My mother died a week after I got married. No one in my family knew about the wedding except for one sibling who wasn’t able to attend, so my husband and I married in the back chapel with the priest and two of the sweetest people from our parish witnessing. Neither of us wanted a big wedding, or an advertised wedding, or an expensive wedding, and we got it. I fronted this when I met him: just so you know, if we get married, I want it to be as small and clandestine as possible. I really do not want a big event. When you find the man who wants the same thing too, you marry him. Our wedding day was on a holy solemnity, but I asked Our Lady about it and she didn’t say no, and now we will be going to mass every single anniversary. The rosary my husband gave me the preceding Valentine’s Day was my bouquet.

I was out of the loop when my mother died, as I had been out of communication with her and most of my family for years. Most of them didn’t know that I moved or had a new number, so I was reached out to by a family member who was in the loop. I didn’t think to update anyone, as I wasn’t ready, and I was still in that post-marital state where we were settling into marriage and enjoying this phase of our lives. No one responded to my emails until I said “we” would not be in attendance. Being out of the loop and then finding out in her obituary when her funeral mass would because I googled it, it just wasn’t enough time to make it back to my Upstate New York town in time. And I guess it doesn’t matter when you haven’t seen someone for years anyway. I can guess which of my siblings wrote the obituary based on the writing style and what is missing from my mother’s biography, as there’s chunks of her life missing, with distinct events that were lumped into other events, and people missing from her surviving family, but I think that’s just how obituaries go: it’s the first time you are no longer in control of your own narrative, but the first time that the dynamics you’ve created to orbit around you are without a center and reflect back what is known.

But reflecting later on, I realized that her obituary was probably appropriate – there were family members she didn’t know about. I also realized that the first things I noticed missing from her biography weren’t events related to being a wife or a mother, because there was really nothing to say: yes she was a wife, yes she was a mother, but these identities weren’t important to her, and those people who gave the identities weren’t nearly as important as the rest of the world was. I’m sure the people who benefited from all the things she put her family aside for gushed at her funeral, and then they will forget her, assuming she’s a saint because look at all the nice things she did for me.

It’s not with resentment that I say there was nothing to say about her as a wife and mother other than that she was one. It was not something she really wanted or wanted to identify with. It’s not something she poured her interest or energy in, and it wasn’t something she wanted to be known for. We do exist, so it would strange to not include us in her obituary, but even if you could get us all in a room peacefully to agree on something, it would take a long time to come up with something. Even for a Catholic, the fact that a female Boomer’s heart and soul was poured into something other than her sacramental roles, other than her covenants, is not considered strange.

I am reminded of an old friend of mine who died at 42, presumably alone and without assets, as I read not her obituary but her death notice, which was asking for someone to claim her body as she was indigent. I would assume it’s drugs, if not suicide, based on the city she moved to and how she was looking in those years. I hadn’t seen her in decades; she was someone I knew in elementary school before she moved far away with her mother, as her father wasn’t really involved in her life. A few years after this old friend dies, I read her father’s obituary. He had a relatively long life. He was also a Boomer and I suppose a legend in his own mind. The obituary gushed about his uniqueness and individuality, and then there was this one line about how he was preceding in death by his daughter. Not a cherished daughter or a beloved daughter, but a daughter. This was his only child. I knew about her trauma when we were six years old – did he know? Did he care?

In the end, who cares if you’re unique or follow the beat of your own drum, or if you never say no to any volunteer opportunity? Who cares about your career, your travels? Who cares if you were entertaining at parties? All those cohorts of yours are going to die and those memories will die with them. Most of what we do in the world disappears anyway.

Love, however, endures. It remains embedded in the community. Everything you do for yourself dies with you,

I got Gregorian masses for my mother, for the repose of her soul. I was able to do that. I pray for her. There is still a part of me that wonders if somehow, this was known, this was planned, because she wasn’t able to make herself the center of attention during this one of her children’s weddings, so she did it this way. Around the time, I had a sibling recovering from a difficult childbirth, and I wondered if also, this time, my mother somehow, in some way, died to bring the attention back on herself. It sounds crazy from the outside looking in, but for people who grew up with mothers like mine, we’ve already wondered if death would be the grand finale performance.

