The Ghost In The Machine Is My Mother

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. 

 

Comments

[Patty McNair]

Really beautiful, Tod. Grief and love and family are each such complicated, necessary things.

[Lori]

Really like this.

[Rachel Kann]

Hi Tod,

Thank you for this. It's really extraordinary, what you've written here. I am grateful for it.

I too am haunted on the internet by some people who died last year, in the same fashion. Technoghosts. It's...well, I don't even have an adjective.

But thanks again.

[Josh Ellis]

I still have my grandfather's cell number in my address book. I look at it and think about deleting it, and I don't.

[Mike Barer]

I knew that what you write, however I did not want to write anything but good (which I totally believe) after her passing out of respect for the four of you, as well as your uncles.
Sorry that we were not able to catch up when I was in the area, but hope to see you again soon.

[Graham]

I was very moved by this. It must mean something that these traces of your mother remind you of the good things.

[Brenna]

I want to say something but I really don't know what. This was a very moving post. Thanks for sharing.

[Bill Peschel]

Sounds like a short story to me: "Hauntings" Real contemporary, bleeding-edge stuff. Which is my way of distancing myself from your essay.

One observation: There was a recent story about Facebook and how shy people are able to come out of their shell more there than they would in real life. It sounds like your mother found it a way of expressing a part of her being that she couldn't otherwise.

[Kathleen]

"I had decided to be better than what I was given." That's what I'm taking away from this as I go through something similar w/my dad.

[Amy Kitchell-Leighty]

This was wonderful. I've experienced this too in my writing. It's harder to write about the living than the dead, and then I usually feel guilty for writing about someone who can't defend themselves.

[vermogensbeheerder]

This is a fact that often we tend to neglect the person when they are still alive. This is a kind of hallucination that haunts us all the time. Maybe they just wanted to tell us something or they have unfinished business. After life may not welcome them due to the fact that your mom still wanted to remind you that she is still your mother and she loves you so much.

[Celeste Fremon]

Brilliant.

Really Tod.

Also, as it happens, I think it's quite possible that your mother took a short detour through my computer just now, as I only showed up here because Firefox crashed and then, like a golden retriever that brings you random objects from the backyard in an effort to make up for chewing one of your nice new leather boots, FF began earnestly reloading sites---except not any of the sites I had open when it crashed. Yours was one of those that came up, which seemed somehow felicitous so rather than returning right away to what I was supposed to be doing, I instead refreshed to see what you might have written lately and read the above.

I am truly grateful for whatever ghost in the machine made this possible---your mother or otherwise.

xoxox

[Burl Barer]

I read an article last week about steroid induced psychosis and the prevalence of it in women treated for systemic lupus. As your mother was my sister, and I knew her all my life, I knew her before you were born, before the lupus manifested itself, before the steroids made her psychotic, before the cancer and the chemo brain and all the rest of it. Through it all, encouraging, assaulting, loving, irrational, damning, accusatory, praising, attacking and not knowing which it would be from one day to the next, her ability to stay alive and be vibrant, and to write a book in her final year and see it in print and well reviewed was a blessing. If I had to endure what she endured, I don't know if I could have/would have. The last time I saw her, I noticed your book on the table, and I wondered what she thought about it, and that story in particular. I didn't bring it up in specific, she simply said that she was so proud of you...and it amazes her that such a sweet funny guy writes such sad and disturbing stories. She said something such as, "when i read these stories, I get sad, and I don't want to feel sad. Whatever time I have left, I might as well be happy."