I’ve been thinking about you this week, Mom. Happy birthday. There are kids on my roster who are feeling a heaviness. They are hiding from shadows that have slowly, like clouds of rain, formed and gathered along the ceilings of their bedrooms and in the space above their kitchen tables. Shadows that have gathered around the shoulders of their siblings and their mothers. These kids are a kind of way at school and a kind of way at home, and those are sometimes very different. They’ve got moms seeking Refuge except the door there is hidden, made unreachable by an impossible combination of alleyways and twists and turns and lock-and-key. They want the shadows gone but they’re hard to get rid of, and I tell them that sounds familiar. I don’t know their specific truth but that sounds familiar.
Grandma — your Mom — remarked on the incomprehensibility of it. It is hard to understand how this happened, she said, not for the first time. I think this is fair. The best explanation I’ve come up with is Lots of Little Tragedies. It wasn’t that everything went wrong at a given time, but that certain things went wrong over time and piled onto each other, gathering into shadows above and about you. Little Tragedies like drink and divorce and the way the house got smaller, its ceiling and walls pressing onto you. But if understanding the lack of you, the absence of you, would require a neat explanation then yes, it is hard to understand how this happened. I imagine many who’ve lost a parent or child feel a version of this.
Then again, maybe Grandma was referring to something more conspiratorial: it is hard to understand how your birthday keeps coming around again. How does that happen? It’s a bit odd — the way we keep birthdays, which mark an entrance into this life, on the calendar and refuse to axe them once someone’s gone. We don’t use a departure ticket to board the plane back home. Why mark your entrance and your exit? But I suppose the answer is simple enough: it’s double the remembrance, double the opportunities to say we love you and reiterate that we tried to help but couldn’t find that door to Refuge, either. To keep a birthday intact is to revolt — to beat back Death by giving Birth, strangely, its own sort of permanency.
Your entry and exit, then, belong in something more like a passport; stamp in, stamp out, and when we flip through the booklet of you we will always find both blots of ink. These are the days I always write. Arrival: January 27, 1967. Departure: September 29, 2016.
It’s strange, too — I can’t go without mentioning it — that the last of the pets we’d adopted as a family had her passport stamped just this week as well. January 26th and Lily, with her white boots and thinned orange coat, couldn’t stand; she’d nothing left to give. I used to write off timing close as that as coincidence, and the ascription of anything more to it as mere superstition. That is probably all it is; she’d been weak a while. But it is strange.
So, yeah. Anyway. Happy birthday. These kids I love are strained and falling out with siblings and mothers and it all sounds familiar. Why exactly I’m weaving all this stuff about work into a birthday letter I don’t know. I think I see work as forever tied to you, to what happened to you, and if I can barely make sense of that then I’m bound to make little sense of things here and to get work all tangled up in it. I guess in my mind you and these kids are inseparable. And on a week such as this — birthday week — that connection is most obvious, and the shadows gathering in their lives take on a little extra weight. They don’t know that I write about them in this general way without names; they don’t know that I write for them as much as you. And as I write this there are other shadows, more like storms than rain, gathering over other families in other places in ways that are not directly connected to you or these kids but not entirely disconnected. Even now, then, the house gets smaller and presses onto us. We don’t know each other’s truths but it all sounds — no, feels familiar.
Really, I don’t know what to make of it all. But happy birthday. We do love you.
*The title of this piece, “arrival,” plays off another on this blog. “An (un)expected departure” was the first in a series of annual writings for my mother, Angela, after her passing in 2016.
