There are things we do not say in my family.
Not out of cruelty. Out of the particular silence that gets passed down through generations of people who survived by not examining things too closely, who learned that some doors are better left closed because what is behind them is large and old and does not improve a Tuesday. We are a family of people who manage rather than process, who deflect with practicality, who say: well, what can you do, in the tone that means the conversation is over rather than the question answered.
My mother and I have not talked about her dying.
We have talked around it. We have had the practical conversations, the will, the preferences, the small administrative preparations of a woman who, on her clear days, is methodical and unsentimental about the arrangements because the arrangements are just logistics and logistics she understands. But the other conversation. The one about what it means, what she is afraid of, what she wants me to know, what I want to say to her in the time before I cannot say it. That one we have not had.
I do not know if we will.
I am holding that honestly. There are families who have that conversation and it is the right thing for those families and I respect it and I have read the accounts of it in the books people write about their parents dying and I have cried at those accounts and also understood that my family is not structured for that conversation, that to demand it would be to make her last years about my need to process rather than her need for the ordinary comfort of a daughter who shows up and holds the coat and makes the tea and does not force the thing that is coming into a conversation it has not been invited to.
Maybe the conversation is in everything else.
Maybe forty minutes on the phone talking about nothing important is the conversation. Maybe the soup and the coat and the childhood name and the parking lot vigil are the talk we are having, the talk our family knows how to have, the love expressed in showing up rather than in the saying of the love out loud.
I am trying to let that be enough.
Some days I manage it. Some days I want the words. Both of those days are true and I am living in all of them.
