EPILOGUE: DEAR GOD

When I first brought my newborn daughter home, it felt as if I were setting foot into a house where someone had died. There was that same unsettling sense of connection to an unknowable elsewhere, to the vast and mysterious place that threatens us at least as much as it makes us feel eager and whole. There was that same awe, exactly that: wonder and terror. That same sense of being helplessly small in the face of something infinitely powerful and unsettlingly near. It was that way again when my sons were born. Wonderful and terrible. Is that what my mother met each time another of us arrived, tugging her world in a new and as-yet-unnamed direction?

Those first hazy newborn weeks, in the half-light of feedings, and in the sleepless whirl of everything else, I discovered another version of my own urge toward the divine: the desire to pray. Dear God, protect her. At first, that was all. And then, Dear God, please allow me to give her everything she deserves. And then, Dear God, let me live long enough to help her along whatever path she chooses. I prayed this way for my daughter and again for my sons. I spoke these prayers aloud. They came out of me with urgency, a fervency that did not strike me as quite me. It was all I could do, all that the deep and abiding need would permit—the need to believe that not even death would put an end to the bond I feel with my children. I still do not really know what led my mother to God with the kind of vigor she seemed to possess for the idea of that particular hereafter, but I wonder, now that I have become a mother myself, if her faith was born of something fundamentally very simple. I wonder if gazing into each newborn face—at each little being who seemed at once ancient and utterly new, fragile and yet, by turns, possessed of an almost discomfiting poise—had put my mother (as it did me) in search of anything that would permit her, quite simply, to last. Dear God, please let me keep her in my life even after I no longer have a life. Please let me always, always be her mother.

Is God each of the many different things we seek in the course of a life? Family for a short time, and then unfettered independence, and then love? Is God what animates the body, drawing us into a deeper, more primal sense of our physical selves? And then, when that appetite is calmed, does God move out of the body and into wherever it is that tenderness or compassion reside? Does God become an armament we leverage for the ones we love, the ones we have committed to nurture and protect? I don’t know what I think. I know that the God I was taught to see as a child, the one who watched over me like an omnipotent father, is still one piece of the God I call upon now. But I feel myself most alive, most electric with faith, breath, and courage, when I think of God as a current that runs through all that is. Not by will or by choice. Not as a benediction but because there are laws that even God must obey.

When I think of the shape God made in my mother’s mind, even as she faced illness and death, I now believe that what I am seeing is the shape, from my own incomplete vantage point, of my mother’s mind.

My mother. In the now I belong to, she has been gone so long it’s almost as though she must only have been a dream that felt real but wasn’t. She has been gone so many years, the moment is approaching when she will have been gone longer than she was with me, and perhaps then it will turn out that I can only struggle to remember her the way one does a dream. So many years during which, at times, I have felt relieved not to have had to see her take in my mistakes. Years that have granted me permission—at least I’ve taken it as permission—to remember her in any way I choose. Though today, when I try to put her back together in my mind, it is because I am searching for the real her, the woman she would have shown herself to be; the woman who could sit me down and tell me exactly what to do, how to mother my children so that they will feel safe being children, how to be playful and patient and forgiving, the way she somehow always managed to be; the woman who would cast every one of my memories and fantasies of her as uniquely wrong.

I am searching. It has taken the writing and reliving of all of this to convince me that this is what I am doing and that my search must have at its core not just my mother and whatever answers she could provide for the questions I never learned how to ask. I’m also searching for a glimpse of the person I could have been alongside her but chose not to be: the confidante, the fearless interlocutor, the daughter eager to share how it feels to take her first resolute steps into the onrush of experience. What shape would God have taken on inside that version of my mind?

There was a moment in writing this book when I thought that I would watch the videotape that was made, in 1991 or ’92, of my mother giving testimony at that North Carolina church meeting. I thought that sitting down and listening to what she was saying, hearing the words in her voice, and watching her face, her body, the ways that she communicated herself and her faith, might help me to finish saying what I had set out to say. I thought that sitting down and watching her give testimony might allow me to finally live out and release the adolescent feelings of embarrassment that had prevented me from watching the video in the first place. And I thought that listening to her describe her own need for God and the faith that she had embraced might allow me to claim a piece of whatever it was she once testified to. It would have been so easy to let her have that last word and to convince myself that she was speaking for both of us. I was ready to give that much to her, to cede that much.

But I discovered that the video is gone. Just like the life we all once shared in that house, the video disappeared in the years after our mother’s death—boxed up, carted off, mislabeled or mistaken for less than it was. If she is to speak now, it will be in a voice I command myself to hear, a voice I must remember or imagine into being.

I am three, resting my head on my mother’s hip, tucking my body into the crook of her knees as she lies on her side on the couch. She doesn’t speak. It is early afternoon and we are alone together in the house. I can hear the quiet mewling of her stomach, digesting the lunch she’s just eaten. I have eaten the same thing, but my body is silent. The only sound I make is my breathing. We are napping together, but I am awake, wedged into the space between my mother and the cushions of the couch. There is nothing I currently want. There is nothing I must do. I feel the fabric of her pant leg against my cheek and smell her perfume. Her body seems to bob or sway, but only slightly, as she breathes. My mother seems like a mystery because she is larger than me.

“Mommy?” I’ll say, finally, knowing she is there, that it is her body my small body has burrowed into, but wanting to know that she knows I am there, too. “Mommy?”

“Yes, Tracy?” she’ll ask, calmly, once I have punctured her sleep with my need to hear her voice, to feel it rise through her and hum against my ear.

“Oh, nothing,” I’ll answer. “Nothing.”