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I can’t speak for her; I can’t speak for my daughter Susan. She is—was—the daughter of a woman—me—who refused to die. I am the mother.
To be the daughter is perhaps easier.
I say “perhaps” because I’ve heard of cases where the mother no longer is “there” in the sense of the word, where a disease lingers too long, beyond anything that resembles a relationship or recognition.
I don’t know what that’s like.How many stories do we have to read about a mother – or aunt—or mother-in-law who doesn’t recognize the visitor?
This is not such a story.
This is a story of a mother who got a phone call one morning and was told that her daughter, who lived 3,000 miles away, whom she talked to the day before, whom she was going to visit in ten days having purchased a ticket, made plans, etc.,
had died.
Just like that.
Maybe it’s a mother who refused to believe her daughter died. What? How? Why?
Of course I am that mother. And that phone call was over fourteen years ago and I thought then I couldn’t go on living, in spite of then having a son—her brother—in spite of then having a husband, right here with me.
But I was crippled. I mean emotionally—I guess it could have been worse; I guess I could have been physically, too, at the time of the phone call.
Just the other day I found journal entries that I hadn’t looked at in years. Some were written the Summer before the Call, when my husband and I were in Prague and figuring out the varieties of adventures in that city, barely staying in touch with the “children” (who were not children, who were adults, full-fledged) (taking families for granted, which people do when everyone is grown up, adults, getting on with their lives.) There were all those old journal entries of museums and castles and concerts.
Then there were the journal entries of pain, of being unable to speak- I mean,really, not mute, but seeing no point in saying anything, the world seemingly to have ended or, if not ended–I wouldn’t have minded a grand Pooff!-we’re all gone! – but convoluted itself into a shape I didn’t recognize. A Mother with a Daughter suddenly became A Mother without A Daughter and that Mother, that woman—what happened to the way I’d defined myself??—was me.
It’s I who have refused to die.
The others have died. I watched them all die. No, I didn’t “watch” her. There was just the call, and I answered it, and there she was, the next time I saw her, in the coffin. A coffin.
No one can imagine. No one wants to hear about it. Let’s read something else.
The poet Keats writes: “I have been half in love with easeful death.” Do I want to die? If it’s like Keats’s idea of death: “easeful.” Otherwise I will continue to exist, having no role, just a woman. A person. Belonging to nothing and nowhere, but carrying on.

It is, oddly, my birthday today. I just remembered that. And I’m still here and have things to do.