Fifteen years later...

As I mentioned in my last post, I have a new book in the works, surprise!¹

I could write a whole book about the book behind this book, and another about the book behind that book.² You could even say I already have. Ultimately, I am trying to understand one thing: my dad’s decision to live or die. Or more precisely, his decisions around how to live and die.

Much of my work has revolved around this mystery. Did I solve it in this book? Lol, no. But part of me loves how fundamentally unsolvable it is. I will never know my dad the way I wished to, or might still hope to. The same has been true with my mom.

One of the challenges working on this book, is how much space (both literal, on the page, but also figurative, in my mind) I’ve given my dad that I feel is owed to my mom. I don’t like making room in my mom-grief for dad-grief; not when I was so much closer to her, and when she was the one picking up my dad’s slack. Of course I know I can grieve both of them, but not really at this stage. My dad-grief is so consuming, it’s hard to even properly grieve my pre-cancer self (like, gone are the days I can enjoy any food I want, trusting that the carcinogenic ingredients won’t affect me).

Anyway, I’m trying to make a little room for my mom this week because next week will mark fifteen years since she died. In fifteen years, my baby boy will be an adult. I can’t begin to imagine what the world will be like fifteen years from now. Fifteen years is a heartbreakingly big breadth of time.

And speaking of mysteries, she left so many questions in her wake. Who was this woman who read my tea leaves yet refused any “alternative” medicine when she reached the limits of chemotherapy and radiation? Who had me less than a year after having an abortion? Who had friends from all over the world but none from her childhood?

Ever since I was old enough to rummage through her drawers, I have desperately sought to make sense of her contradictions. My yearning to understand her grew once I discovered her journals on the top shelf of her closet, and still more when I learned how to surreptitiously pick up the phone and listen to whole conversations without her knowing, and yet more when I became a mom myself. I wanted to understand how she so gracefully balanced working full-time while single parenting two busy kids. How she felt when my dad disappeared. How she coped with being away from her own family and hometown.

For the better part of the last fifteen years, I thought that if I tried hard enough—combing through old letters and bank statements, reading the book I noticed she was reading in a photo from 1996, etc.— then I would finally be able to wrap my head around who she was. If I could just get to the bottom of the questions I had about her, I’d finally understand.

But, try as I did, there was no way for me to piece together the puzzle of my mom’s life, or my own, without uncovering more missing pieces. It was like trying to clean while my toddler was awake: a moving target. The notion that I could ever fully understand her has turned out to be a total illusion.³

Between the ongoing mystery of my mom, and finishing my book yet finding no better understanding of my dad in the process, I can’t help but wonder: if I wasn’t born with telepathic abilities, am I really meant to achieve a full understanding of others? Maybe I’m not meant to understand any more than I am meant to be be bombarded 24/7 with headlines from around the world. Maybe, maybe!, I am simply meant to wonder.

To my delight, I feel more at peace when I’m wondering about my mom than I do when I’m trying to understand her. Understanding has all the satisfaction of a one night stand; you think you're going to get what you want, only to be disappointed by the discovery that what you really want is still utterly out of reach. It’s a dead-end. Wonder, however, is a crush; it may keep you up at night, but you can at least rejoice in the unlimited potential of the unknowable. It’s turtles all the way down; it’s infinite mystery and longing.

Isn’t it kind of wonderful that I still don’t understand my mom, even after growing up inside and beside her? She was in the air of my first breath and I was in the air of her last. Is there anything I can actually claim to understand, in a world that is constantly evolving, with all its interdependencies?⁴ It’s simply too much to ask.

2024 me must have sensed I’d come to this conclusion because my only resolution for 2025 was to cultivate wonder. My thinking was that it was much easier to aim for wonder than happiness or success. Now I have come to see how wonder compensates for understanding. Wonder is always possible.

I can feel awful grief over losing my mom when she was only 57, or anxiety about how I will raise a child without her support, or even fury over the delays in her diagnosis, and still wonder at the range of human emotions I contain, at the capacity for trauma to shape my trajectory, and at the beautiful way a loss can bond me to others.

I can feel overwhelming guilt for rejecting my dad’s attempts to reconcile, or regret for taking so long to appreciate all the ways he has supported me, or shame for pretending he didn’t even exist, and still marvel at how creatively fulfilling it has been for me to process this tornado of emotions, at how we can be shaped as much by someone’s absence as by their presence, and at how many forms an inheritance can take.

What I’m trying to say is that despite my best efforts, I have failed to achieve a solid understanding of either of my parents. Ironically, this is precisely what makes each of them so beautiful, so alive, even now that they are gone.

Fifteen years later, I miss my mom in a way that even I will never understand. I lost so much when she died—a grandma to my son, a witness to my growth, a home to return to, a net to catch me when I fall…—but I am at least a little consoled to think that I gained a deeper sense of wonder.

I can’t pretend to understand where the world is heading (even two years from now is unimaginable to me, let alone fifteen!), but I can wonder what it would look like if we were all more skilled at admitting that we don’t understand.

I think that world would be wonderful.

“Self-knowledge is not fully possible for human beings. We do not reside in a body, a mind or a world where it is achievable or from the point of being interesting, even desirable. Half of what lies in the heart and mind is potentiality, resides in the darkness of the unspoken and unarticulated and has not yet come into being: this hidden unspoken half will supplant and subvert any present understandings we have about ourselves.

Human beings are a frontier between what is known and what is not known. The act of turning any part of the unknown into the known is simply an invitation for an equal measure of the unknown to flow in and reestablish that frontier: to reassert both the exterior and interior horizon of an individual life; to make us what we are—that is—a moving edge between what we know about ourselves and what we are about to become. What we are actually about to become or are afraid of becoming always trumps and rules over what we think we are already.”

David Whyte, Consolations

1. Thank you to those who responded to my last email to volunteer as readers! And thanks to Ope and Marina for already finishing and providing feedback and Hooman for becoming a paid subscriber❣️💗)

2. But also, I never want to write another book again lol

3. For many years, I similarly believed that a meticulous note taking system in Notion could finally help me find some semblance of order in my brain. If I could just get to the bottom of the thoughts I had racing through my head, I’d finally understand. The notion that Notion could ever satisfactorily offload and make sense of my brain, has also turned out to be a total illusion. Now I can’t help but wonder: if I wasn’t born with a photographic memory, am I really meant to capture every single thing that I experience or think?

4. At first, I was going to say that for me to understand my parents, they’d have to be about as basic as a rock. Then I wondered (😉), do I really—I mean reallllllly,—understand rocks? The answer is no, and would still be no even if I read every book ever written about geology.