a very good adventure
dispatch 64
hi friends. How are you doing out there? First, thank you for the kind words on my return posts. They buoyed me in ways I can’t begin to describe. To those who reached out about their own experiences, past and present, with grief, thank you for your trust I am so grateful to witness you. You are not alone. Thank you for reminding me that I am also not alone.
I am feeling the drumbeat of grief in my everyday life, feeling the season change, and supporting myself as best as I can as I somehow pass the six month mark of my mother’s death. Today’s dispatch is an adapted version of what I read at her celebration of life this summer.
A quick housekeeping note: I will likely not be posting with a regular cadence as I continue to navigate grief. That said, subscriptions are once again turned on with all funds being split monthly through the remainder of 2024 between the Middle Eastern Children’s Alliance and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief in support of those impacted by Milton and Helene. Where I am financially able I will be matching funds.
a very good adventure
When I was little, I spent a lot of time in the car with my mother, shuttling between all the obligations and elements of our family life in her hunter-green Jeep Grand Cherokee. It was, at best, a 50/50 shot on whether she knew where she was going, but she would never admit to a weakness as pedestrian as a lacking sense of direction.
A lot of times we wound up wandering some Long Island neighborhood as the street lights started to come on. Because I like to poke danger, I’d ask if we were lost. Her answer was always clear: We were not lost; we were on an adventure.
That word, adventure, from my mother changed things. Suddenly an ordinary neighborhood was full of mystery and possibility. I’d sit up straighter in my seat, straining my eyes to read the street signs when she asked, pleased to be her co-pilot, a part of her adventure. We’d be out there for hours on our quest, that time stretching with magic in my memory because it was just the two of us.
Eventually, after hours, she’d either find her way back home or be forced to stop at a payphone (preferably at a Burger King) to call my father or someone who could give her directions. These were the days before cellphone trackers and Google Maps and while I do not want to be cliché and romanticize the past, I cannot help it. So many of my memories belong to this void before incessant technology. On the drive home, we’d share French fries, hot and salty out of the cup holder. If she was scared that she would not find her way home she never showed it. That night before sleep, she’d kiss my forehead. “That was a very good adventure,” she’d say.
And that was her, I think, a woman who was able to turn being lost into an adventure.
We did not have her for long enough, and yet she lived more lives than most people ever dream of. She always sought adventure, honed the iron of her strength on it. In her more domestic years, marked by the care and keeping of a child, she found time to cut her hair off and dye it purple, become nearly a black belt martial artist, start an antiques business, ride her horse in parades and become a gun-toting Rough Rider in historical reenactments. I am still routinely asked for her famous birthday cake recipes.
Her embrace of her passions and her exploration of self made space for everyone around her to let their unique weird out too. Because who could argue for conformity against a woman who would casually drop an anecdote about seeing The Who in London? Or about quite literally skiing to school, uphill both ways in the Finnish winter? She was unapologetically herself and when she lived, she lived.
In the months since she died, I have uncovered box after box of photographs. My mother shielding her eyes on a bench in Israel, laying on a beach in Greece, dancing in Spain, in motion with foot extended through a plank while earning her next belt in karate. In one folder, a collection of shots of her iconically painting the walls of my childhood home wearing head-to-toe white and a Yankees baseball hat.
If you loved her, there was probably a week or a month or a decade when she stopped talking to you. Her love was always fierce but never easy. She was a Viking, tough and exacting as the shieldmaidens she idolized from history and fiction. Still, if I need a shorthand to describe her I say “Like Clint Eastwood, if Clint Eastwood were a Swedish lady.” She showed that kind of old-world competence and hardness to the world that can only ever be armor for the softest of hearts.
Because she was also the woman who on one Summer visit to Ithaca quickly befriended my mailman. I’d find them sitting on the porch everyday for a week, comparing notes on their favorite historical fiction shows. The woman who’d spend an hour insisting she hated small dogs and three hours curled up in a nap with Remy, our 17lb wonder. She spent months hand-embroidering a baby blanket for every single one of my cousins to welcome them into the world. She loved hard, though she would never admit it and she was really, truly funny. (If you laughed at one of her jokes she had a habit of deadpanning “We in the FBI have no sense of humor.”) She showed her care and her love with quiet action every day. To be one of her people then, was the best feeling in the world.
My mother was a wonder, and she was, I am continuing to learn, very well loved. In the days and every long hour after we lost her, both her phone and mine did not stop buzzing with love and care for her. I am left in awe of the network of family and friends that she created so far from where she started. It has been my greatest honor to witness how she is still held, still carried. Bits of her scattered across so many of us.
I do not know how to live without my mother, only that I now somehow have to. I know too that in her own way, through how she loved me and how she loved others, she has left me with everything I need.
And so mama, where ever it is we go next, to heaven or Valhalla, or become stardust in some distant galaxy, I hope the streetlights come on at just the right moment to lead you home. I hope that when you finally ask for directions, they are true. I hope, of course, that there are French fries. And I hope most of all that you know that through this adventure and the next, jag älskar dig, mama. I love you. This has been a very good adventure.
Sad music for sad folks*
*or: music that has been supporting me in grief
Psychopomp by Japanese Breakfast: Crying in H Mart was one of the first books I read and I resonated with so much of Michelle’s story and relationship with her mother. The cover of this album is a picture of her mother which brings me joy every time I see it.
Javelin by Sufjan Stevens: Who wants to feel SAD? 🙋🏻♀️ This album is devastating, the aftermath of the loss of his partner. If I wanted a bit of a necessary wallow, this is where I turned.
Little Rope by Sleater Kinney: This album is about grief and its transformative power. I love it just so much.
Nonstop Sinéad: No explanation needed. My mom loved her, and her defiance and force evoke my mother for me.
QUESTIONS, CHOAS & FAITH by Joy Oladokun: Max played this on the radio shortly after my mother passed and I have played it maybe a million times since.
Get myself together by Robyn: An odd choice, you say? I am of the (correct, sorry) opinion that Robyn is appropriate on literally any playlist. Somehow this one has been on repeat.
in love and grief,
lisa
A quick housekeeping note: I will likely not be posting with a regular cadence as I continue to navigate grief. That said, subscriptions are once again turned on with all funds being split monthly between the Middle Eastern Children’s Alliance and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief in support of those impacted by Milton and Helene. Where I am financially able I will be matching funds.
It’s just lovely to have a clearer picture of your mother. She jumps off the page at me. Beautiful! Holding you.