In the twilight of October 29, my mother arrived for a visit to my home, traveling all the way across the country. It was the first time ever. She had vowed never to fly after being on an airplane that was struck by lightning. “Even the Monsignor was praying,” she told me. My mom always felt that she was a magnet for lightning. Another time she was in a cabin in the woods with the door open during a storm. A ball of lightning rolled into the room, right up to her, then rolled out. By putting herself in the sky, she was asking for trouble. But this time she came in an urn, other flames turning her mortal body into something containable, something that would never again tell a tall tale or shrink in fear. Ashes to ashes.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the mail carrier said. Her face was brown and young and kind.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I talked to her the whole way,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
She reached in her pocket to give my dog Josie a dog cookie, still holding the box labeled CREMATED REMAINS. Then I remembered that I was supposed to take the box.
I brought Mom inside. “I love you, Mom,” I said to the box and put her in the back room. The finality of the ashes. The intensity of love. A creeping sense of regret. A rising sense of peace. I put it all in the back room and returned with my dog to the street. We walked down the block together, past windows lit up by TV screens and chandeliers, past driveways where cars had returned after long days of being parked elsewhere. I have often felt our aloneness, mine and Josie’s, two survivors of what was once a family. But now the knowledge of my mother’s ashes in my home made me feel connected to this place. How can I be alone now that she lives with me? Is that morbid of me? Maybe. But I feel the truth of it as we hurry home past the plastic skeletons of Halloween.
The next day, October 30. “Happy birthday, Mom,” I said, drinking my morning coffee with her.
Halloween, we gave out candy. All Saint’s Day we vacuumed.
**
In writing about my life, the words have felt too angry, too simple, sputtering with hurt and rage. And now that my mom is dead these three months, I know why. In writing about my life, my gaze has always been firmly fixed on myself. I could only see and feel from the perspective of an 8-year-old girl, standing in a trailer court with her sister as her mother is driven off in a police car. I could only see myself, and my sister, and the harm that came our way because of our mother’s failure to protect us.
But memoir writers often use their own blood and tears as ink, writing to make sense of their wounds at the hands of governments, cultures, fathers, mothers. How are we supposed to gain enough distance from our pain to write a bigger story, one with more than just one fully felt character?
Jeannette Walls does it by keeping her gaze fixed without judgment on the secondary characters. Walls, in the opening scene of her memoir The Glass Castle shrinks down in a taxi on her way to a gala, hiding from her mother who is rooting through the trash. She meets her mother for dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the next scene and tells her she is worried about her and wants to help her.
Her smile faded. “What makes you think I need your help?”
“I’m not rich,” I said. “But I have some money. Tell me what it is you need.”
She thought for a moment. “I could use an electrolysis treatment.”
“Be serious.”
“I am serious. If a woman looks good, she feels good.”
“Come on, Mom.” I felt my shoulders tightening up, the way they invariably did during these conversations. “I’m talking about something that could help you change your life, make it better.”
“You want to help me change my life?” Mom asked. “I’m fine. You’re the one who needs help. Your values are all confused.”
Walls wants to help her mother, even though her mother denies needing her help. But Walls never judges her mother, and she never pities herself. She lets her mother speak, and Walls puts herself on the page, too, unafraid to make her own self appear misguided here. Walls presents her mother in all her mother’s certitude of how she has chosen to live. Walls’ mother is not beneath the narrator, not above her, but directly and clearly in front of her.
I didn’t understand this kind of direct gaze at my mother until October 29, 2025. I didn’t understand this until it was too late. For so long, I was in the camp of the scathing, poised my whole life to write an angry obituary of my mother, like some choose to do.
Now that my mother is dead, the judgment I’ve leveled against her turned to ashes as surely as she did. I’ve spoken to a first cousin and her mother who gave me a glimpse into understanding what a hell my mother’s childhood most likely was. My grandfather I knew to be a violent alcoholic. What I didn’t know was that he preyed on very young women. Did he prey on my mother? I won’t ever know. The china and silver of predation, handed down from generation to generation. Since she died, a rogue wave of regret keeps knocking at me—the regret that I can’t be bigger or better or more kindhearted, more forgiving than I was.
Everything I might have asked her I can’t.
If you are writing a memoir, and there’s a person in your life that you have not allowed to speak, or be seen, I urge you to reconsider that. Writing the secondary characters around us is an act of load-bearing empathy, of deep listening, sometimes of forgiveness. I urge you to do some further thinking. Not for the sake of the dead, but for your writerly self that might not have the whole story. Might not.
The navel is our body’s reminder of the umbilical cord that once connected us to our mother’s placenta, a portal to her oxygen and nutrients. No wonder we are accused of “navel gazing” when we look there, remembering how she once was everything to us, how she gave us life. It’s too late for me to ask any questions of her. Is it too late for you?