Dear Mom 3.0

In which you pass your first trimester, and I wrestle with a motherless summer.

It’s been three months since you died and it is getting a little awkward for me to pretend you’re waiting in the bathroom for someone to bring you a fresh toilet paper roll. Instead, time has unspooled.

We’re out in Long Island, on the water. How dumb we were, in the Edenic sense, last summer, presuming you’d be back out here again this year.

In 2024, I was exceptionally and geriatrically pregnant with our 5th child, trying not to forecast the future too hard. To keep my expectations low and so have them de facto exceeded. But not 8-feet under low. Not abdominal-cancer low.

It’s startling to walk into a space where a dead person has given up occupancy. Instead of a mother, her paraphernalia: a still life of your pink nail polish, tub of aquaphor cream, NYT’s magazines, mildewed green towel and white beach coverup. The plaster casting of my pregnant belly wound up in your laundry basket.

We did not think to plaster cast your entire being. Who knew we would need an imprint?

It’s hard not to imagine the dead person as still a person. It sucks that you’re missing the grandchildren learn to wobble-walk, sneak extra cake frosting, fashion arrows out of crab parts and feathers, and develop beyond suffocating gender binaries. Or are you missing it? The verb seems inept.

You were always so pleasantly nosy and hated to be left out of any conversation. If you entered a room where we were talking, you’d ask us to start over! And now you’re in the ultimate snooping location with your eyeless eyes and earless ears.

So anything I tell you, you already know. But because I’m a writer, I’ll say it anyway. I’ll start over and over for you.

First, dad cuddles your lumpy pillow, as if cradling your head. Why you liked that deflated sack of a pillow is inexplicable. You favoured what was worn out and through, a status your body assumed too quickly (though you fought for a world where material conditions wore people down far, far less. And fought for your pal Democracy, which just got its own metastatic cancer diagnosis).

Dad’s biggest enduring concern is whether or not you knew, as you died, exactly how loved you are. In his effusive style, he fed this narrative into your ear in your sleep coma. I have no doubt you soaked in the memo completely with your last grain of consciousness. Everyone should die that adored.

Last week, we spoke to your death doula, who had your complete confidence those final weeks of your life. She affirmed, yes, that was the wave she rode out on.

“Really?” He asked. His face lit up like my children’s when mint chip ice cream is substituted for black beans and rice. “You think?”

She nodded enthusiastically: “Definitely."

That love was your faith. The knotted rope your spirit climbed into the sky’s intimidating envelope.

It’s hard to accept the spiritual lessons in place of, say, you. If birth brings an oxytocin rush, that bonds us to one another despite ourselves, death brings some other kind of rush, an expansive flight.

You would love things like this:

Last week, Ro, reproductive consultant and 10 year-old natalist, touched my stomach and asked, “Are you pregnant again?” Like you, he prefers to be in on a secret.

Er.

Me: “Nope!”

10 year-old: “Are you sure?”

Er.

10 year-old: “You didn’t know last time…”

Um.

Which thing to correct first? What I didn’t do was tell him it can be offensive to make assumptions from the shape of someone’s stomach about their reproductive status. Maybe I should have.

When I was 12, some fool ahead of you on a line to buy movie tickets gleefully and like a total dumbass asked you when your baby was due. You were wearing your trademark fanny pack, which many a grandchild since has pickpocketed. You had a middle-age person’s belly beneath it, about which you were self-conscious. You gave them a murderous look. I read that look closely. You were probably a little older than I am now.

My 10 year-old lacks your discretion about when to be honest out loud, but he has the honesty gene in the webbing of his tongue. Like you, he’s come to love the deliciousness and absurdity of babies. For his youngest sister, his edgy mask disintegrates.

Later, he came with me to push the baby in the stroller in circles around the block for her nap. (My forthcoming memoir will be called Circles Round the Block. or Square Peg Circumambulates Round Hole.) He made goofy faces at her, which is like caffeine for babies.

“Maybe you could have 1-2 more babies?” he proposed, not yet resting his case. “I really like having baby siblings around. You’re young and healthy!”

Er. Thanks, natalist.

Me: “Nope. I’m old and we have a big family.”

He pressed: “Daddie had a baby when he was 51!”

They need to start that health class at school STAT.

“Had a baby” in the ancillary sense.

“Daddie has an easier job than me in the baby-making process,” I reminded him. His job is like 5-seconds long. “Pregnant people get had by the baby! Pregnancy is a big demand on the body and psyche. Then the birth, then potentially breastfeeding. It’s a lot.” And then, of course, everything that comes after.

“I think you could do it,” he affirmed me.

Mom, when I confided in you in the dark fall of 2023, in a basement cafe, that I was surprise-pregnant with our fifth child (and my third bio child) at 44 years-old, and I wasn’t sure what we would do, you straightened up and said, “I support you no matter what.”

No matter what meant no matter what. The server had sculpted a heart in your cappuccino foam and it blistered up in the dim lighting. You held my hand, happy to be trusted, miming zipping your lips.

Who is my no-matter-what now?

I’m working to bottle that feeling. I wish I could unzip your goddamn lips though.

“You can’t think yourself out of this problem,” Dad admitted through tears, sitting outside in a wobbly plastic chair to watch a storm roll in over the peninsula, battering the pines.

