The Death of Her Mother

Her parents spent every special occasion the same: a movie and dinner. Taylor often joined them, because she lived only forty minutes away, in Los Angeles. She could map the past year out by Holiday-Movie: Labor Day, Jeremy’s Course; Halloween, Death After Zombie; Thanksgiving, Seventh Dinner; Christmas, The Outfitters: Hereafter; New Year’s, Operation Agency 4; and so on. Her parents preferred the shared but individual space of the movie theater for their celebrations—a miracle of a social activity absent socialization. It matched the backwards way they cared for others, loving by ceaseless criticism.

In the most recent movie she saw with them, the hero’s motivation hinged on the death of his family. Three people killed off in several swift flashes of backstory—the hero’s brutal dismembering of dozens of evil henchmen now justified. Or so the calculus went. No one could fail to comprehend the gravity of losing a loved one, let alone three. 

As Taylor watched, she wondered how long it would take for the fictional dead to surpass in number the dead of human history, if ever. Every film she saw seemed to raise this question in some form. Her cynicism convinced her that that time could not be far off.

The grief of losing a parent. The grief of losing a child. The endless conflicts of a family uniting for the funeral of an emotionally distant patriarch. The classic arcs of death assembled themselves so readily in her mind.

On the news the next day, four dead in a car crash. Twenty children dead from a bomb. An explosion killed hundreds. She thought, “These could all be the starts of great espionage thrillers.”

In a call with her parents, she mentioned this while on speaker phone. The word “desensitized” unraveled from her mother.

She thought to herself, it’s not desensitization when it’s reality. They all already were the starts of gripping espionage thrillers. She wouldn’t have known the tragedies could work so well otherwise. She rattled off the titles in her head: Extradition, Dead Break, Second Life, Dawn of Night. Extradition won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. 

She brought it up again with her parents several weeks later at Red Robin after seeing another film together where the main character, a woman, struggled to rediscover love after losing her husband of one year five years ago. The ambience of Red Robin enclosed their booth in a utensil-scraping, voice-murmuring bubble. Taylor looked around for their waiter, who had promised to replenish their basket of fries ten minutes ago, and said, “What dead lover ensures our waiter brings us another basket of French fries on time?”

Her parents stared at her. Her mom said, “What are you going on about?”

“I’m just wondering, how do we all do anything without the ghost of a dead loved one haunting us?”

“You’re going to start with this again?” her mom replied.

“I’m just saying what’s on my mind. The movie made me think of it.”

“Death happens. Are people not allowed to tell stories about it?”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Then what do you mean?”

She stared at her mother. She wanted to say, “I mean people use death as a crutch to make people take their story seriously. They aren’t actually interested in death. They’ve just run out of ideas.” But the arch expression her mother wore, a devastating leitmotif of Taylor’s childhood and adolescence that presaged the onset of a magnificently passive aggressive argument, convinced Taylor to say nothing. Thankfully, the waiter arrived at their table with their food, and her father commenced a paean to the taste and temperature of his burger that distracted everyone from Taylor’s opinions.

A week later, Taylor’s cell phone vibrated with a call while she lay in bed. When she answered, her mother’s voice greeted her on the other side of the line. She wanted Taylor to put together a scrapbook for Taylor’s father’s birthday next month. “He loves your scrapbooks more than mine,” she said. “I’ve seen him going through them for hours for no reason. Just because.”

Taylor sat there quietly, failing to recall her father displaying any interest in their family’s scrapbooks recently, those made by her or her mother. Then she said, “I don’t scrapbook anymore. It’s a waste of money.”

“Just do it again this one more time. He’ll appreciate it. Plus, you’re always asking me for gift ideas. This is one.”

“Yeah, but I want gift ideas he’ll actually like.”

“I’m telling you he likes your scrapbooks.”

Taylor remained silent. She didn’t know what would possess her mother to lie about this.

“He’s getting older,” her mother continued. “He’s sentimental now.”

Taylor said, “Fine,” but only so she could hang up. Her mother thanked her and promised to email the pictures later in the day. They talked a few minutes more about Taylor’s job at the magazine. Once the call ended, Taylor silently resolved to not amend her original plan of buying her father a fall coat, since she constantly heard him complaining about chills and drafts at the theater.

When his birthday came and went the next month, she found to her surprise she had actually worked on the scrapbook ever so slightly. She had progressed about a fifth through the pictures her mother had sent her. She thought she could understand why her mom (she believed the scrapbook was for her mom) might want this particular trip memorialized: many of the pictures were of Taylor and her father standing together in front of magic hour landmarks, his arm beached along her bony shoulders, hers hooked lightly to his distended hip. Only one or two of them featured Taylor’s mother. This didn’t surprise Taylor. Her mother possessed countless stratagems for absenting herself from family photos. 

Taylor’s father regularly wore the fall coat she bought him for his birthday. Her mother joked several times about how he would wear it to his own funeral, he loved it so much.

At work, a colleague in Sales that Taylor had never met died in a car accident. Her best friend, Marianne, who worked in Graphics, said over lunch that she planned to take work off for a week: “I need to reset, you know? Henry’s death has really … made me rethink things.”

