Dear dead mom person, this is neither here nor there, but why did you never get around to teaching me how to cook? I'm not trying to be sexist; I also wish you'd taught my brother. Does anyone else wonder about things your mother never taught you, the knowledge she never imparted, the letter she never wrote you to say goodbye. I mean, if she'd taught me how to cook, it would have been way before she died; I was twenty-four and living on my own in a different city. Maybe if I wasn't teaching myself how to bake a chicken breast at thirty-two, I'd feel less like an orphan train wreck, but it's mostly the wondering that gets to me.
The brilliant mixed blessing of the Big C is that often (unless it's pancreatic), you have time to sort out your shit. My mom had three and a half years. It's not like she was in a car accident and died with no warning. Was she so invested in believing she would survive that she never thought to leave behind anything tangible for us to cling to after her death? Or was she just that certain that we'd be fine without her? Surely it would have occurred to her after the letters at our twenty-first birthdays, our college graduation. She was a person who put things into beautifully-crafted words and then floated them out to you like a lily pad crossing a pond. I'm a capable person, but it would have been something to have a few more words of advice, of comfort, assurances to hold on to. A lifeline, something.
Oh, how I long to have found an envelope going through her things all those years ago, to be sorting scarves and sweaters and jewelry I'd never wear and come upon it suddenly. I dream of that still happening, a note fallen down the side of her chest of drawers with a perfect edge of settled dust, the tentative, laughing glance my brother and I would share (all these years! how did we never...). Or maybe locked away in a safety deposit box, the key to which we'd find in a box of old journals. Journals she hid, or burned, or buried. God knows I understand why she wouldn't want us finding those and reliving her darker moments. But a letter...a fantasy as perfect and iridescent as a soap bubble. My heart stands still seeing my imagined name on the envelope and the typed pages that would somehow find a way to encapsulate perfectly these twenty or so years that I would have had her. The words encircling me with her warmth and verve and kindness and wisdom.
But of course a letter like that is a fantasy at any level. Received, it would have been worn threadbare and then placed with all the other keepsakes I have of her, falling short, as they all do, of being her.
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