched it age

leave

and live only through

my poetic personifications.

Family

One of my favorite musicals is Les Miserables. I grew up performing in community and semi-professional theatre. I was never great in musical theatre, tending more toward dramas (I'm sure you're shocked) but I loved this one. For starters, it sort of perfectly illustrates musical theatre theory. I'll not say anymore about that because you either don't care, or you do; and if you do, you're nerd enough to probably already know what I mean. But secondly, the show reminds me why I admire fiction writers so. To come up with so many characters, scenarios, side stories... it just boggles my mind. I am completely a non-fiction writer which I know is a different skill set on its own. But I can't help feeling that fiction writing is in some way superior. Makers of fiction, I bow to you.

I watched a DVD of a high school Les Mis production tonight. My sister-in-law was in it recently, and they are visiting us from Philadelphia. As she and I sang along, I realized this may be my in.

You see, I don't really know them yet. And I also miss another family, a different set of in-laws, and I'm trying to reconcile it all.

When I set out to write this blog, I set out to accomplish a couple of things. I wanted another writing project. Also, I am in a process of confronting the losses I've experienced. They haven't all been deaths. I also went through a divorce in my early 20s. In that, I lost a family. And there are days, these years later, when I still miss them.

My ex and I met in middle school. We had the same friends. I met his parents around the same time. Beginning junior year of high school, we started dating. I spent at least three nights a week hanging out at their home. My mother and I were going through a difficult time. She had begun dating for the first time since my father died when I was six years old, and I didn't particularly care for the guy. She and I fought a lot. I escaped to my ex and his family's home. Soon I was crying on their sofa, telling his parents about my mom and I. Soon I was in on the inside jokes of the family. They started attending my plays. I was invited on family vacations. His sisters became the sisters I never had. I never really thought about them as "my husband's family," but as my family. By the time he and I married, they were indeed my family. I loved them deeply. We had traditions. And the tug of doubt nestled in the depths of myself on my wedding day were silenced yet again when I spotted my father-in-law waiting for me to walk down the aisle. I married them, really. At that point, my mom was really my only living family member. I remember being so content knowing that when she was gone I would have other parents, two sisters, brothers-in-law, eventual nieces and nephews. I had a family in a way that I never had before, and in a way that I thought I never would. And there they were.

And there they went.

By the time of the divorce, I had grieved that relationship, I think. The hardest part was losing them. I had these grand delusions that we'd all remain friends somehow. Instead, there was an abrupt end to communication, an immediate severing, to a family. I understand perfectly that it most likely helped me to move on and create a new life. I also understand that they needed to rally around their son. Yet I missed them. Once in a while I still do.

And now, because I fell in love with P, I get his family too. This is wonderful, indeed. But I'm not ready, I think. I'm not ready to take it all on again. And I don't know that it would really be the same. I knew my other family during formative years. This new family will be different. This other family knew my mother. This new family did not. And perhaps it is too much to ask right now to take on the role of daughter in a family, fresh off the loss of my mother. I know my situation makes them want to embrace me more. But my grief makes me want to take my time. I don't love as easily as some people. I don't hug people I've just met and resent those who assume I'd like to be touched. Grieving is not a great time to meet new people, at least for me. You inevitably share current events, and my current events make people uncomfortable. They make me uncomfortable. But they are there. And they are me.

My former in-laws are me, my ex-husband is me. My father who died 20 years ago, my mother who died almost a year ago, my adoptive father who died two months ago; all me. To share my story is to share those losses, and I don't know that I'm in a place to trust another set of humans again with my pain.

At the end of Les Mis, Cosette is given a letter, telling her her life story, basically. Secrets are revealed. She learns her history. It's all presented in black and white, finalized, and neat. You get the sense that even as she grieves, she has peace. But life, at least mine I suppose, is never so neat and final.

"...'cause you are my medicine when you're close to me"

Being in love with a grieving person has to be similar to being in love with a crazy person. I suppose I feel somewhat qualified to make that call, as I have been a grieving person several times over, and I once dated a man who ended up in a mental hospital. Oh, my twenties.

