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Recently, I've had the unusual experience of being haunted by my mother on the internet. This happened all the time when she was alive -- I made the mistake of getting her onto the internet several years ago, and, well, paid the price -- but as she's been dead since November, it's a might bit more unsettling.
To say that I had a difficult relationship with my mother would be a vast understatement and not just in the normal "all children have difficult relationships with their parents" sort of way. Anyone who read my book Other Resort Cities and then felt compelled to email me after reading the story "Walls" to let me know that they understood, or to ask if it was true, or even to tell me their own story must have sensed something, since no one ever reads my other work and wonders if I buried Wendy under a dock. And, of course, I've never shied away from talking about my childhood in interviews and, certainly, my sisters have addressed it to some extent in their books and also, recently, my sister Linda talked about it a bit on her blog. (And my brother actually wrote a rather iconic essay on the subject 30 years ago in Newsweek). To go into detail would be to ruin my memoir -- not that I'm writing a memoir, but you get the idea -- but suffice to say that the story "Walls" is about 95% true, or more true than any other story I've written, but still, no matter what, fiction. Because the fact is, I made some things up and I combined some things, and changed some other things and to the extent that that story is painful to read, I'd say the truth was more painful and not all of that story belonged to me, which is to say that it belongs to my siblings and it belongs to the men and to the good man that's in the story and, though she's largely absent from the story, my mother. So my telling alone makes it fiction.
The reason I bring up this story in relation to the fact that my mother is haunting me on the internet is simple: I keep forgetting that she's dead and in forgetting that she's dead I've tempered things I might have said or written about because I didn't want to hurt her feelings, since it's no fun to hurt someone's feelings who is dying, because my mother was dying for a very long time. The entire time she was alive after Other Resort Cities came out, I expected to get a call from her telling me how horrible I was for telling such lies abouth her, because that's the sort of thing she did, even when things I'd written weren't about her or, if they were about her, weren't lies. Because I never lied about her when I wrote about her, except to make her look better, which I suppose was a kind of mitzvah. When we cleaned out her apartment after she died, I found her copy of the book and it was bookmarked after that story, which told me what I had to know, I suppose. She'd read it and not called. Had not continued reading. We didn't talk about it, as I feared we would, and in the end that fight didn't happen, which is good.
But the other day, as I worked on a short story and found myself thinking about the first day I recall my mother telling me she'd always meant to abort me, and I wondered how an adult of 40, my own age, because that's how old my mother was when she said that to me, could say that to a seven year old, a song by Neil Diamond came on Pandora and I clicked over to let Pandora know I liked the song...and found my mother staring at me. She was wearing a cream colored sweater set and she was smiling and alive and I suddenly remembered she was dead, but when she was alive, she clicked that she liked Neil Diamond on Pandora, so now she lives there, on Pandora. A few days later, she stared at me while Frank Sinatra sang about the summer wind.
She shows up on Facebook regularly -- and it's because of Facebook that she shows up on Pandora -- and I find myself regularly surprised by this, because I never really looked at her Facebook when she was alive. I avoided her a lot in real life, too. And I feel some shame in that, mostly because I had decided to be better than what I had been given. But I am not always able to do the better things. Yesterday I went looking for a photo on Facebook and found that at some point she'd left a comment about it. A funny, loving comment and I found myself overwhelmed with grief. Not grief that she was dead, because it is better for her to be at peace, both out of pain physically and mentally, but grief that she really wasn't all that loving in the real world, but that on the internet she's haunting me with kindness. A few weeks ago I went to look at an interview that had been done with me a some years ago, and there she was again, in the comments section.
Amazon recently recommended her book for me, based on my browsing history.
My email box is filled with letters from her, some that I've kept as evidence. It's a fucked up thing, really, to keep email that you can use as evidence in arguement later, but that's the sort of thing you learn to do in fucked up situations, but there it sits, haunting my inbox.
And then tonight, just an hour ago, as I thought about going to bed at a decent hour, she showed up again, this time in an email from someone who emailed everyone in their address book about a hoax virus and there she was, right next to me, in the address bar, both of us being spammed about spam.
None of this angers me, I want you to know -- and I don't know who you are, but I know that writing poorly about the dead and about dead parents in particular is often bad taste, but I know that I've written these things about the living before and about this person in particular, as they lived -- if anything, it makes me sad for what the future holds, for knowing how I'll be haunted by those who mean the most to me, how losing someone has changed as the world has changed, how you no longer need a gravestone to mourn by, not when the dead show up on your computer, alive in perpetuity, both so terribly close and so terribly far away.
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