Remembering to Remember, Forgetting to Forget

One year ago today, I was plunking away at a longstanding freelance job. I didn’t like it very much but it paid my rent, required minimal time and energy, granted maximum flexibly, and allowed me to write two cookbooks; I knew then that I was shortly to lose it. Also, my boyfriend and I had just broken up. I had a fair amount of anxiety about that and my future job prospects, and that it was August 11th, the date my mom had died 6 years before, hadn’t yet occurred to me. At some point late in the afternoon I was finishing a purchase order and I looked up to the corner of the computer to check the date. Something important registered, and then it computed. I had almost let this horrible, important date slip; it had now officially been six years. The fact of this weighed down on me terribly, leaving me depressed and exhausted and guilty. It was the closest I’d ever come to forgetting. I walked home from work and took a picture of the sunset along the way, and then I split a bottle of chardonnay (Mom’s preferred drink) with my ex, who I’d asked to meet up with me. I went to bed tipsy and regretful. It was the beginning of a not-great year.

Grieving can be something one has to remember to do, which is why there are holidays and memorials and other sanctioned ways of remembering. But it sneaks up, too, literally, as it did last year, and figuratively, a creeping, amorphous figure with a dark sheet. I saw the musical Fela! a few weeks ago. It opens with the character Fela Kuti approaching the stage from the orchestra. The first thing he and the rest of the cast members do once they convene on the stage is turn to the illuminated portrait of his mother hanging on stage left, join their palms, and bow to her. Even there in suspended disbelief of the theater, with the actors and the music and the Bill T. Jones, that quiet, deliberate practice pierced me. I felt such powerful yearning to have ritually done that for my own mom, and regret because I hadn’t, hadn’t ever even considered it, that it caused a quick flood of tears and shortness of breath I first thought it might be a panic attack.

Grieving for my mom used to take up more of my brain space, but there are so many other things now: money, my hazy life plan, my niece, my new extended family, and my concern that I might be turning into a crazy hermit. This is arguably a sign of progress, normal things to fret about. But these new concerns don’t offer near the depth of feeling that grief does. They offer new causes for insomnia and in general are a new set of obligations—things I need to stay on top of and proactively manage if I’m to take care of myself. This non-grief is exhausting in different way, as a pervasive loneliness that I’m starting to believe is epidemic in adulthood. In many ways it’s more satisfying to wade through grief. It, like joy and new love and pride, has the ability to make one feel significantly more alive.

It took me a couple years to curb the impulse to call my mom in the evenings, when I’d be walking home from work down Broadway from 23rd street to Union Square. I’d dig my phone from my bag and fumble through the contacts list for a few seconds past the point I knew it was futile. Or I’d read a book or a recipe I would want to share with her and I’d strategize, one by one ruling out the mediums for how to get it to her—no, I can’t email it; I can’t put it in the mail; I can’t call her—until I realized what I was up against: She isn’t alive, she’s dead, I can’t send her anything ever again. For those years it was easy to forget, and I’d often wake up in the mornings thinking I’d dreamed her sickness and her death. But at the same time there was a recurring dream where she was driving a car into a golden light, looking radiant and smiling; I’d be sitting in the passenger seat, warm and secure under a seat belt, and without turning to look at me she’d offer one halfhearted assurance after another. “Everything is going to be fine.” “You’ll just have to wait and see.” “It’s not what I expected, either, but that’s what it is.” Now that’s all just the memory of a phantom limb: I remember those patterns and lapses in logic, but I don’t experience them anymore.

I used to be struck by my mom’s physical absence, but now I worry about her absence in spirit. I find myself thinking about her fairly often—one time I indulged in the idea that everything in my life would be easier if she were still alive, that she wouldn’t have allowed me to go this long without health insurance, or that I call my grandpa so infrequently. But otherwise, I don’t honor her, Fela!-style, as I sometimes feel I should, and I’m not sure that writings like this are a kind of grieving that anybody finds productive. I meet with my family on her birthday every March, and with each year it becomes more of a vacation than anything else. Maybe this is right, and maybe it’s what she would have wanted. Everybody moves on, time passes.

Last night I was at a party with a friend, in a part of town I rarely go, standing up on the penthouse floor with an obstructed view of the Jackie O. Reservoir. I was thinking about all this, what I had been remembering to remember, what I was forgetting to forget, and involuntarily, domino effect, the all those last hours and days came into focus, the blow-by-blow of her dying. I calculated that a few hours earlier, on that day seven years ago, we’d just taken her up to bed. She’d tried really hard to be part of dinner—my aunt and her family flew in; at this point we had no delusions about death—but she moved to the living room where she could lie down on the sofa. She was drugged up and nauseous, shivering and sweating, miserable, not able to think straight—suffering. That kind of misery is nothing you want to see drawn out, and it would be a crime to not want for it to end. We took her to bed and that would have been the last time I saw her cogently alive. I think I knew this, because I told my aunt that we could find someplace for her to sleep if she’d rather not go back to her hotel. I don’t remember what I said to my mom when we put her to bed, what my last words to her were. Probably “Goodnight, I love you”—which, now that I think of it, is enough.