They say one day the sun will turn red and explode, but I think that’s cosmology swooping in to make our problems feel smaller.

I convince myself to refocus on the now, not the then, and channel your spirit, texting my oldest kid to ask if I can read their writing.

Shockingly, they answer, and then send it. I read it as the summer sun rises a belligerent orange, and the baby flip-flops in bed into my husband’s armpit.

For their college summer class, K composed an essay on how bodies are policed into categories, for the sake of institutions in which they must function. Those categories can become reified, or stuck, rigorously mortis. But Real bodies defy reductive categorization.

What category is your body in now?

Their essay is too smart for me, but I understand-ish. Are you still a daughter if your mother is dead? Are all categories relative?

And there are attributes we cannot check on any institutional form because the form don’t care. You can be pregnant, for example, with loss. Absolutely full of it, bulging. It siphons your oxygen. Try to put that in your health intake though. They just want the date of your Last Menstrual Period, even if you’re 80 and riddled with tumors.

And while my belly-cast turns pregnancy, a mashup of mystical and biological, into art, it is a highly policed state — gestating bodies kept on ventilators, miscarriages recast as crime!

Yet death is still rebellious and autonomous. It overthrows all our identities.

An expansive thinker, K’s essay-manifesto, a welcome distraction from my tilt-a-whirl grief, ends with communal interconnection in the coming revolution via radio waves network. I’m out of practice with theory, but I’ve been thinking about what such waves can subvert, and how they can help us locate each other when we feel desperately alone.

Mom, you were not so patient with abstract thoughts, but now you’ve become one. The best I can do is enclose you in punctuation, and include you in our imaginative play.

When I change the baby’s diaper, which she resents epically and with her whole body, I hand her a pink walkie-talkie to distract her. “Ema’s calling for you,” I tell her. “She wants to know why you prefer to stay in your shitty diaper. Say: Hi, Ema.”

She takes possession of the radio like Golom’s Ring. Briefly, all distress fall away. Ah, how our devices soothe. Or maybe, you’ve returned in a way only babies can perceive.

The baby sucks on the antenna, then presses its buttons aggressively. I believe you are on the other end of some radio wave I’ve yet to fully tap. Perhaps she will randomly access what longing can’t, and your voice will break through the static.

“Mamamamamamma,” the baby says, and throws the walkie-talkie across the room with all her might, and what might she has.

As dusk falls over the water, and the stamp of your absence looms, I’m entertaining some irrational possibilities. I’m really hoping the sky will open like a luggage zipper and you’ll step out, ready for a walk on the road with us, to take the “stinky bag” of food scraps to the public trash can each night. Just one walk. Under one shooting star. To one trash can. It’s really crumbs I’m asking for. I believe God has some loaves to spare. I believe She hath Celestial Costco membership, and remembers her friends.

Your death doula says you asked her in the hiring consult, three weeks before your end of life, “I feel so depressed. Can you take this despair away from me?”

Who can?

What a good, human question.

And what do we do— sit with our despair until it transmutes? And what if it doesn’t?

I pin my current despair to the delicate wings of the tern and watch it soar out over the swollen bay, where crabs and seagulls have returned, where baby piping plovers peck at invisibilia on the shore as they always have. Nourished by tiny creatures that live between salt-worn rocks.

I guess I’ll just keep talking to you, as the beach grass nods in response.

At the family table in Long Island, while the birds plunge for the last fish of the day, we thank you for this house and all you gave us before we eat dinner.

“Ema’s DEAD!” the 6 year-old literalist corrects us. “She didn’t make dinner!”

Shhhhh, silly! Define make. Define dead. I BET YOU CAN’T.

With heart,

SARA

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Other Incredible Things for You!

Interdependence day weekend is here. I feel unsettled about America, not at all celebratory of its birthday. But here are some things for you I feel great about:

• This seminal correspondence on nonviolent resistance, MLK Jr’s (open) Letter from Birmingham Jail. I used to teach it to middle school essayists every year. In closing, King wrote: “I can assure you that [this letter] would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else is there to do when you are alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell other than write long letters, think strange thoughts, and pray long prayers?” That’s a bit like the holding zone of grief. Study the whole thing, really. Best read aloud, even better read in community.

• What I still do believe in is our birth stories, and the powerful feelings that linger after these rites of passage, however they unfold. In that light, I hope you’ll celebrate Interdependence Day by telling your birth story with me. Step into a virtual 1hr session with me to be fully witnessed telling your story. You’ll (re)visit potent moments, thoughts and emotions, you might have never spoken aloud, but which require air and affirmation. After, you’ll receive a written keepsake of your narrative. If you subscribe to this newsletter, like this post and comment “interdependence day!” (Or message me/reply to this email if you feel comment averse), you’ll receive a 25% discount on your session, for yourself or to gift.

• Read this gorgeous essay by my friend Meg Leonard, who writes about being a working mother artist with children omnipresent, featuring a lemonade stand, vigorous vision and coins borrowed from a piggybank.

• Here’s Sula Johnson, our death doula. You want to work with her (in NYC or virtually). From her bio:

  “I am an advocate for the life and the death that people ask for. Dying is a sacred event, not just a medical event. No one knows how it feels to be dying, except the person going through it. My priority is to ensure that the dying person is feeling deeply witnessed, deeply cared for, and deeply honored - however that may be!”