“You only ever saw him once in the parking lot.”

“I know, but it’s like … he was one of us. He made the same salary as us, he hated his job like us, he went home and escaped his life with reality television like one of us.”

“I hate reality television.”

“Don’t say things you’ll regret, Taylor.”

Taylor asked herself, what switch had her life flipped off that prevented her from registering the proper emotional feedback at the death of a Henry from Sales? She thought about him and felt all the grief of someone waiting at a stoplight.

Her mother told her while watching television, “You’ve never experienced loss.”

“Grandma and Grandpa.”

“You saw them once a year at best.”

“Oh so do I need to raise a child and have it disemboweled in front of my eyes to understand what it’s like to lose someone?”

“I don’t know. But your life has been easy. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Easy?”

“Easy.”

Her mom tallied the invoice. Private school: check. Private college: check. Six-figure parents: check. No college debt: check. Access to internet her entire life: check. Healthcare: check. Etc. The list made a mockery of all her past and future life obstacles.

Then there was her love life. She used a dating app to meet college-educated strangers for thirty-minute coffee breaks during the workweek. She didn’t have a high success rate of second dates, but she went on them more to talk to people than meet a partner.

“Our reliance on death is lazy,” she said to one of the dates, a guy. He had said he liked movies, so it seemed appropriate to grind her death axe.

“You’re kind of morbid and cynical at the same time, aren’t you?” he replied.

“I’m realistic. I’m making an observation about reality.”

“I’m going to guess you’ve never cried at a movie.”

“Where the Red Fern Grows. The entire night afterwards.”

“Dogs.”

“Joke’s on you. I’m a cat person.”

The last bit was a lie. She didn’t like dogs or cats, but she realized long ago that not liking dogs or cats paralyzed the imagination and sympathy of others.

The guy laughed. He asked to see her again at the end of the date, and she struggled to manufacture breath, since no one had asked to see her again at the end of one of her coffee dates before. A crazy impulse to fabricate some excuse seized her—she wanted to tell him she had the funeral of a family member to attend. She suppressed the desire, however, and between stutters, managed to agree to meet him again next week.

The next time Taylor and her mother spoke on the phone, her mother told her not to wear her standard t-shirt and jeans outfit to the second date. “He’ll think you don’t care,” she said.

“I already wore a t-shirt and jeans to the first date ’cause I didn’t care,” she replied. “It’ll look weird if I get dressed up for the second one. Maybe he enjoyed my indifference?”

“No one likes someone who doesn’t care. Don’t bring up movies either. You have unpopular opinions.”

She didn’t enlighten her mother on the uselessness of that particular piece of advice. Her mother agonized over her peculiarities, insisted they accounted for her life’s complete lack of romance. Taylor saw them as the only romance in her life.

The second date progressed as well as the first. So did the third. When her mother died before the fourth, Taylor canceled over text. The man assured her he understood and apologized for her loss. She didn’t reply to him.

Her mother died of fatal cardiac arrhythmia caused by an irregularity of the heart. The circumstances of her death were mundane: her father dropped a plate in the kitchen and startled Taylor’s mother to death in the other room. The surprise caused her mother’s heart to beat at a rapid pace for too long, leading to her fainting, then dying. Taylor’s father didn’t discover what he’d done until he walked back into the living room where Taylor’s mother lay lifeless. He carried a plate of nachos, which he carefully set down on the living room table in case his wife was asleep.

Taylor took time off work to mourn as soon she found out. Her father called her with her mother’s phone, having accidentally broken his in the mayhem of the first responders and the ride to the hospital. She ate only instant ramen for a week afterwards, taking her meals in bed while she binged Try Not to Laugh videos on her laptop. She developed the circadian rhythm of a stay-at-home vampire, sleeping for ten hours before nightfall and unspooling with the moon. Opening her eyes became a war of attrition between her dreams and the minor complaints of her neglected body.

She never heard or saw her father cry. When they talked on the phone, he indulged in long, deliberative silences and never avoided reminding her of how tough it was now that her mother was gone. “It’s tough,” he said with a long sigh. “It’s hard.”

“That’s all you ever say,” she told him.

The silence he replied with rebuked her cruelty. “Things are difficult,” he said. “For both of us.”

She hung up on him. But he still called her three days later. He didn’t ask for an apology.

Exactly thirteen people showed up to the funeral, which was family only. All cousins of some sort, to Taylor or her mother. The number filled her with resentment. During the ceremony, a video played of her mother, a montage of grainy, handheld, at-home clips, all of them of her mother smiling or laughing. As Taylor watched, her mother, standing in the kitchen, looked at her and told her she loved her, and Taylor felt the architecture of her chest tremble in upheaval.

The next year, to commemorate her mother’s death, she and her father went to dinner and a movie on her mother’s birthday. The movie lasted about an hour and a half; the dinner, the same. On the drive home from the restaurant, her father raised the issue of Taylor’s suspicion of death in art: “I think I understand what you were trying to say about people not taking death seriously now,” he said, his eyes on the road.

