Mary

Everyone leaves us with something. Sometimes they bequeath us a house, or family photos. Perhaps we are given a watch, or willed a piece of heirloom jewelry. The most valuable gems are usually the memories. Those priceless tidbits that can't be held in the hands, but only in the heart. They are the pieces of our life, the chapters of our story. They are both happy and sad, full of fear, and love. If we meant something to someone during their lifetime, after they pass from this world they want us to have something of them. It might be because they loved us, it may be out of a feeling of obligation, or maybe, they just don't want to be forgotten.

When she was only dying and not yet gone, my mother gave me things I didn't want. I was given the responsibility of being the comforter, the caregiver, the decision maker, and the adult. I didn't understand when a parent is dying how the child and the parent suddenly become the other. There is no way to prepare for that, nor did I care for that role to be mine.

After disease took her, my mother left me with too much, and too little. A house that was filled to the rooftops with memories, and all the things inside. The weight of both, the memories, and everything she owned inside those walls, was almost impossible to bear. My mothers clothes were mine, and her sewing machine passed to me. All she had acquired during her seventy years was now mine. Mine to keep, or mine to get rid of. My mother wasn't wealthy. She didn't have many hobbies. Yet the amount of things that needed to be dealt with seemed overwhelming. The decisions of what to do with all of it was paralyzing. Every single item was worthy of consideration because it had mattered to her.

She was an average person with an average amount of belongings, and had I devoted the time I felt was sufficient to each thing she owned, it would have taken me years to go through it all. When there was time, I spent entire evenings sorting through little scraps of paper and lists gone unfinished. Other times things were hurriedly bagged and stuffed in car trunks. Those black, plastic garbage bags were weighed down with clothes, shoes, and my guilt from haphazardly emptying her closets. Those coats and sweatshirts she always wore didn’t get enough time in my hands, or between my fingers so I could feel them one more time, and smell the stale smoke imbedded in them.

She left me with lots of things, and few too stories. My mother was a private person. She didn't share much of her life before me, or even with me when I was here. She was an enigma. After she died it seemed everyone had a story to tell. It wasn't until she was gone that I more fully understood who she had been.

I will never know why she never told me all of this herself. Maybe she wouldn’t have told anyone and they only knew because they were witness to it. I don't know if she felt she was protecting me, or if she was sparing me from the hurt she had endured. What I have always believed was that she kept so much of her life from me because she didn't want me to have anymore than I'd already taken. Granted, I had no intentions of taking anything. A baby does not ask to be born. Yet, unintentionally I had taken her body, her comfort, her sleep, her energy, her money, and her time. I was the continual, living embodiment of years of her life that were spent in a way she wouldn't have chosen. She had to give whether she wanted to or not. I had drained her without even trying.

My face was the reflection of not just hers, but my fathers. A father that wasn't there to help. It wasn't my fault she had to raise me on her own. Yet, one thing I knew for sure, even if she didn’t, was that she resented me for it.

She kept her life locked away from me. Some secrets escaped, but not many. I will always wonder how different our relationship would have been had I known them sooner. Maybe the knowing combined with maturity would have made a difference, but I think my growing up probably didn't matter. It wouldn’t have changed the fact that my mother lived in fear caused by a perpetual feeling of lack. She failed to see the wonder in life and undervalued how much she truly had. She was always worried about losing her job, and therefore afraid to commit to many of the things she truly desired. Regardless, I would have liked the possibility of having our relationship be different, to be something more than it was.

After the house was sold, insurance paid out, debts and obligations taken care of, and all her belongings allocated, what was left totaled $20,000. A modest amount, but another twenty thousand pieces of her life that was now mine to decide what to do with.

A year after she died a friend of my mothers invited me to dinner. It was a woman I didn’t know well. I had vague memories of her as a child, although she stayed by my mothers side at the end of her life. After we ate she told me she had a gift. From the chair next to her she handed me a small black notebook. She told me it had been my mother’s. She kept it as a child and into her early twenties. I said I had never seen it before. My mother’s friend told me she had acquired it during my mother’s illness. She said that she had removed it from the house at my mother’s request because my mother didn’t want me to find it in the immediate aftermath of her death. My mother had said she was afraid I wouldn’t know what it was, or understand, and make a hasty decision had I been in a hurry and pressured by time. I wondered, does that ever end, the pressure of time? Either way, the black book was now my twenty thousandth and one earthly item of hers that needed to be given a purpose.