The Delusion of Importance: What Do You Actually Do?

I’ve never been a huge fan of sci-fi fantasy; I prefer my fiction to honor the surreal and strange as opposed to create an artifice of the strange and foreign wholecloth. Life is strange enough, and there is enough here that we don’t acknowledge that is truly odd. The same thing that inspires the poet inspires the entrepreneur: there is more here, every day and in all things, than we’re often allowed to acknowledge. I don’t need to indulge in a fantasy so much as I have to honor what is surreal. This makes it difficult for me to really have an online life these days: besides the fact that demands of adult life and anything that’s truly valuable requires you to live in the real world, there’s already enough here to work with. I wish my mother had seen that. I wish she had been able to find purpose and meaning in her life without always seeking external validation. She would have been a keyboard warrior had she been younger. I’m very sure of it. I know that she wasn’t able to walk outside on a quiet day (as if our neighborhood was ever quiet. The boys who lived next door the longest have all been in prison for something, and at least one is a lifestyle criminal) and just see how strange it is. The ash tree that is so huge, reaching up into every cloudy day, life still and stoic above her. The sugar maples that lined the property, the tangles of black raspberries. The patch of grass that would never grow because even when we cordoned it off, the postman would still walk all over it: it told it story, from the yard’s perspective. Would you even believe a place as cold and clannish such as Auburn, NY would have the source of maple syrup everywhere? What if you took a quiet walk in the morning and scared the scores of crows in all the trees and send them cawing and fleeing upward and onward to another tree? The town is famous for all the crows. Some say it’s because of the prison or Fort Hill Cemetery, but the crows reminded me of something important very early on: all of the people I know would either die or disappear, in reality or just within the collective imagination as they will move, change, and forget, crows hopping from one tree to another until they eventually leave town, and eventually, you get so used to them, that you forget they’re even around.

So sometimes, I need to remember that I’m probably just an anonymous observer of all the weird and wonderful things around me. I may be, at any given moment, the most important when I take notice of a skink running across my driveway. I may be, in that moment, the most important when I notice the first paper wasps of the season looking for building material. I may be the most important when I notice the first hard green fruits forming on that struggling blueberry bush out back. Sure, maybe there’s other things that exist in the present time that could matter at some point – things I have done, places I have been, accomplishments recorded on heavyweight paper – but if a skink, a paper wasp, or a blueberry bush don’t know or care, then what it is? Most of the time these days, I’m a middle-aged woman, a married woman, a consultant who is no longer in a court room, a person who is doing X in the community but not Y. I’ve never been a hero, and no one could trick me to think otherwise. I know people who think they’re “fighting fascists” by being inflammatory and abrasive on social media, and that is very important to them, much more important than their mundane reality as employee, spouse, parent, home owner, mortgage-payer, commuter, grocery store patron. I’m not sure who is a fascist anymore, because the definition seems to change depending on who is using the word. It used to have a specific and universal meaning, but that too seems to be a crow displaced and dispersed to yet another tree. I have yet to meet any real life fascists in real life, ever.

A couple nights ago, I had a dream that I was using a very old computer to buy tickets to a Lord Huron show. A year and a half ago, I was trying to get tickets to the concert at Red Rocks, but each time I was ready to pull the trigger, something told me no, you’re not going. At first, I thought I would just need to find someone to go with, but then I realized I could just go solo, but even then, I couldn’t pull the trigger on the solo ticket, because something said to me, you’re not going. The first day of the concert was my last day at my old job, and the second day of the concert, my fiance was helping me with the final tasks of moving, and I left Chicago to start anew. I think about this and how he probably would have gone to the Lord Huron show with me if I had bought tickets before I met him, but I also think this was better. In this dream, I was trying to buy tickets while The Yawning Grave played in the background.

