Dot Dot Dot
I’m watching the sixth video (dated 1/3/21) on Leap Day, 2024, which also happens to be my sister Suzanne’s birthday. HBD, Suzanne!
I’m also recalling that at the beginning of these posts, I said I wasn’t going to worry about making them fully realized essays, but then I think that’s exactly what I ended up doing for the most part. Looking for a thread, a theme, a motif I could use to anchor a story about my mother’s life and connect it to my own. It’s a natural instinct for writers who dwell in memoir, I think. With these last videos, though, I’m struggling to synthesize or make sense of what I’m learning. I feel anxious and antsy. I wonder if it’s because I’m aware that I’m coming to the end of viewing them. Is it a protective, stalling measure meant to keep her alive on screen with me a while longer?
We’re finished talking about the decades of her life at this point, and I’ve sent her some questions to think about. We start with some light-hearted ones:
What’s your favorite movie? Yankee Doodle Dandy
Actor? James Cagney
Television program? Law & Order SVU
Book? To Kill a Mockingbird
Song? …
And here she chokes up, telling me it’s a song Gary picked out for their wedding. Something about being a hero. She says she’ll have to look it up and tell me the name. (Edit: I think it was this one?)
After that, it’s a song she refers to as “The Irish Rebel,” (but which is actually titled “Shall My Soul Pass Through Old Ireland?”), a folk song her brother Tommy taught her when they were teenagers. I know the song well because she used to sing it to me as a lullabye when I was a child. “In a dreary Brixton prison,” it begins. We laugh about this and say it must have something to do with my being “a little strange.”
We both love forsythia and agree that it should never be trimmed into neat hedges. We both love coffee ice cream and clams, which she says she has a “high palate” for and I wince a little at this strange construction, a sign, I think, of the language confusion that will only increase as she becomes sicker.
I ask her about the last time she belly-laughed and she tells me about filling cannoli shells with cream with her BFF Mary at Christmas and how they howled at the dirty joke of the whole thing. “We had such a good laugh over it. Mary said we were disgusting pigs,” she said. “You were girlfriends having fun,” I countered and she agreed.
It’s 10 AM on March 2, 2024 and I don’t want to write the rest of this post which should include details about what she thinks she’s good at (people pleasing, telling jokes, shopping) the last time she cried (earlier that day over “everything that’s happening”) what she’s most afraid of (that everything she believes about what happens after death won’t be true), and how she wants to be remembered. It will detail the ways in which alcohol made her (and her father and siblings) a “Jeckyll and Hyde” and about how it did that to my father, too, though we agree we don’t really know if he was truly an alcholic or not. (I suspect yes.)
I don’t want to write it all into some kind of false eloquence because it feels so very heavy. My fingers feel heavy on the keyboard, my eyelids heavy in my skull. It makes me want to sleep. I recognize this feeling from very early journals I kept as an adolescent. They were filled with details about what pop stars I loved (Prince, Howard Jones, George Michael ), what boys I was obsessing over (A, A, M), how much weight I needed to lose (a lot), and other teenage ephemera. They also included cryptic, unfinished entries that housed and shrouded the darker stuff of my life: “Something is happening with my parents. I can tell. I can’t write more. Too much. Too tired. Maybe later…” So many ellipses like off-ramps from honesty. Like pillows I’d bury my head under to block the sounds of anger and unhappiness echoing throughout our home.
Sleep is a trauma response, I now know.
“The ellipsis is also called a suspension point (or suspension for short), points of ellipsis, periods of ellipsis, or (colloquially) "dot-dot-dot". Depending on their context and placement in a sentence, ellipses can indicate an unfinished thought, a leading statement, a slight pause, an echoing voice, or a nervous or awkward silence. Aposiopesis is the use of an ellipsis to trail off into silence—for example: "But I thought he was..." When placed at the end of a sentence, an ellipsis may be used to suggest melancholy or longing.” —https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis
We end this interview with a conversation about how she wants to continue. I suggest that she could dedicate a whole interview to each important person in her life. She likes this idea and enthusiastically agrees that this is what she wants to do. I am sure that in that moment she was imagining videos to her husband, my sisters and stepsisters, all of her siblings, her grandchildren, her best friends…
But there is only one video left, and it’s dedicated to my best friend (which is all our mother ever wanted), the person I know is reading every single word of this and everything esle I write: my sister, Catherine.
And, shit.
I don’t want to I don’t want to I don’t want to watch it…
But (screw the ellipses) I will.
❤️