I often wonder where I would be in my grieving process had it not been for my wonderful husband, who we'll call P for the rest of this blog. I'll ask him this sometimes, usually at the end of a particularly rough crying jag, beating myself up about not being able to handle this on my own. "Well, you don't have to handle this on your own, so it doesn't really matter," P always says. But the part of me who was taught to rely only on herself by a single parent, the part of me that forgot that lesson and let my ex-husband steer me onto the brink of financial ruin, my survival instincts have said "Don't trust that guy. Adorable curly hair aside, he might be shady."

The day my mother died, P and I were on vacation. Thankfully, it was a "stay-cation," and we were taking advantage of the long weekend of July 4th. Adding two extra days off, we had about a week to do the things in our city that we hadn't managed to experience yet. A full list of restaurants, a few pairs of theatre tickets booked, we were ready to relax. "Part of me just doesn't want to do anything," I told a work friend my last day at the office.

Our first day off was Friday, July 1st. We got up and had breakfast and went to an antique store. The store had a couple of those frames with butterflies under glass. I remember lingering there, and remembering the one my mother had hanging in her bedroom, for years, in all of the houses I had ever lived in. I had always loved it, amazed at the beauty of the wings. Standing in the antique store at 11am that day, I thought that I'd like to have my mom's frame one day for my own home. Of course, "one day" is the euphemism our death-scared culture uses for "when that person no longer has use for it because they are no longer alive."

Next we had lunch at a restaurant we had never tried, and over our meal, I told my husband the story of my parent's courtship, and my dad's childhood. Then we went home, I saw that my mom had called, and her message said, "Don't bother to call me back, I know you guys are on vacation." But I did. And I'm so glad I did.

The next phone call I would receive would actually be seven phone calls. We were sitting in a park near Lake Shore Drive, watching a movie on a large inflatable screen. Sitting in a sea of strangers all spread out on blankets, I simply wanted to check the time. When I pulled my phone out of my backpack, I saw that I had missed seven calls. In about an hour. My mom's cell, my step-father's cell, his daughter's cell. Something was going on.

Since I made that phone call back to my step-sister, since I stumbled back to our blanket and told him that my mom had died, P has been the strongest man in the world. I practically fell down onto our blanket, still barefoot for our summer night in the grass and said, almost like a question, "My mom is dead?" He sighed sharply,and it was as if a switch flipped. He instantly gathered all of our belongings--two pairs of shoes, snacks, backpack--and wrapped them all in the blanket. "Let's get a cab home," was all he said. But I demanded to walk the short distance back, thinking the worst thing right now might be sitting in a hot cab with a stranger driving, even if only for five minutes around the block. We maybe got five feet out of the crowd when I collapsed, wailing, a barefoot crying woman in a dark park with a man hovering over her, trying to pull her along. People probably think he's trying to kidnap me, I thought.

He sat down with me, got my shoes out of the blanket, and put them on my feet. He waited until I could stand, helped me do it, and we began walking again. He called my adoptive fathers and made sure they could take our dog. He didn't tell me to calm down as we walked past others, me sobbing, asking into the city night, "What am I going to do?" He got me home, and as I raced into the bathroom to throw up, he bought bus tickets to my hometown. For two.

What I have to remind myself right now is that at this point he was just a boyfriend. One who was living with me, but just a boyfriend all the same. But he made it clear that this journey I had just been thrust into was not mine alone. The next morning, after having not slept all night, we sat on the el heading downtown to catch our bus. Two stops in, an obviously mentally ill individual stepped onto the train and poised to punch me in the face. I was so out of it, I literally just stared back at her. P stood up, and gently pushed the woman to the other side of the train. When we finally reached the bus, he worked out a ticketing snafu with the driver as I banged my head against the bus door. When we boarded, he chose seats, situated my belongings, and held my hand. When the bus doors opened again in my hometown, he alighted with me, entering this strange new world by my side. He helped my step-family, people who I don't even know really, make food, find legal documents, make phone calls. He got all of my close friends there. He tried to get me to eat. He reminded me to shower. He laughed with me at my inappropriate macabre humor, and let me cry and throw legit toddler-like tantrums.

