When my mother died the family dissolved — not quite overnight. I watched it unfold like a car crash (I wish I could think of a less laboured metaphor); a sickening collision stretched out into an impossibly suspended moment.
Thank God I made the sensible choice: to transfer out of that writing major(lesson #32) and into something more tangible. You can’t write good fiction when your insides are crystallised by life’s cumulative blows, when those swarming molecules of creativity are slowed, distilled and hardened into one solid and immovable mass. No. Criminology is the realistic choice. Write government reports on crime trends, make recommendations. Some might even get implemented. It’s sensible, reliable. (Is that the best that I can hope for?)
Where was I? Dead mother. The family–yes. Except it’s more a reconstruction of them (a painting? A kind of family portrait?). Let me begin again.
My mother died and the family dissolved. I looked on (a helpless witness) as tensions jostled and then shattered, breaking apart the brittle bonds that once bound us to one another. Mostly, I’d become a satellite member. The trips up the coast and back down again had become untenable. It was hard to put my finger on the exact reasons why (it wasn’t because of the time commitment). Perhaps it was my mother’s immovable what’s the big deal attitude that side-eyed us through childhood and then adulthood: never to be packed away, even when our beloved family dog met an untimely demise(lesson #14) (picture me hovering over his stiffening canine form). Maybe it was my father’s serial acquiescence(lesson #11)(picture him, doing nothing).
I got married. I replaced them with a better family, though at times it chafed: a pair of pants with a too-tight waistband. My new family’s love was personal, to be presumed upon. It pursued me. There were no steely or resentful silences, where need—inconvenient and forbidden—festers and settles in our bones. Instead: a routine refusal to allow the air to hang heavy with our secret hostilities. Sometimes, in quiet moments, I picture what this kind of love would have looked like in my father’s final weeks. (I try it on: an occupied chair in a hospital room? A holding of hands?)
My own family (should I say real family?) had a way of making me feel dramatic. I could go without seeing them for ten years and they’d act like they hadn’t missed a thing(lesson #24). Like the time they missed my wedding (I’ll never forget it; the way it rained). The bodies that couldn’t be there were piled up in everyone’s minds (my father at the top).
In another photograph I’m getting out of the wedding car: brocade silk shirt bunched up around my thighs to keep it from soaking up so much storm water. A small river that swelled and rushed against the curb. This is significant, it seemed to gush. I scanned the crowd of well-wishers: my family didn’t show. Pity spread like a fever, sweeping across the countenance of guest after guest after guest. I doubled down, tried not to let any of it touch me. Have no expectations. Pretend not to be there. They’ll pretend that you aren’t anyway. My aunt had it down to quite an art. Her brand of making you feel invisible hit you where it hurt. (Was it, children should be seen and not heard(lesson #5)? Or was it something else?) I keep getting distracted.
My mother died. I went to the funeral. They asked me to write the eulogy. Someone (outside the family) asked to read it (who does he think he is?). I told him to get fucked. Nicely, of course – I didn’t use the word. I said it in a way that he knew exactly what I was saying. I can’t remember quite how I found out. No, I can. My sister told me. He’d been there with mum, in the last days. Beside her bed (it should have been me). So much for: she doesn’t want anyone to see her like this. What a joke. What they meant was: she doesn’t want to see you(lesson #42).
I open my phone to look (again) at the last text she sent. It was just weeks before the end. Before I even knew there was going to be an end. But they knew. All of them.
It’s getting a bit abstract, this picture I’m painting (metaphorically); I thought I’d paint something pure and true (Is that what Hemingway said?); I can never remember the name of the actor who played him in that time-travelling Owen Wilson film. It was Midnight in Paris. We streamed it on my laptop in the middle of a forty-degree heatwave in our Airbnb – my husband had never seen it – in a fifth-floor studio apartment in a terrace on the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. It was really a converted attic. The “bathroom” was a toilet in a cupboard with a shower head hung from the ceiling above it (when you took a shower, the toilet seat got wet). The table fan was broken. Our hosts offered to reimburse us if we bought a new one. We only had three days in Paris, so we chose three stifling, still and airless nights. I wish I could say it was romantic, sweating our asses off like that, but in truth I whined bitterly the whole time. No. Write the truest sentence you know. Okay, Hemingway.
My mother was a bitch.
Now you’ve done it. Thanks to your sanctimony. Don’t you know that the truth is anathema to the memory(lesson #45). Especially of the dead. You always were a bit of a prick.
Try again. Don’t just write more words just for the sake of it. Forget honesty. Forget good, clean prose. I’ll hate myself anyway.
My mother is dead. She died. The family died too. Not a real death (at least, not literal).
It is real, though. I’ve piled them into the coffin and set them blazing onto the funeral pyre. Metaphorically. Don’t call the cops. She held us together (emotionally). Now we’re free to be strangers. We can finally stop pretending(lesson #46). No more (un)happy family. No more family.
This painting is ugly.
I’m going to light it on fire and watch it burn too. No need to start again.