Oh you fool, there are rules, I am coming for you. Darkness brings evil things, oh! The reckoning begins.

I tried to warn you when you weer a child. I told you not the get lost in the wild. I sent you omens and all kinds of signs.

I taught you melodies, poems, and rhymes.

And this was actually true for me. There was a time when I would look up at that giant ash tree in the yard and ask God to make the wind blow. The Finger Lakes tend to be stagnant and breezeless; wind was a novelty. And the wind would blow, and back then I knew it wasn’t me who brought the wind nor took it away. The mistake was thinking that I could harness or direct the wind, and sometimes, I think the mistake we’re all making is that we all think we can do magick, although most of us do it in ways that aren’t creative: if everyone else I know agrees with me, I might be right…I have created truth. If everyone else I ask thinks this about me, it must be who I am…I have created myself. The easiest way to do this is with a curated social media account. Most of the time, we could see past the facade. I know who doesn’t really look like that in real life. I know whose endless squad outings and girl group fun is the cover for broken marriages and the inability to simply be alone with a man and be real with him. I know whose lifestyle is funded by credit, and I know who is relying on a pension still being around, or luck, for their retirement. I know who lives with multiple roommates well passed the age most of us live with multiple roommates in order to afford the ceaseless travel they seem to take no joy in. I know who talks tough on social media but would freeze in real life in a confrontation. I know who isn’t constantly living in a honeymoon. These things we know, but the glamor spell can be powerful, sometimes so powerful that we believe them, and we already know that: we are in a post-magic phase of social media. We are in a post creativity phase of social media. We’re in a post-connectivity phase of social media. We are in a post-experimental phase of social media now that surveillance makes it all evergreen.

It’s breezy here by the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. I don’t ask God to make the wind blow anymore. Sometimes, I ask Him to let it pass over our house as I watch the radar wondering if that’s better than being woken up to go into the basement.

Who am I? I am a person who takes the tornado sirens seriously. I am that person. It’s what I actually do. I am the person who makes my born-and-bred Midwestern farm boy husband humor me and get into the basement, too, because no matter what I do for a living, no matter what I have a degree in, no matter what I have ever written or done, at the end of the day, the last thing I may be known for is being someone who was flung miles away when the roof was ripped off her house, and the last thing I ever do is become a tornado projectile.

Although, wouldn’t it beat all if my Yawning Grave moment would have been just that, a Wizard of Oz moment? After all, I was warned as a child, and I was sent omens and all kinds of signs.

My life is now more like my mother’s life is both more and less like hers than I ever thought possible. On the surface, it’s more like hers. I am devout, and I am involved in my church. I am a wife, and I do live in a modest home in a forgotten part of the country where the industry has long left for sunnier places. I am not a housewife, but I may as well be because I am working from home in a job without glory – as I seem to prefer those it seems – and the home I work in is a modest work in progress. My eyesight is going. I drink a lot of coffee.

But I love my husband. I love my church. I love my volunteer work. I even love my housework, much of the time. I love my home, and I don’t have to worry about something going wrong. I am happy not to be seen at work, or in the community. I don’t mind that I’ve been here for about a year and most people don’t know my first name, let alone how to spell it. I am not talent or ambition thwarted by forces outside of myself. I am trying to get the world to like me or think that I am important. I don’t miss my old life, or see it as freedom. I don’t think anyone will write an obituary for me telling of rainy days when I needed to honor the strangeness of life and sit in a dark basement and write while listening to Lord Huron. I doubt anyone will write about me as a brilliant astrologer because even if I was, who remembers, and who cares? Certainly not the people who would care enough to write my obituary. No one will remember that I spent two years living in South Korea, just as no one remembered that my mother spent about that long living in Fairbanks, Alaska in the 70s when it was still a bit of frontier. No one will remember that I got a JD And I even love the quiet excitement of trying to learn the radar so I can see if we’ll get that storm of the century and if maybe I’ll end up living in a trailer in my own driveway while the insurance company gives me a new roof. Still, no one remembered that my mother spent a year in Florida at New College, when it was brand new, and participated in the first Earth Day before leaving for Alaska, and then not long after, for the Marines. No one will remember all the things I studied in college either. No one will remember that I was at one point a pretty good tutor and that I actually was a freelance writer in law school. No one remembers that my mother worked at Bo-Mer and at Sears before marrying. No one remembers that in her junior year, my mother lived in my grandmother’s old neighborhood, Jackson Heights, and commuted all the way to Fontbonne Hall in Brooklyn. No one remembers that I spent a disastrous year at a small private liberal arts college before fleeing.

