My mother died on January 29th.
I’m 55. She was 85. I’m incredibly lucky that I’ve had both my parents this long. I’m incredibly lucky in general. My brother committed suicide at 41. My oldest sister died from sepsis in 2016. She was 58. I have one sister left. When just the two of you are left standing, it’s hard not to feel alone, guilty, and lucky.
Sometimes I think about what happened to many people I knew, including some relatives in my generation, and I realize that it’s amazing I’m alive from that perspective too.
My mom’s death prompted a lot of introspection. Ongoing introspection, really. I did not have a complicated relationship with her. Not on her end. I knew she loved me, and I loved her, and she was a gentle, caring person. Again, I was lucky. She was also, like me, melancholy and anxious, but she kept a lot to herself, something I’m not good at doing.
Or I don’t seem good at it. Here’s a magic trick some of us who have been very online for decades learned fairly early: the art of appearing to lay it all out without telling folks much about who you are. Smart, perceptive readers will read between the lines and glean a lot. But most people are skimming along.
That’s my way of saying I’ve kept a lot to myself. I always will. You give everything away, and what’s left for you?
But I received a package from my dad in the mail today. A note in his spiky handwriting and a dozen photos of a trip he took with my mom, grandmother (his mom), and sister in 1996. “None of this should be forgotten,” he wrote.
It hit me then that I need to do this. I need to write about my family. I’ve been doing it for years in my head and have mapped out how to do this so it isn’t navel-gazing or the textual equivalent of watching some friend’s slideshow of photos from their long summer vacation.
I’m still reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I’m almost done with Karl Ove Knausgård’s first book, My Struggle. It’s taken a while. Both can be slogs. And I’m not doing that here if I can help it—save that you can consider this all fiction from here on out. I want the reader to see why I find any of it interesting enough to write about for public consumption rather than navel-gazing old white guy solipsism. For example, we’ll begin long before I was born. I wasn’t around then, so how could I know for sure any of what I’ll write about happened as I was told?
So hey, it’s a novel with my name and many family names inside it. Online.
More soon.