If it hadn't sunk in yet that we'd crossed some kind of threshold in our relationship that weekend, that came the night before the funeral. I come from a family of only children. It's not big. We were already pulling step-family men to act as pallbearers. We needed one more. It had crossed my mind to ask P, but it's a strange thing to do."So you don't know these people. Fuck, I don't either. And I know we haven't really talked too much about where you and I are headed together, but would you help carry my mother's casket?" It's a lot. But I didn't have to ask. Because he offered.

Shit gets real when you see the man you love literally and actually carry your mother to her grave.

I realize now that P was actually one of the last people to see my mother. He was the one out of the two  of us to see her for the last time before her casket was closed. I looked at her, and then I was ushered outside to the waiting car. He and the other pallbearers stayed as the casket lid came down, and then they carried her out. After she was placed in the hearse, he came over to stand with me and my step-father. "Thank you for doing that," my step-father said. "It's my honor," P replied.

I watched him carry her up the precarious stone steps to the church she loved, steps I had walked with her when she remarried there in 2005 and I was her maid of honor. I followed him as he carried her down the center aisle of the church. I laid in his arms in the front row after giving my eulogy, crying like a maniac for the rest of the service. Yes, I was actually laying down in the pew.

I followed him as he carried her out of the church at the end to the waiting hearse. And when we got to the cemetery and I watched him bear the weight of the woman who raised me one more time, as I held a close friend's hand I said to her, "If I don't know now, I never will."

Two week after we got home, I proposed to him.

Script

You will collect them.

One day.

I hope one day far from this day.

And you’ll marvel that you ever rolled your eyes and wonder what was so silly about it

because now?

Well.

In her careful hand she wished me happy birthdays and merry Chirstmases, but even happy Halloweens and Happy St. Patrick’s days and the occasional card just to say she missed me. A news clipping, detailing the lot of some former classmate, the fate thrust upon an old building in the neighborhood, that someone had died.

I hold all of these now and stare at the way she wrote my name and remember that she chose it and that means that she loved it, and that my father, gone eighteen years before her, loved it too, and there was a moment when they both said “that’s it!” and named me.

I look at her careful handwriting and remember the notes she sent to school with me after I’d been absent for with a stomach ache, detailing the mundane for Ms. So-and-So on fine stationery. She wasn’t a writer, I was, and my dad was, but not she, she always said. But for someone who did not write, her words were so beautiful.

I know now that, of course, somewhere inside of my unknowing, untested 20-something mind, I knew that these things were important because they were still mine. They were shoved into shoe boxes and drawers and not discarded.

The strange glow of her death, those couple of days before she was in the earth, I had to do what I’d seen her do many times. I made the phone calls. “Hi, this is Mary-Margaret and we haven’t spoken/barely know you/repeat my name, but you knew my mom and she’s dead now.” My reference was her address book, and her careful print in my lap was somehow grounding as the rest of the universe whirled around me.

Her recipe cards that are kept not because she was a good cook because she wasn’t, but because they are in her hand. Because she sent them with me when I moved out. Because they are her, still feeding me, all these years later.

Letters she wrote to my father over the long-distance courtship not because I want to know details of their intimacy but because she meant every slide of pen to paper and because she was charting a roadmap to me, and the rest of forever, and here I am at a destination I have yet to explore, and not sure if I will be able to understand. But the key is forged in characters that are all at once marshmallows toasted in a Vermont fireplace, Gregorian chants hummed as stained glass sunrays rested on her cheek, the morning my father died and the night I shouted that I did not like her second husband. They are fraught and confused, and pleasant and warm, but most of all they are known, they are known.

Hearth

When I was a kid, we didn't have cable. I was raised by two intense bibliophiles and there were books and newspapers everywhere. When I look through photo albums of my childhood, any photos taken in our home show strewn pages of the New York Times, the local paper, and books. It was a house covered in words, and while we had a television, it wasn't really the hearth of the home, as it seems to be for most living room set-ups. This is probably why I've comfortably not owned one in three years.

I had a television during my first marriage. My ex loved it. We had cable, and extra football channels, and a plug-in for his video games so he could play over the internet with others. It was indeed the hearth, leaving little room for the heart, of the home. It was like turning on the lights when you enter a room. Come home, set down your bag, pet the dog, turn on the TV. Even if it was CNN just as white noise during dinner. That glow was always spraying forth from the corner of the room.