No one remembers that her favorite color was lavender, or that her favorite sweet was chocolate, or that her favorite drink was coffee, or that her favorite food was cigarettes. No one remembers that she spent some summers visiting her father’s family in North Carolina during the Jim Crow Era and how she got in trouble at a public pool for using the colored drinking fountain. No one remembers that she was preceded in death by a brother, Matthew, who was stillborn at five months gestation. No one remembers that her favorite flower was a rose, or that she loved Victorian novels, or that she finally had one good recipe under her belt in her 60s, which was chewy oatmeal cookies. No one remembers that she hated raking leaves more than shoveling snow. No one remembers that she would eat peanut butter on a slice of cheddar cheese as a snack. No one remembers that she has seen every episode of Law & Order. No one remembers that she was actually very good at Dr. Mario because there was a time when that’s all she did all day long. No one wrote about the fact that she was very involved in the Right to Life Party in the early 90s, likely because she was more involved with that than with her children, and likely because the woke narrator can’t add that to a life story and still show his/her face on social media.

None of this is to say she was a good mother. She wasn’t, and it was this failing of hers, the thing she didn’t do, that set the tone for how she would be enshrined. But before we are ruined and reckoned with, we are people, and there were things she did that were left out of her history, things that actually made her feel important or interesting. I don’t know if it’s because she didn’t share them with the author of her obituary, or if it’s just the fact that he’s never really been that interested in people to remember details anyway, and if there was a political reason to rush her obituary to publication incomplete, but I have spent the last eight months wondering how much it matters, the narrative or the importance, if it’s all “chasing the wind,” as Ecclesiastes has reminded me this month.

Last night, I prayed against the wind, hoping it wouldn’t turn into funnels as the thunder overhead shook my home. I would have liked my night to have meant more if I would have to lose sleep, but every spring, I take notice of how full and lush the trees are when their leaves are fully unfurled, forgetting their stark and bare branches against the white winter sky, and then every winter, I look up at those bare branches as if they have never and will never leaf again when spring comes.

I believe my mother may know that I’m married now. She may know that I’m reverted, and that I am a follower of Christ now. She may know that I’m flexing my peculiar privilege to live in any pocket of this country and find my stride. It wouldn’t stop her from praying for me too, but I think it would certainly help. I think it may be helpful to know that even if it all began in winter that the leaves came out again. It may be helpful for her to know that my life seems to have a reverse trajectory for the modern era: it actually keeps getting better, and each year is happier than the next, and each nadir isn’t as low as the previous one, and I have no nostalgia for the past, no old glory I want to recapture, nothing to reminiscence over, nothing I want to go back to, as if it all seems to have died with her, as if all the wheels she set in motion fell off the spokes and fell out of the machine because the nut that she was fell out.

It’s been eight months since she died. She is free now, for what that is worth, and the thunder rolls on ahead. Dinner is done and cleaned up, and it’s time to go be a wife and partner upstairs where the music choice is democratic and competes with the cascade of a warm rain I can go stand in because no one in my memory or standing in front of me could stop me, and I have never been tall enough to catch the lightning. Maybe God will make the wind blow for me again.