She shook her head. “I was stupid.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I never experienced loss.”

“Why would you have needed to experience loss?”

She sat there. Her mouth fell open.

“It’s because your mother died that I understand what you were getting at,” her father added.

A pressure began to form behind her eyes. She hadn’t cried over her mother’s death for nearly eight months. She changed the subject to basketball, which she knew her father liked talking about.

She contacted Coffee Date Guy a year and a half after the death of her mother. He remained single, and agreed to see her again. The ease with which she reconnected with him convinced her he had profound emotional pathologies as well as a substance abuse problem to cope. How else could he still be single? He had such a small face and strong chin. 

On the other hand, he did wear glasses.

After sitting down with their coffee, the first thing she said to him on their date was, “I’m sorry I canceled on you.”

He said, “Your mother died.”

She said, “Still.”

He said, “Well, we’re here now.”

They stared at each other. She turned her coffee cup on the table. “All I mean is I wouldn’t have been surprised if you had assumed I was lying to you,” she added, unable to drop it. “About my mother.”

“Lying?”

“Yeah, people lie about stuff like that all the time to get out of things. Go watch Holiday at Nellie’s. Go talk to any college student.” She didn’t bring up how she had toyed with the idea of lying to him when he had asked for a second date the first time they met. The irony of that memory caused her too much physical pain.

He stared at her, expression perplexed.

“You would have been totally justified in hating me,” Taylor said.

Coffee Date Guy’s mouth opened and closed several times in the manner of someone attempting to whistle. “You didn’t make up the death of your mother, though,” he said. “She died, right?”

She nodded. “Yeah, she did. I’m just saying.” She took a sip of her coffee and avoided looking at him.

Coffee Date Guy reached over and took her left hand in his. He held and squeezed it, almost painfully. He went on like this for several minutes. She didn’t resist. His urgency arrested her. She didn’t know if she should feel scared or touched. She thought he seemed to be trying to impress into the map of her knuckles that no amount of dispassionate imagination could rewrite the honesty of her grief, or the guilt of her past.

When she called her father a week later to ask if she should bring anything to a dinner they planned to have in a few days, she got his voicemail. She heard the robot: “You’ve reached the voicemail of.” Then her mother’s voice followed: “Gloria Harris.” Her father still hadn’t changed the voicemail on her mother’s phone. Taylor didn’t leave a message after the beep.

Her father cooked the dinner himself: three cheese lasagna. They drank red wine with it. Their conversation formed sporadically. But her father surprised her with a question in the middle of the meal:

“Did you ever start on that scrapbook your mother asked you to make for my birthday?” he said.

She stared at him. “You knew about that?” she asked. 

“It was my idea.”

She processed this information. “Why? Why would you want that?”

Her father poked his lasagna with his fork. “I like looking at the pictures and imagining you putting them together. I don’t know.”

“I thought Mom made all of that up. I thought she wanted the scrapbook for herself.”

“No. It was for me.” A slight pause followed. “So I take it you never made it?”

She shook her head, her shoulders collapsing onto her chest, her body metastasizing into her chair. She remembered her assumption of her mother’s dissembling. Taylor had seen no point in continuing with the scrapbook after her mother’s death, though she couldn’t say it hadn’t often crossed her mind as a reminder of her talent for maternal disappointment.

The lights in the house seemed to flicker for a brief moment as a draft passed out of the room.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s fine,” her father answered. “It’s not a big deal.”

The dinner ended with several helpings of lasagna uneaten. Taylor took them home for leftovers. As she placed them in the fridge at her place, she found herself organizing a scrapbooking schedule in her head, blocking off weekends to perform a pastime from a forgotten stage of her life.

A month later, she stopped by her father’s place to drop the finished scrapbook off. It had required several weekends and the purchase of countless stickers and varidesigned photo corners to finish, but she had done it. When she put it in his hands, she said, “Here.”

He opened it slightly and let the pages cascade together like a wheel. “You made it,” he replied. 

She didn’t say anything.

He turned the scrapbook over, though the front and back were identically blue and unadorned. Then he opened to a random page. “New York. Your mother’s not in many of these.”

“No, she’s not.”

They stood there quietly as he continued to flip through the scrapbook, Taylor feeling outflanked by the moment.

Her father’s phone rang then. He looked at it, and said, “Doris. She’ll call back.” Taylor nodded without saying anything. Doris was a friend of Taylor’s mother who routinely called her father since the funeral. Taylor knew other friends of her mother’s called every now and then too, to check up on him, confirm he hadn’t succumbed to broken heart syndrome. The ingredients of a romantic drama all stood poised to coalesce before him if he just possessed the urgency to activate them. Several months later, however, he finally changed the voicemail on his phone, and her mother’s friends gradually called less and less frequently, leaving him to die a widower a decade after the death of Taylor’s mother, beyond the explanation of a broken heart. Taylor grieved a little less at his funeral and took only a couple of days off work, not because she didn’t love him, but because she had experience now coping with the ambiguity of unresolved endings.