The gift of the book determined the fate of the money. The money took the book and transformed it into something new, multiple somethings new. For a woman who kept her life such a secret, who spoke so little to me of her experience, and her existence, she was in fact a storyteller. I didn’t know because she never told them to me. Maybe she didn’t originally pen them for me, but since the book was now mine, I liked to think that was the final intention.

When she was small she wrote stories. Stories meant for children her own age, yet hatched from a perspective much older than her mere eight years. In high school she wrote poetry, and more stories. After that, letters, to me, to my father, to herself, and still more stories. The magic was that every page in that notebook weaved into the next. It wasn’t a series of unconnected pieces or contexts. It morphed from fiction, to autobiography, to prose, then back again, and seamlessly blended them all together. There was no let down as one concluded and the other began because the first never ended. No matter the construction, it was only a continuation of what came before. There was no awkward transition from one form to the next. Somehow, she leapt from one to the other, forcing the reader to jump alongside, and the reader never actually realizing that underfoot the terrain had changed. It was so engrossing, that you kept walking through the story with her, almost oblivious to how she told it, only caring that she was.

From the front cover to the bottom of the last page, was one of the most intriguing, cleverly crafted stories ever imagined. Not only was it brilliant, it was full of every previously undivulged tale, of every moment of consequence in my mother’s life. Some were disguised in the fiction, others hidden in the poetry. Regardless, now I knew them, now they were mine.

I took the $20,000 and her black notebook and had it reprinted in as many copies as the money allowed for. It was bound in pale yellow leather. Yellow was her favorite color. Inside the book I changed nothing. My mother never made spelling mistakes. I didn’t even have the story typed out prior to printing. In addition to her immaculate spelling, my mother had beautiful penmenship. It was printed in her own hand. The only thing I added was a title. The only one that seemed appropriate, that rang true when spoken out loud, was a simple, one word name sake. Embossed in gold on the front of the yellow leather cover was her name, “Mary.”

I gave the newly bound books to her grandchildren and to her siblings. There was no way of knowing how she would have felt about her story being shared. Just like I will never know why she chose not to tell me about her life when she was alive. Is it because I was right, and she had already given me more than she wanted to? Or, was there something else, something more? What I did know is that each of us were only ever given pieces of her. Every one of us was given something different when she was here, and after she left.

This book, this was the only story, the only picture of her that would show every one of us all of who she was. No longer could she show each of us just a chosen side. No longer could she hide all the many sides that made the whole. Maybe she didn’t want us all to know, but it wasn’t my place to deny my children, or her sisters either. I wasn’t the only one who felt like my mother didn’t give them all they needed, or all they deserved.

My hope was that by reading her story, they would realize, as I did, that she gave each one of us what she thought we required most. She paid for my care. She went to the grocery store for my grandma when she was sick with cancer. She spent her time calling my aunts. She bought my son dinosaurs, and baked cookies with my daughter. She deducted from some to give more to others. She knew her ability to give was limited, and she spent that where she felt it was most needed.

She was human, therefore imperfect. Her fault, her tragic weakness was her inability to pretend. Most of us do it, we fake empathy when a friend is hurting, yet we are too preoccupied with our own issues to truly listen to what that friend is saying. My mother wasn’t capable of doing that. She was always preoccupied within her own life, within her own mind, but she gave all she had to give. She didn’t held anything back, she literally gave all she had. Honestly, though, the problem was that what she gave didn’t feel like much, and most of the time didn’t feel like enough. However, when looking at in context, it no longer felt like I had been slighted, ignored, or even unloved. I wanted the rest of my family to know this. I didn’t want my mother to be remembered for her lack, the same lack she saw herself living in day after day. I wanted her to be remembered for what she gave each us, and what we never saw her give to others. I wanted them to remember her name, all of her pieces, all of her story.