Saying “Voldemort”

Words are powerful things. Speaking or writing them has the effect of fixing them in reality, even if only as an idea. This is one reason why we avoid talking about difficult subjects. It’s why nobody wants to say “Voldemort.”

My mom is dead.

She died, likely in her sleep, early Sunday morning in California. I found out shortly after sending my newsletter, which included a video. It was the first thing I’ve done that she’ll never see or hear.

When I was a kid, she brought home a guitar that she’d picked up for me at a yard sale. It was out of tune and I didn’t know how to tune it. A string broke and the guitar fell into the realm of battery-operated toys, consigned to neglect for want of a replacement part. Later, when I went to college, I learned how to tune it and had it restrung. It was a terrible guitar, so it didn’t stay in tune and it didn’t sound particularly great, but it let me try and fail to play songs, and it was on that guitar that I started to write them.

Before any of that, my mom nearly died.

We used to live in Wisconsin. When my dad finished school and landed a job teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, we moved there from Baton Rouge. Distorted by the lens of time, and presumably cost of living, much of the time in Platteville was good. My mom had a bookshop. My dad ran a sports memorabilia business in parallel with the faculty position. It was the kind of place that a young child could roam freely, getting in all manner of trouble. There was the time when neighbourhood children encouraged me — 5, or 6? — to thump a beehive with a shovel; there was the time when neighbourhood children encouraged me to take a hacksaw to our next door neighbour’s tree; and who could forget the time when, inspired by news footage of people throwing rocks, I developed the habit of throwing rocks at cars traveling down Carlisle Street, eventually — and much to my amazement and chagrin — striking one.

It wasn’t all mischief, of course. There was also plenty of baseball in the fields with older kids, which came in handy when I later played organised baseball in California. Traveling to sports memorabilia shows. Getting absconded with by a friend’s family when a tornado came to town while we were at the public pool in a pre-mobile phone era, with a panicked mother at home. Okay, maybe that one wasn’t so great. But there were lots of great things, promise. And my mom loved me through them all. She was disappointed at some of the things I did, sure, but who wouldn’t be? It didn’t stop her from taking me to the hospital when a bike trick went wrong and I took a chunk of pavement in my arm. Dick’s is a Piggly Wiggly now?

But Wisconsin was cold, you see. In the winter, lasting from October to April, if we’re comfortable being honest, snow and ice are keen to take up residence on the roadways. One night, on her way home, my mom had a car accident. Her car was struck by several vehicles in an intersection. Someone called my dad to tell him about the accident. Then one of my mom’s friends called as we were getting ready to go to the scene, and my mom’s friend asked if my dad was joking when he told her that my mom had been in a car crash. He asked her if he sounded like he was joking. I was still very young — 7/8? — but it didn’t sound to me like he was joking.

I sat in the back of a police car for the first and last time. I couldn’t see what was happening. But it was cold. They had to cut the car open with the jaws of life. It was in the paper. She was in the hospital. My mom nearly died. We didn’t stay in Wisconsin. Too cold. Too far away from roots, from family. So we moved back to California, where I was born and had lived for a short while before Baton Rouge.

Lots of things happened when we lived in California. Not all of them good. Many of them scandalous and interesting, anecdotally, though less fun to live through. Some of them were good, even very good. I wanted to learn to play the drums, and my mom insisted that she was happy for that to happen, but she wanted me to take piano lessons first. Safe to say that she didn’t always know best, but she nailed that one, and I still don’t play the drums.

My mom was my confidante. She was the person to whom I sheepishly confessed my various juvenile crushes. We sang Disney soundtracks at the top of our lungs in the sunken living room where I first learned of a family member’s death. It seemed like a bit of fun, something special to share when dad was at work, but in retrospect, I suppose it was probably a desperate attempt on her part to somehow conjure enough joy to push the sadness away. Occasionally, I would steer the car on the highway as we traveled back and forth between the various parts of California that pretend each other don’t exist. It was a Honda Accord, license plate 2SJL465. Eventually, I was too tall for it, but there was a time when I would stretch out in the back seat and we would sing.

Despite my best intentions and generally solid citizenship and academic performance, I still managed to make some of the requisite teenage mistakes. You guessed it, my mom loved me anyway. But she nearly died, then, too.

It’s not my story to tell, and I’m not sure I know it well enough to tell it. Now that my mom’s gone, it’s a story that will go untold, or fall into the clutches of an untrustworthy remembrancer (thanks, Pynchon!), or slip through the cracks of memory as do most. But all of our stories are true (thanks, Me!).

My mom wanted to kill herself. Perhaps it wasn’t so much my mom as it was the insidious coercion of the downswing that counterbalanced the mania that made her so fun and engaging on her best days. The days that lead a child to believe anything is possible. The belief that fosters the most foolish of dreams, which then serve to sustain us through the grimness of the inescapable mundane.

