Passing On:

I’m thinking about genetics. Heredity. What we inherit from our parents. I rest my head against the cold airplane window. As I watch the clouds, I’m startled by the closeness of my own reflection, and I look back at myself for a moment. I try to find her in my features. My mom had such blue eyes, but me and my sisters all have green, the rarest color. I know it’s a little more complex than this, but basically, the rareness of green is its combination of recessive blue with dominant brown. You can’t have green without that blue, even if you don’t see it.

I look back at the sky, a sea and mountains of clouds all around me. One might think of heaven, but I’m the rare asshole thinking about mashed potatoes. Not thinking of them really, but remembering them: the ones Mom would make. I didn’t realize how she showed love through cooking until it had been years since the last bite. I’m still in denial that I didn’t inherit her cooking skills. You can overblend the potatoes, you know. Especially in a blender.

Even when she was still alive, I knew she wouldn’t always be. If anything, that just made it harder to reach out. To grit my teeth through the niceties and never get past the weather. Speaking with her like that while knowing she wouldn’t last forever was so painful. It felt like I would never be able to reach her, even if I could touch her. Once, when I was a kid, she told me how she would look up to the sky when she was on the swings. She would stare at whatever celestial object: a cloud, a star, the moon. She locked her eyes on it, and every time she was propelled forward, she imagined gravity had failed and she was suddenly lurching toward the object, falling forever. Now that she’s gone, it kind of feels like that.

She left behind a lot of belongings, but it’s so hard to go through them. For now, I’ve taken only three things: a notebook, a locket, and $20,000. The last one was easy because it’s the only thing without memories or meaning. The locket, on the other hand, once belonged to my great grandmother as well as my mother; it already outweighs the money. It’s oval-shaped with the silhouette of two bluebirds (my mother’s favorite) sitting on a branch. Inside, there’s a sepia photograph of my great grandma. It’s the kind of photograph that is very sensitive to sunlight, and the image is fading. I try not to look at it. I never met her, but my middle name is for her: Marie. Finally, I have this notebook, which I’ve been writing in. I’ve turned it backwards and flipped it upside-down; I’ll write this way until I get to my mother’s last page. I am hoping that the timing works out to be something beautiful when my writing meets hers. (Mustn’t talk any more about mashed potatoes, then.)

Anyway, the whole reason I’m on a plane is because of something she said in this notebook. She had been reminiscing about this time in school where they were putting on a fashion show. The teacher selected her as the announcer because, she says, her French accent is “magnifique.” She literally says this. She makes this joke to herself in her diary. And just that detail made me smile, laugh, then cry so quickly it felt like one emotion.

Turns out, it made her feel similarly—not the joke, but the memory. It was a happy moment, but she felt disheartened that, at the time of writing, she had still never been to France. To my knowledge, she never got to go. I think there are a lot of things she never got to do because she didn’t want to do it alone. And that’s something I can understand, because I think it’s something I got from her.

So, I’m going to do something about it for the both of us. I’m going to land in Paris to explore as much as I can in three days. I'll visit all the major landmarks: the places she dreamed of going. Then, I’ll take the train south to a place I think she would have loved: Hyères, a tiny town on the Mediterranean coast. It's a seaside town known for their palm trees and castle ruins. The name “Hyères” is pronounced the same as “hier,” the French word for “yesterday.” I plan to go there and pretend time does not exist, and that she is with me.

I look back at the sky and, as the sunset brings tones of orange, red, and purple, it looks like a Renaissance mural. I’m running out of space to write, which is fine, because I’m remembering the time I gave my nephew and niece a tour of Grand Central Station. They looked straight up at that famously yawning, arching ceiling of blue sky and gold stars. A man saw us gazing and stopped to say, “Did you notice it’s backwards? The zodiac. East and West are flipped so that the signs are in the opposite order.” He put his hands in front of him as if he was holding an invisible ball, shifting it as he spoke. “They say that’s because it’s not actually meant to show our perspective, but to show how we must look through God’s eyes.”