Proposing a World without a Mother: Grief and Creative Nonfiction as a Sense-Making Tool

Methodology

Or, what can you make of the grief that resides in your mouth but words, a story.

Telling the story of one’s loved one’s death or of one’s own grief is a way to try to make sense. Kübler-Ross and Kessler liken it to detective work, seeking out the pieces of the puzzle that will help one eventually put it together: “Telling the story helps to re-create and rebuild structure” (63).

For a while, you think to yourself, This is the world without your mother. You think, This is what it’s like to go to work in a world without your mother. You think, This is what it’s like to go to the movies in a world without your mother. You think, This is what it’s like to go for a run in a world without your mother. Each time you think this thought, it helps you frame or reframe or build the world in front of you without her. It’s like if you don’t think it, you are pretending that the world has not changed when no one should be allowed for a moment to forget that it has.

Writing is a time-honored tradition of grief work. Writings “are concrete ways to celebrate beloved memories or to resolve tormenting ones. Artists conjure their parents in their work to bring them back, to lay them to rest, or to say what could never have been said in person” (Safer 131-132).

Your mother will never call you again.

Every message began, “Hey, baby, it’s Moma.”

Your first phone upgrade, the sales associate activates the new phone without warning you that it will delete most of your voice mails. It saves random ones—appointment reminders, messages from numbers not programmed into your phone, and only two from your mother. Both are from after the surgery to remove the original tumor, so her voice has that slurred, choking quality of her last month alive.

You call and complain and practically beg them—is there some kind of daily backup file?—but there’s nothing they can do. The associate on the phone tells you that you can imagine that they had many of these inquiries after 9/11. You can imagine that, but it feels like cheating to make your tragedy seem small and personal. Everyone’s tragedies are small and personal. That’s why everyone is begging for a secret stash of voice mails.

This essay is less a way to lay my mother to rest than to keep her alive within me as I try to figure out how to reconcile my desire to change utterly with my desire to remain absolutely the same.

The grief theorists and the writers agree on the value of, the hardwiring for, storytelling. Bonanno says we generally manage bereavement well because we are “wired” with the skills to do so (198). Cron says, “We think in story. It’s hardwired in our brains. It’s how we make strategic sense of the otherwise overwhelming world around us” (8). For the bereaved writer, Cron’s hypothesis that stories “often begin the moment a pattern in the protagonist’s life stops working. . .” feels gut-wrenchingly accurate (187).

The first birthday after your mother’s death is your nephew’s. He turns nine a week later and wants the family party that he’s always had: cake and decorations. You take him to Walmart and buy him the seventy-dollar video game he wants because he seems to truly want nothing else, and what else can you give him? Your niece wants a phone, and when you lie together on the extra bed in what you must now call your father’s house, and she whines and says everyone else has one, you believe her, and you want her to have a phone. Two months later when your upgrade comes through, you send her your old iPhone and put a line for her onto your bill.

You had always thought about getting your mother a laptop and internet service. You think of how much she might have enjoyed it. You think she would have enjoyed it far more than she would have, probably, but any amount that she would have enjoyed it, you never got around to giving her.

If the content of the project is to tell the story of my mother’s death, of my initial attempts to do or to avoid the hard work of grieving, then I must find an appropriate form. The current freedom of form—D’Agata’s suggestion that every essay is experimental no longer seems revolutionary—leaves me with many options (95). The best option is always the one that arises organically.

At the church, you sat through the preaching. It felt like a revival, more talk of your mother being saved and going home than of her life on earth, of her as an individual person. Then everyone, row by row, went to view the body. This included the family, you and your family. You walked as a group near the casket, just a few feet away from the first bench, and then walked back. You had seen your mother’s face inside the casket too much already, made up, the varnish on her nails, her mouth sewn shut over what you knew was still inside. Then the church, row by row, came to the family. You shook hands and hugged. You should’ve known who these people were, but you stopped going to church as a teenager and moved away and didn’t come back. Then you sat in a row by the casket at the gravesite. Then you moved away while the work was done and came back when your mother was finally and fully under the ground.

When your sister orders flowers for her second birthday under the ground, she tells you the florist asked, “Is it a country grave?”

In my studies of the literature of grief theory and creative writing, I hoped that a common thread would emerge, and as discussed above, the idea of storytelling as a sense-making tool became that common thread. Because this comparison took place within the form of a proposal for an academic essay, I now utilize this received form as a way to integrate the research with my personal narrative. The narrative is interspersed, it interrupts, exemplifies, and perhaps contradicts the proposal. The form of the proposal is doubly fitting because the work of storytelling in grief is to “propose” a new world, a new self.

I begin the proposal and its review of literature separately from the narrative essay.