Whatever it was, she wanted to die. Fortunately, she told a psychiatrist. My dad told me at Taco Bell. I definitely wanted to make a run for the border. Clovis and Herndon. There wasn’t a freeway then, but I’m glad to see that the donut shop my friends and I went to at opening time is still there. Chocolate milk and fresh donuts were the stuff of teenage dreams, soz Katy.

Things were never much the same after that. In all likelihood, they were never as they had been before that either, but the pretense of the pantomime was no longer negotiable. The deus ex macarena’s masque had slipped. It was around this time that I again encountered the panicked mother who had cried in anger and relief in the kitchen of our house in Platteville when I returned home following the tornado incident.

During the latter stages of high school, I was the oldest one of my friend group, and the driver. We had many adventures. One night, we had gone to my friend’s house, and when it was very late and time to leave, I was too tired to drive safely, so we decided to take a walk for a bit of fresh air. My friend’s house was on the outskirts of town, and at dumb o’clock in the morning, with blankets, we strolled down the long driveway and along the road. We were visited by a stray dog, which was oodles of fun after having just watched a bit of Cujo. When we made our way back to the house, day breaking ever so slightly, we were greeted by my friend’s mother. She stood waiting in the open doorway, a pose she’d held for who knows how long. My mom had called, worried because I hadn’t come home yet. There was trouble. Again, because she loved me.

Life was challenging when I left home for college. My last hurrah was a very grown-up two-day stand with some very talented jazz musicians at Idyllwild’s Jazz in the Pines festival. I drove, we played, and it was all exquisitely Rite of Passage-y. After it was over, I had to drive home, and there was very little wiggle room in the schedule. Being young and free, when it came time to make the trip, I was exhausted. The route homeward took me through the town I had lived in when we first moved to California, and with the City of Angels soundtrack blaring, it seemed sensible enough to swing by old haunts and attempt to gather some energy for the remaining hours of the journey.

I pulled down the dirt road and stopped at the broken security gate on Deep Creek Road, where we’d lived in a doublewide on a big piece of property overlooking a subdivision that went belly up before that was even in fashion. It’s where we lived when the Berlin Wall came down. Along the sidewalk outside the house I had practiced keeping my toes on the cement while catching the football that I threw into the air. With a black Adirondack baseball bat, I sprayed baseballs all around the undeveloped dirt lot, always focusing on height and power rather than contact.

We took to the cats and dogs that wandered around. My mom gave the impression of being relatively happy, as we’d come in from the cold, and I went to school, where I excelled because the educational system in Wisconsin had put me ahead of the curve, rather than by any merit of my own. I won a spelling bee for the school.

Waltz.

It was also the school where I cried hysterically because I failed a math test when I didn’t realise there were problems on the back of the page. It was where I got lined up with a number of my classmates outside of Mrs. Walton’s class and cried as we were told off for our liberal application of newly acquired swear words. She was a great teacher, and since I was about to set off to attend one of the most prestigious schools in the country, I wanted to go back and thank her. In the school office, they told me that she didn’t work there anymore, and they told me which school she had moved to. I drove to the school, and when I went to the office there, they advised me that she was on playground duty and would not be available to speak to me. So, I left, and made a wrong turn on Route 66. To the right, coincidentally.

When I got back to Fresno, we had a goodbye lunch at my mom’s favourite Mexican restaurant. I said goodbye to my friends in the parking lot. Car park. (Assimilation error.) It was painful for me. It looked painful for them. When I got on the train, it killed my mom, I’m sure. I didn’t tell GJ about that, though. GJ was a punk-haired, black-fingernailed fellow who I sat next to from LA to Chicago. He was going to Bard.

I got to Swarthmore, and for all the fear mongering and pride, it wasn’t a challenge. So, while things fell apart back in California, I tried to make it into one. The first year was an adjustment period. For all of us, I imagine. My poor roommate had to cope with Billy Joel or Harry Connick, Jr. albums on loop for weeks at a time. I began singing in a cappella groups, arranging for one, and cracking high notes in the other. My favourite singing was that which I did alone in the bell tower, or on the out-of-tune upright in Upper Tarble. The night was my own, and I sang to it. Amid all the other things I did — mostly wrong — it never occurred to me that anyone listened.

My mom drove from California to Philadelphia to pick me up after freshman year, so that we could have some time together as we drove all the way back. When she got to campus, she came from the wrong side, and ended up at the Rose Garden (my room was in Hallowell). She asked someone if they could help her to find me. It was Jared Solomon, who I never met, but knew was the student body President. When she gave him my name, he said, “The singer?”

