In the weeks after our mother’s funeral, well-meaning neighbors and friends brimmed with platitudes. They lingered on our front steps with their cars still running in the cul-de-sac. They carried casseroles in platters that I’d forget to return and that would remind me of my family’s grief each time I used them.
One woman arrived around dusk. Evenings grew gloomier each day and the light receded earlier the further we were marched into fall. She was the mother of one of Steph’s high school classmates. She had expensively highlighted hair and pale skin, and she clutched a cerulean prayer blanket that her church group had knit for us.
You are all so young, she kept saying, as if we needed reminding. Your mother was so young.
Steph and Caroline leaned on either side of the doorframe and listened to the woman. All through the weekend, we scrubbed the house and tossed moldy food from the fridge. We exterminated anything grimy or dying or dead with a vigor that first stunned and then soothed us. It seemed our father was constantly out of the house or tucked in the office off his bedroom. I had no idea what he was doing, and I didn’t ask.
She’s watching over you, now, the woman with the blanket said. She wouldn’t want you to be sad. She’d want you to be happy.
My sisters offered the woman bland compliments while they fanned out the blanket’s folds.
So soft, Steph said, always dutifully polite.
This will be…useful, Caroline said, never one for insincere or saccharine niceties.
I hung back in the hall. This visitor was the type of woman our mother would have poked fun at as soon as she left. When Steph was in middle school, she invited this woman’s daughter to our house for her birthday. My parents bought Roy Rogers, Steph’s favorite. We watched in dismay as Steph’s friend slid the fried skin from the chicken and discarded it before eating.
Aiiiiiiy. She’s the mother of that girl who didn’t eat the skin? our mother would have said, personally offended. Who teaches their kids that? What’s the point of fried chicken if you don’t eat the skin? Then she’d launch into a poor imitation of how the woman drew out her words. She thinks we’re cold or something? That we need that tiny blanket? Chi seen. My mother would smack her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and we’d titter conspiratorially.
But in that moment, I thought that Steph’s friend was lucky to have a mother who crocheted blankets and prayed for other people’s children. Imagine what she did for her own kids. It didn’t matter if she was a good mother, whatever that meant. Being alive was what mattered.
These house calls thrilled and confused me. Before our mother died, we rarely had visitors. My parents did not have friends whom we invited over for dinner or saw casually. We weren’t like the other Chinese families in these suburbs, since we didn’t attend church or speak Mandarin. We were our own island. But these visits made me hopeful that we might gain a community, though I knew these drop-ins would eventually come to an end. I felt greedy and guilty for wanting something positive from our mother’s death.
Hours later, swaddled in the prayer blanket, I turned this woman’s words over in my head.
Watching over you.
Wouldn’t want you to be sad.
Other adults—the guidance counselors at school, neighbors—said similar things. I often didn’t respond. When I did talk, I blurted out details of her death regardless of how they fit into conversation: that she technically died of cardiac and respiratory arrest and not cancer. Her passing was relevant to everything. I spoke in chronic caps lock—MY MOTHER JUST DIED TWO WEEKS AGO!—and I noticed that adults often struggled to find the right words, unsettled by my abrupt declarations, then concerned when I smiled earnestly to prove I was OK. My guidance counselor wrote me a hall pass that I could use whenever I wanted, which I flashed liberally until I graduated. I used it to lie in the nurse’s office and stare at the ceiling when I found class boring. I napped. I cried. I wrote in a notebook and sketched poems about my mother’s death that I would later share with my English teachers for feedback; this act allowed me to express what I could not, or did not want to, say at home.
In conversations likes the one at our front door, adults tested their consolation.
She’d want you to be happy, not suffering.
I couldn’t blame them for saying such things, but each time someone said my mother was watching over us and would have wanted us to be happy, I privately disagreed. To have been happy would have been to disrespect her life. After all, we were only just surveying the rubble after the catastrophe. We understood now how everything had shifted: There would be no more visits with our family; no more of her cooking; no more talks about our futures and how we needed to do more; no more burrowing into her shoulders for hugs. And from the practical mind of a thirteen-year-old, there would be no more horseback riding after the checks my mother had written before her death ran out.
Still, those assurances:
She’s watching over you.
She’s with you every day.
She’s everywhere.
She’s alive in your memories.
Despite myself, I took their words literally, my newborn grief latching onto every word. My imagination gorged itself on this hope.
* * *
I conjure you from the underworld, part taxidermy, part ghost. Your expression toggles between something comical and something frightening.
I want to think that you don’t mean me harm, but I wouldn’t blame you if you lashed out because you were mad about your premature death. When you’re not dropping into my life, you are somewhere vaguely above—heaven, perhaps, though I’m not sure if either of us believes in it. You stomp around in the attic of our family’s grief. The thrums and rattles from your footsteps constantly punctuate our thoughts.
As Steph and Caroline and I clear out your desk at your office, or call the cell phone company to change the name on the bill to Caroline’s, or visit the cemetery to burn more incense and joss paper, or research how to order a tombstone, I have a flash of something that feels like memory, though it never happened. In it, you are irate about the L.L.Bean dress. You will always be a little annoyed about this outfit.
Why? you ask repeatedly. You barge into my mind, a frenetic four-foot-eleven Kramer, slapping my mental doorframe with your hands, limbs flying this way and that. Why this?
You keep tugging at the hem, then the sleeves. Your agita is my indigestion.
You couldn’t have buried me with a sweater? you ask. What if I get cold?
You run your fingers along your arms to show that it’s chilly. I find myself missing, of all things, seeing the soft flaps of your triceps, and how they looked like deflated balloons. There is a gentleness in the taxidermic, ghost-you, though you are mad. I prefer this irritation to the agony and indignity of your death; to your being sad or needy or worried about all that you’re missing in life and all that you’ll never do.
Eventually, your ghost will find this outfit situation amusing, and we’ll joke about how you are perpetually underdressed in your L.L.Bean ensemble. (Whatever eventually means.)
I know that you are cold. But it never occurs to me until now to burn tissue cutouts of clothing to send to you. As a teenager, I was a rude host. I could’ve made you a jacket or a new dress that way. I could have made you rich.