Last week in Vermont, we didn't realize there was a television in the house for the first two days. To the left of the fireplace, and really too far removed from the sofa to be completely watchable, was a squat wooden armoir. The fireplace ablaze with split birch trees, books in both of our laps, my husband said with genuine interest, "What do you think is in there?"

I love this guy.

We ended up watching a bit of TV. Conan was filming in Chicago that week, afterall. But we were so out of touch with what was on and when, and what channels we might enjoy. So we'd eat dinner, read, watch Conan until the musical guest, and then grab the binoculars and head out to the balcony to star-gaze, the hearth of the home appropriately blazing with flame rather than newsreel.

With the television the unappreciated novelty this time around, growing up, the fireplace was a curiosity in that house. Our family home didn't have one, and it brought images of Santa Claus, of course. In the early June when we always go to Vermont, it still gets cold enough at night to warrant a fire. And while the TV sat unused, my father would go find three long sticks outside when he went to the wood shed, and we'd roast marshmallows. This is one of the few memories I have of my father eating sweets. Actually, Vermont holds most of my limited memories of him at all.

My father was 54 when I was born. In traditional Irish culture, there is a saying that "the kitchen isn't big enough for two women." A lot of men will wait until their mothers die to marry. My dad did this exact thing. Not consciously, I don't think, but he was her caretaker. Before she was sick and dying, he was her caretaker. When he was 13 years old, he kicked his father out of the house after a particularly brutal beating he gave to my grandmother. Since that time, it was just the two of them against the world, as they say. They had always been poor, living in an Irish tenement neighborhood of New Jersey. They didn't have medical care. So when my father contracted scarlet fever as a young kid, they didn't get to a medical professional until it had really taken a toll. My father's organs were all permanently damaged and weakened, most notably his heart. He spent the rest of his life eating as healthfully as he could. But Vermont was a little different.

It was different because he would eat s'mores, yes. But it was also different because there, he could relax. For a whole week, no doctor appointments. No mustering the energy to complete household tasks. Just a book and a view of the mountains. Many of my memories of him at home take place in a hospital setting. His hospital stays were so frequent, that I could probably still return to that hospital and navigate my way around it. It was part of my terrain, part of my life. Christmas mornings spent there, most afternoons after kindergarten. White walls and Jello cups, the excitement when he didn't have a room mate so there was more space for me to play while we visited. It was all very normal to me.

Finally, his heart just gave out. To the adults involved, this was inevitable, and a clear conclusion to this rarified existence. But to me, it wan's rare. And his death was sudden. I went to bed one night, dad away in the hospital, mom at home with me. I woke in the middle of the night and rather than finding her in bed, I found my great aunt sleeping on the sofa. She told me that my dad needed her, and that she'd be back in the morning. I went back to sleep. I woke up to hear my mom on the phone, and abruptly ending her call when she saw me emerge from the bedroom. She sat me down and told me that my dad had died during the night.

I know now that she was "making the calls," going through an address book in a newly deceased person's handwriting, calling those close and those you barely know, knowing that with each call, you're ruining someone's day. Knowing that you almost don't care though, because your life feels ruined. I know that now. I did it last summer when she died. I did this two months ago when a friend died. You don't get better at it.

Last year I would have said that you also don't get better at grieving. When my mom died, it was the third major loss I had experienced in five years, and probably the fifth in my relatively young life. Yet it wrecked me the most. I'm getting worse at this, I remember thinking.

But one more loss sustained, and somehow, I'm still here. Still functioning, still eating, still going to work, still laughing once in a while. Over the past year, I've done a lot of reflecting on my mother's life, and the losses she encountered. Somehow she remained one of the most positive human being I've ever known. Somehow, she raised a daughter to the age of six while also caring for a dying husband. Somehow, she raised me on her own while grieving the love of her life. Somehow, though she is gone, she is teaching me how to carry on.

And I think she would have loved that fire and listened intently to my husband explain how to identify the Milky Way through binoculars.