While there may have been many other things of which my mother was proud, I suspect that moment was quite high on the list, at least as judged by the number of trips made to karaoke nights, where I was forced to come to grips with just how hard it is to find something useful to do while waiting for the solo in Ants Marching to finish. She was proud, we spent time together, and it helped her to repair some of the fraying that my leaving the nest had done. We had, it should be noted, sung throughout most of the cross-country trek back to California. The Prince of Egypt soundtrack, Garth Brooks, Mariah Carey, Boyz II Men. It was the 90s. Get off my lawn.

The second year is when everything properly fell apart. At the end of it, my parents weren’t together, and Swarthmore and I were “on a break.” All of my anxiety dreams are centred around this period, for the most part. The empty duplex, a Swarthmore where I never found my classes. Where I was nothing. I moved with my mom into what was perhaps not an ideal situation, but I reasoned that it was only for a short spell, so the quirks were able to be overcome. I commuted from the end of the BART line to a then dream-job at Borders. The people I worked with were fun and interesting. They thought I was a good singer, if a bit unattractive. It was not very rewarding, financially, but I enjoyed it for the month-or-so that it carried on. I had to quit because, one night, upon returning “home,” I was told by the homeowner that I was no longer welcome. My mom eventually followed out of the house, and some discussions were had. I had no home for a few short days, and I believe my mom may have spent a night or two in a truck before returning.

It was decided that I would move to live with my dad, and after bouncing around the homes of co-workers (and a co-worker’s friend!) for a few nights, I spent an afternoon waiting outside of the Borders in San Ramon, hungover and suffering in the sun. I was waiting for my mom to bring my things so that I could gather the possessions that would come with me to Missouri. Out of the bed of the pickup truck that I had driven so many miles, I plucked a life that I could carry. As I watched my mom and Michael drive away, it had the feeling of a last time. I thought that it could be the last time that I saw her. Turns out, that intuition wasn’t far off.

My mom loved me. The problem was that she had never really figured out how to love herself. She found a man, in Michael, who loved her dearly. They faced many struggles together, but they had each other and enough love to carry them through 16 years of ups and downs. I am so grateful that she found such a companion. But the last few years have been very difficult, and her health has been in steady decline for longer than I knew. If you knew me through the start of college, you may well have had the good fortune to know my mom in some capacity. If we’ve met after that, you probably don’t.

I saw my mother five times after that day with the hangover. That was in 2000. Granted, two of those were visits of a few days, but it’s not a lot, any way you slice it. She never met Ezra.

My mom was so much more than the world or her own mind ever let her be. She wasn’t supposed to be able to have children, and when she ended up with me, I think that she was both amazed and perplexed. To her, I was a miracle that she wanted protect, but I also altered her life in ways that she might not have delighted in. She taught me to be silly, and to love, and to forgive. She was a gifted artist who never had the leisure or external support to pursue the craft for any considerable period of time. The most excited I heard her in recent years was when she’d been in contact with a gallery owner who was interested in displaying her work. At 68, with failing health, and in a precarious financial situation, there was a brief flash of a different life that may have been possible were it not for psychological trauma and illness.

Our last conversation was not a pleasant one. It was one week before she died, and I was responding to some concerns that she had expressed about our relationship. Distilled, I told her that I loved her very much and that it was important that she stop spending so much of her time and energy worrying about things and being wracked by perceived injustices. It was important for her to get back to being who she was meant to be. To make art. To enjoy life. The signs are that she took some steps in that direction in the intervening week.

For a number of years, my mom managed self-storage facilities. When she was doing so in “The Bay Area,” I used to prank call her. I’d put on a bizarre accent, or insist that I’d called a pizza place, or ask questions strongly suggestive of intended improper use of a storage unit. Being so professional, she always did her best to address my query, and was relieved when I eventually revealed that it was only us calling to say hello. In our last call, there had been issues with her phone battery, and on a few occasions there had been a brief delay as she or a phone transited some portion of her apartment. I asked her, “Is he keeping you locked up? Blink twice for ‘yes.’” It was the last time I made her laugh.

I know this is very long. If you are still reading it, I am sorry. My mom loved to read my writing. She thought I was great at it. It’s why I felt like I had to write something. I haven’t been able to string two thoughts together since I found out. And I just keep adding words because then, it’s not over yet. It’s not real. I am not Sara Benincasa, and I am not fast. This has taken me 2 days to start and nearly a whole day to write. But I loved my mom, and I don’t want to say goodbye now anymore than I did in that parking lot. Life doesn’t let you make those choices, though. You don’t get to know when the last laugh is actually the last laugh until the sound is all gone and the air is silent, nothing but a vacuum you want to shout at until it’s replaced by one more chance to say, “I love you.”

But you can’t go back.

Time doesn’t turn. Voldemort is dead.

So is my mom.