My brother Steve was 40 when he finally won custody of his teenage son. After years of legal wrangling, the victory came as a huge relief. Steve was convinced that my mother knew in advance of the verdict, and was somehow behind it; she should, therefore, be the first to know. Unable to reach her, though, he wrote a note and delivered it in person. He went to the cemetery and wedged the tightly-folded piece of paper between the earth and my mother’s grave.
“You did what?” I said in disbelief.
He repeated the words, as if the repetition would somehow explain the obvious logic of his action. I could grasp the note-writing part; actually delivering it had me stumped.
During the following years, Steve and I had other exchanges in which he ruminated aloud.
“I had a talk with Mom today,” he would say, despite the fact that my mother had died several years before. Or “Mom liked the new house we rented,” as if my mother were there to appreciate it.
I never questioned Steve about these dissonant, odd phrasings and almost got used to hearing them. The lack of questioning was not, however, due to any lack of curiosity. I was extremely curious about Steve’s view of the world, and my mother’s apparent presence in it. But the fact that we were talking about the same mother could not override my sense that Steve was describing something completely private, between my mother and him, outside of me.
That he had given her an afterlife, an existence beyond death, was part of it. But the sheer defiance of reinventing my mother in the present tense left me speechless. Which is, perhaps, as it should be.
Unlike virtually anything else, one’s memories of someone who has died are entirely singular. Conversation on the subject is by invitation only. I should have learned this from my mother when she was dying.
During the three months of her illness, my mother spoke often about death, about her belief in an afterlife, and about her own mother’s death. She would describe an afterlife in vivid, compelling terms as if it were a travel destination. In a sense, I suppose it is.
She also recalled this story: About a year after her own mother had died, my mother, then 30, had a strange experience. She was asleep one winter night, the blankets half-tossed off the bed. She awoke to the sensation of her own mother pulling the blankets over her shoulders, under her chin. My mother’s telling of the story was a simple relating of facts, unembellished.
I don’t know what actually occurred that night. My mother’s story seemed so complete, so self-contained, that it left no room for inquiry. To question it would have risked the appearance of a challenge, and the risk wasn’t worth it. The closest I ever got to a question was an awkward, self-conscious, “So I might hear from you, or see you, later?” She nodded, and we moved on to something else.
It is now many years since my mother died, and I have long since given up thinking that I might have my own version of the blanket episode. But years later, I am certain that my mother’s “encounter” with her own mother was real. It wasn’t an actual physical encounter; clearly, my grandmother was unavailable for blanket-tucking. But something happened that night with the blanket that was soothing and sustaining, even if only in a dream. It stayed with my mother for the remaining four decades of her life.
So, what do I make of blankets that get mysteriously tucked in the night, and notes delivered to a cemetery?
I was invited into these conversations to listen; my opinion wasn’t sought or desired. It frankly didn’t matter. What matters is that even the congenitally curious, like myself, can easily grasp that some kinds of truth are better left unquestioned.
— Joan Silverman is a writer in Kennebunk. This column appeared earlier in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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