The Pilot Episode: Flying Home

About 48 hours ago, I had a messenger bag on each shoulder, trailing my husband as he finagled his way into an escalator with a 68 pound suit case. My shoulders, and his back, are still feeling that. Two laptops, 7 books (one of which was a hardcover edition of 1Q84, because I am an asshole and bad at traveling), a week's worth of clothing and toiletries, and souvenirs. Did I mention the souvenirs were two bottles of wine, a bottle of mead, a bottle of lager, and a bottle of artisan balsamic vinegar?

Yet our muscles were soothed knowing that at the end of that escalator was the waiting blue line train toward Forest Park, away from O'Hare, toward our lives at home. Seven years after moving here, I still feel something every time I come home. I remember a school librarian trying to instill patriotism in us by recalling her time as a military wife. As wonderful as those other countries are, she said wistfully, I was always so glad to land on American soil again. My only question was, Did Germany have Oreos? My allegiance ran thin. And, if Murakami on my reading list didn't say it loudly enough, it still does. I feel lucky to have been born here with certain freedoms, sure. But I feel pride in Chicago. Maybe because I chose it. Maybe because I came into my own here. Maybe because I met my husband here. Maybe because my dog is here. Whatever it is, I'm always filled with joy at the end of a sojourn.

Two days ago felt different, though. And perhaps it's because over the past year, I've become radically different.

My husband and I spent last week in Vermont. Right. I know. Why? Well, before I was even born, my parents bought a timeshare there. A timeshare is not a vacation home, but the illusion of one for the fading middle class, and terrible financial decision, as far as I can tell. Nevertheless, I've grown up going there at least every other year of my life, until about 6 years ago. That was the last time I'd gone. I was supposed to go last year, but life got in the way. My mom went this week last year.

And that was two weeks before she died.

As I round out the year without her, I've been reflecting. After a year of literal screaming mad grief, I currently find myself reflective. When I told her last year that I couldn't come with her, she said that she had booked it again for 2012 and that I could use it then. "We'll most likely go somewhere else. Hawaii, or Disney," she said.

"The best laid plans...," and all of that.

Right after her death, I didn't think I would be able to make the trip. Too many memories, and too specific to her, and my father, another painful loss in my history. But as the months wore on, I realized how badly I missed this place, this staple of my childhood. And, when I became engaged to my now-husband, I realized that if I was going to share my life with this man, part of my life laid in those mountains. I needed him to be there with me at least one time.

The last meeting I had with my therapist before this trip, I started off with saying, "Well the reason we can't meet next week is because I'm going to the site where I would have scattered my mother's ashes, had she been cremated." So with nothing tangible to take, nor prayers to say into the starry night sky as an atheist, what could I leave? My therapist asked this question, and I had been mulling this over myself. What can I take so I can leave it?

When I was a teenager, my mother and I traveled to Europe. One of our stops was Normandy Beach. She had never been, and her father had actually landed there on D-Day. After taking it in and snapping her photos, she collected a few items: rocks, a pine cone, some sand. She took them home with her. When I went to clean out her home months after her death, I found them all in plastic baggies. Now they are in my home.

On our third day in Vermont, we went on a hike and found an amazing waterfall. As I perched precariously on large boulders, making my way across the water, I looked down and noticed the beautiful stones below me. I plucked one from the millions without thinking too much about it. I didn't have a plan for that rock. I just liked it. It felt nice in my hand. And, when we returned to the guest house after our hike, my husband said, "Baby, I got this for you. We can put it on our shelf." He produced a smaller version of the stone I had selected.

My mother didn't leave anything at Normandy. Her father already had. He'd left literal sweat, actual blood, and a story for her to chase. She took a few simple reminders, reinforcement for a story that had swam around in her head unmoored for decades. And I, my story I mean, is unmoored right now. When my mother died, my last remaining blood relation died. The final tie to my childhood, someone who shared my last name, someone who remembered by father with me. I don't know that I have much left to leave anywhere. So I took. Two rocks. Bottles of wine. Stories about my family that could only be coaxed from my mind by that scenery. Content for plastic baggies that one day my children may find and recall, fondly, that though at one time all I could do was take, it was now mine to give.

1. Mom and I on our last trip to Vermont together:

2. My husband and I this year:

3. Things to take so that I may later give: