Five and a half years today. At a certain point it seems meaningless to mark these anniversaries in days, weeks, numbers, and years. But there it is, and somehow you find it impossible to erase.
Is there a point, anymore, in recounting the past? I could talk about the morning of April 17th, at 6 a.m., the jangle of the phone that stirred me from me restless, sporadic night of sleep. I could say that I knew what it was, as people with loved ones who are terminally ill can sense, the second I heard that ring. “Ms. Gluck, this is the hospital. We’re sorry to tell you that your mother passed away last night.” I could recount my sister running into the room, screaming. I couldn’t hug her, I couldn’t cry, all I could say was “it’s done.” I could wonder and try to understand why I used those words now to tell my nineteen year old sister that her mother was gone. Words that, in retrospect, seem so cold and detached. Or I could make up some elaborate metaphor - my life, as I had known it, was done. Maybe that’s what I had meant. I could pretend it would matter somehow, that it made some sort of difference. But the story ends the same way, regardless of the fiction we create to make it more forceful, more dramatic, more palatable, more relatable. And so it goes.
I could describe the minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months that followed. What I read at her funeral, what I wore, the people who came and those who didn’t. The way we buried her, with a card I had sent her just weeks earlier telling her about the trip we would finally take to Italy when she turned sixty - when her health was better, when she was strong enough to walk around and I was stable enough to bring her back to her favorite place in the world. I could recount what it felt like to return to D.C., where I was in law school, and to see the looks on the faces of my classmates as they tried to say they were sorry. One girl just hugged me. She seemed to know, instinctively, that words were pointless. I won’t ever forget the way she hugged me, and the look on her face, even though I have long since forgotten her name.
If anyone wanted to listen, I could try to explain what it felt like to walk around with legs of rubber, just a floating torso, wandering the streets of Washington aimlessly, not seeing what was around me and just knowing I had to keep moving. Maybe someone would understand what it felt like to be an alien - I was no longer anyone’s daughter. Adrift, but the strange thing was that the ocean around me was calm - people went about their business, commuted to work, went shopping, studied for exams, got drunk at happy hours. Their world was unchanged. They would never know about this thing that had happened.
I might be able to remember in bits and pieces what I said to people, what they said back to me. The fights with my sister, the crazy shopping sprees I went on, plunging into deeper and deeper debt. She channeled her grief in a positive way. Me, well I was simply obliterated. I could describe the relationship I got involved in six weeks later, the most serious and painful relationship of my life. One from which I am still not sure I have completely recovered.
I could show you the pictures of Venice, the trip I took with my boyfriend at the time, the trip I was supposed to take with my mother. Instead I went ten months after her death, telling myself I was going in her memory. I could recount the fact that I didn’t cry until I was about to board the train back to Rome, because I realized then, staring at the hoards of pigeons, that she wasn’t there. That the trip had not been about paying tribute to her, but instead an attempt to find her. The hope that somehow, in the mist and bridges and decaying buildings, I might see her as she had been, before the sickness that waged its war of attrition on her organs and she began to disappear little by little.
I could admit that part of me has been searching for her ever since her death. I search for her in friends, in boyfriends, in places, in things. I could talk about my ritual of going through my cell phone address book, searching anxiously through every number, realizing each time that there really isn’t anyone to call. I could say that it hurts just the same each time.
I could explain how time hasn’t healed wounds, it has simply forced me to forge a new life. A body with an alien limb. I’m convinced I can still feel it, even though it’s no longer there.
You might ask me what I will do in the meantime. If it’s a good day, I could tell you that I will try to live a life that does justice to her memory. That I know, eventually, I will find something to grasp onto. That I will make some sense of it and make peace with it and with myself.
Instead, I would probably tell you about Moon River. That it was her favorite song. The idealistic, naive part of me hopes that she is there now, floating off to see the world. I could tell you that I believe that maybe she’s just on the opposite bank now, with her huckleberry friend. That maybe one day, when I stop drifting, I’ll get there myself.
For Marilyn Gluck, 1948 - 2004
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