You start this essay more than once. You start this essay without the notebook of your mother’s death every time. For a while, you carried it with you, in case you needed to record some thought or memory. Then you put it away. Then you got it back out and put it next to the bed because of the dreams. It has stayed there, other notebooks and library books often on top of it. When you were growing up, the family bible—a big St. James with the words of Jesus in red—lay on top of the television (it lies there now), and you weren’t allowed to put anything on top of it.

When both have reached a critical mass of words on the page, I print them out. Beginning with the proposal, I use scissors to cut the separate sections and make piles of them. I also cut each idea and quotation from the literature review draft and sort them into groups by discipline, then idea. After pasting these back together, I have a draft of the academic proposal.

You were in the room for your mother’s last breath. Your sister knew it was coming, said she was gray about the mouth. You were there for her last breath but didn’t realize it was her last at the time—you can only ever realize after, in the absence of another. Your sister was frantic on the phone with the hospice nurse. You were desperately trying to open the little bottle of morphine, which you were dripping into her feeding tube not for pain, because she complained of none the whole day, but to help relax the panic of not being able to breathe. Afterward, her face looked plastic, waxen, changed colors. Her eyes stayed a tiny bit open.

Then I go through the same process with my narrative fragments—printing, cutting, and sorting. Here there are multiple levels of sorting to be applied. What can be gained from a chronological approach? Do patterns of diction, of syntax, of theme, etc., emerge? Is it possible to sort the narrative fragments by direct correspondence to parts of the proposal itself, to form a sort of call and response?

Your mother wrote in her notebook “Am I dying right now?” Always the coward, you waited for your sister to say that it was between her and God. Did she feel God calling her home? She said no. Your sister later said she was lying. Not believing in God or home, you believe them both.

It became harder and harder to be in the room with your mother. “Don’t cry and upset me,” she wrote to your best friend from childhood. “It makes [it] hard to breathe.”

Your mother wrote, “Can I open [my] mouth?” She hadn’t been able to close her mouth in days.

Imagine your mouth closing itself with tumors.

In terms of the content of the narrative itself, I strive for honesty and try not to shy away from revealing what Bonanno calls “coping ugly” behavior, an evocative term for exactly what it sounds like (78).

After your mother dies, you spend two weeks at home with your father. One day while your niece and nephew are at school, you and your sister take your father loafering. You go into a gold mine, the kind of thing that you would have loved as children but never got to do. There was a gold rush in Georgia, the mountains washed away. You don hard hats and go into the mine, following a guide. You pay the extra money at the end to pan for gold, and you each go home with a little plastic tube of the gold flakes from your particular pans. It’s harder work than one would think. Your haul ranges from two to three flakes. When you are still in the mouth of the mine, you take a photograph with your phone of your father and sister. They smile, and if you didn’t know, looking at the photo, you would think they are happy.

I try to keep telling the story when the story is recounting what stories best recount: “the battle between fear and desire” (Cron 126). Part of writing is wallowing—allowing oneself the luxury of thought and revision of thought as well as of the words themselves. Attig describes the attraction that “dwelling in the emotion grief” holds for some of us (36-37). This project flirts with that bittersweet dwelling, but the effort to create something out of it makes it an active dwelling.

The notebook of your mother’s death is the anti-bible. You want to know it is there but buried. You want access to it without carrying it, without seeing it, without the conscious reminder of everything it contains in its record. You want to imagine that it is more complete than it is, than it can possibly be. You want to imagine that it contains your mother’s death, that it will fix all the memories that have already faded, that it will give up more information each time it is read, that it will serve as a kind of bible for the child who could never believe but who would read and read and read.

Lopate cautions that “It is difficult to write analytically from the middle of confusion,” but there is no other way to write from grief (xxxvii). Writing is always an activity at a remove, but “essayists write for the sake of preservation; in order to find solutions to problems, in order to remain intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually awake amidst the full rumbling fury of the world” (D’Agata 407).

On your first birthday after your mother’s death, you force your husband to bake you a cake. Even though it’s been many years since your mother baked you a birthday cake, you refuse to admit it’s a world in which no one bakes you a birthday cake. Your husband bakes cookies, not cakes, but you buy cake pans in with the weekly groceries, and he gives it a good try. You eat the leftover icing from the container with a spoon. With your mother, there was no leftover icing and sometimes more than one container was required.

Writing is in fact a form of preservation of self.
The notebook of your mother’s death is the notebook you do not let yourself write in anymore. It is the notebook with dotted lines instead of regular lines. It is the notebook with the funeral home’s “in loving memory” card inside. It is the notebook you practiced writing “mother” in because it furthered the distance that writing already puts between writer and event. It is the notebook that you hoped could save you from grief.

You write this essay instead: the only way to live with or through anything—construct a story about it. And like all writing—revise. Find comfort in form, structure, pattern, indulge in breaking it.

Remembering overrides memories, so—

Tell yourself the story until you are in it.