(Deep Breath) First Book

First Look at My Book sounded too Seussian for a post title, but that is what you are getting. Anyone who made it out to last week's Creative Fridays Showcase has already heard this (and thank y'all so much for being there! It meant so much to all of us).

Here's what I read. It's part of what will likely be an early chapter mixed with what will likely be a middle one. I started writing it after my mother died in January. Writing, along with friends, yoga, kickboxing, and grad school, is what kept me upright some weeks.

I am using other parts of the book as part of an ongoing project that sprung out of a final paper. When I read it in class, my professor suggested that I start blogging it to get it out there more. It's pretty amazing how many great mentors I still have (and find) even though my greatest one is gone.

Mom, this is for you. I hope you like it.

Love,
Hil



Nancy, my mom, had an absolute, all-encompassing interest in everything. She would read the New York Times and want to attend every cultural event and learn about every new issue. She was the embodiment of excited joy - she'd skip down the street in the rain, and would skip more assiduously if her only daughter got embarrassed. It wasn't until my adulthood that I really saw the importance of skipping, and of skipping together, with abandon.

This week is the eleven-month anniversary of her death. I keep thinking back to last year. I went home to visit her the weekend of St. Patrick's Day, and it was one of the last times we were able to walk around her town together. It was one of the last times I rode in a car with her driving. It was one of the last times that she was able to walk anywhere without incredible pain and at her normal speed.


It is still winter after my mother's death, perhaps creeping into spring. I make it to the platform just before the B train pulls in. I do not yet realize that I have left my travel mug of tea at home, sitting by the door. The subway smells like a damp dog. I read halfheartedly, sensing the dusty dull motes of sadness settling on me. Grief can be both blurry and hard: it comes in different forms, almost from moment to moment. It also has a strong grip, and I can feel it wrestling with my stress for control of my shoulder blades. I wish it were socially acceptable to take a sad day instead of a sick day. I could take an orphan day, a cancer witness day, a lonely day, a turning back time in my mind day.

I hope my grief lets me enter my kickboxing class first, trailing behind me like a wraith instead of sitting on my shoulders and driving me downward. My grief likes to remind me that it's still there. It's part of me now, because my mother will never come back. Even when I feel her presence the most strongly, and even when I am most in touch with the reality of her death, my grief sits right next to my other emotions. It's mine. It owns me, and I own it. Grief is disembodied, but attaches to you like a leech and stays there quietly. It uses your energy to keep itself going. It sidles up and grabs your hip and won't untangle itself, siphoning off as much energy as it needs in that minute.


On a frigid morning in March, I finally wake up scenting spring. It isn't here yet, but I know it's on its way. As I let my shower energize me, I feel that I am again channeling my mother's inveterate optimism. Her energy is my energy. It's part of me now, keeping me upright and moving forward.
On the subway, later, the train pitches sideways, and I am strangely proud of the other bleary commuters for not falling. They don't even trip. I reflect on the toughness and strange centeredness of the New York tribe. I follow the smell of skunk up the subway station steps, realizing that it's burnt rubber when I hit the sidewalk, but still feeling like it adds to my spring premonition. For a minute, I hover in my childhood backyard, and then the light changes.


My mom was magic. She led me in rain dances and I really believed it would rain. Even when she was dying, when she said it was going to be okay, I believed her, and she was the only person who could say that and make it sound like truth. Her memory is part of my being - she is in my DNA, as someone told me soon after her death -- she created it -- but her love and her memory and the way she raised me are part of the fabric of my world.


Now we are in spring, and we are gifted with hints of warmth, punctuated by breaths of winter. I think the weather wants to be different things. It struggles against the confines put on it by climate change. It reserves the right to be capricious, like a cat. It laughs, gently, at our obsession with it.

And the sun always returns.