Speaking Up: One Year On
I’ve written and deleted this post at least a dozen times. This week marks the one year anniversary of my mother’s passing, and it’s been almost as long since I’ve posted here. Writing, for me, has always been a way of creating order out of chaos — or, at the very least, of teasing the chaos apart to see what — if anything — of worth might fall out. But life was such, last May, that I found myself teetering over the precipice that keeps the chaos defined as a separate thing. I fell into it. I drowned in it. I struggled back to life, and drowned again. And I repeated that cycle over and over and over. Because, for me at least, that’s what grief is — an endless series of waves pulling you under one after the other, and it takes a single-mindedness — one that I wasn’t sure I was capable of — to keep fighting back to the surface, knowing that another wave is coming, and clinging to the hope that the waves will exhaust themselves before you do.
On this day, one year ago, I flew home for the first time in four years and met my brother at the airport in the already sweltering Texas heat. I struggled to climb up into the passenger seat of his enormous pickup, and we made our way out onto the flat, open highway surrounded by those blue, horizonless skies that country singers write about. We didn’t cry. We didn’t talk about it.
Over the next few days, I sifted through my mother’s meager belongings. In her small room at the back of the house, the top of her dresser was lined with notebooks. As my eyes slid across their spines, noting the sheer volume of them, for one moment I thought, it’s going to be okay. She isn’t completely gone. Not everything I have of her now is a memory. Through these notebooks, she will keep talking to me, at least for a little while.
I was looking for something that I didn’t know, that she hadn’t yet told me. I wanted there to be one more thing that hadn’t yet happened — a piece of her that was still new. I couldn’t accept that everything I had was all there would ever be.
I stacked the notebooks on her bed and sat down beside them. I opened them one by one and flipped through the pages. Some were completely empty. In others, on the very first page, there was a list or a date or half of a line. Half-finished plans for the future, or the intention to start a record of a life that would never be.
It amounted to nothing.
It is difficult to articulate the pain that came along with the realization that I had truly reached the end. That there were no more messages, nothing left to learn, and that anything I didn’t already know was gone forever.
I carefully placed the notebooks back on the dresser where they’d been when I found them.
In the weeks that followed, I thought a lot about the things that we leave behind, and the record of ourselves that remains to speak for us when we no longer have a voice. I’ve had the urge to write my entire life, and in the several years leading up to my mom’s passing, I was even lucky enough to get paid for it. But in opening the bakery, I made a conscious choice to leave that behind. I grew tired of using my voice to speak for others. What I have to say for myself may not be worth much to many, but it is my record of myself, and it is — for better or for worse — what I will leave behind when I go.
From the half-finished lines on the first pages of my mother’s notebooks, I can glean an intention, a mistake, and a warning — the intention to put something out into the world, to keep a record that was tangible, the mistake of believing in next time and tomorrow, and a warning about waiting too long to say whatever it is you have to say.
Simone de Beauvoir said, “I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth — and truth rewarded me.” Once I started working full-time as a freelance writer, I almost immediately began to struggle with finding and maintaining my own “voice” in my writing, and as a result, I felt the thing that had kept me afloat and allowed me to make sense out of the world for as long as I could remember slowly fall away. Don’t get me wrong — I was lucky to be able to make money doing what I love, and I did love doing much of the writing I was paid for. For a while, it was nice to shift gears and write not about myself and my own experiences, but about the outside world. I learned a lot, too, from the constant reading I was doing to stay informed. But at some point, I started to get the nagging feeling that I was trading in on what writing really was for me for the credibility that getting paid to do it could bring. It’s a compromise I avoided making earlier for fear of this very result.
In opening the bakery, I hoped to find the perfect solution — to be able to make money doing something I love on my own terms, while also no longer borrowing from my voice to tell stories that, while interesting, were not the real truth for me. But getting my voice back hasn’t been as easy as I thought it would be. And then something unspeakable happened. And I’ve struggled to say anything ever since.
But it’s time to try, now. I can’t stay stuck. And I can’t keep stopping halfway through the first line on the very first page.
