My mother died on January 24, 1997, when I was eighteen. Every year, on that date, I write her a letter. I am including only four here, for now.

January 24, 1999

Dear Mom,

It is January 24, 1999. You died two years ago on this very day. It was sunny that day. Today is Sunday but it is raining and dark. I stayed in bed for a long time this morning, listening to the rain and the sounds of Mike making coffee and drifting in and out of sleep, thinking of you. I cried a few nights ago, dreading the arrival of today. I don't want it to be two years. I haven't seen you in two years. I haven't heard your voice or touched you in two years. I have become a different person in two years - a person you don't know. Today I am calm. I wanted to do something special, be outside, be somehow worshipping your life but I guess I do that everyday. There has not been a day that I haven't thought of you. I miss you so much. I need a mother still. Two women came into my work the other day and they were a mother and daughter going out to lunch. The mother ordered for her daughter. I want you to take me out to lunch. I want you to order for me and ask me about school and about my job and about my boyfriend. I want you to be excited and proud of me but you aren't. It has been two years and I still feel lost.

Where are you? What happens when someone dies? It has been two years and I still don't have any definite thoughts as to where you could be. All I know is that you aren't here. Your death has ripped me open, ripped me in half, and sliced through my flesh, leaving it hanging loosely. So much has happened in two years. For the first few weeks after you died I was numb. I thought everything would be okay eventually. I was confident that your death would make me strong and competent, would turn my flesh to steel and that I would be able to withstand anything. I even felt that way for a while. I felt even if I were to be raped that I would feel nothing, that after your death nothing could ever touch me again. It has been two years and everything affects me. I cry when it rains, I cry at the moon, I cry at children and stupid movies, I cry when I can't catch a cab. Regardless of all of it, every month I grow.

Regardless of your death, the world continues to change also. Last week your mother grew too old to live alone and moved in with your sister. How is it that you can still have a mother but I don't? Grandma's house is for sale! How is that possible? You, who sighed with relief and comfort, fury and frustration inside of that house. That house was somehow yours and now it is for sale. Grandma is too old. You are dead. I am alone in this apartment in Manhattan. You knew so many things about me. Did you know that I would live in New York, the city of your becoming? I came here eight months ago looking for you. I have found much more about me. Dad is alone. This very moment he sits in his dead sister's apartment in California, dozing in his chair in front of the television, a watery glass of scotch next to him. He has thought of you today.

The other night he called, as he does almost every night, and told me that he has begun dreaming again. He said that he has rarely dreamt in his life but that suddenly he wakes in the night, laughing out loud at his outrageous dreams. Mike said that people dream at odd times in their lives, the end being one of them. Dad misses you as much as I do but in so many different ways. Ways that I cannot fully understand. He is so alone now. I don't want him to leave though. Sometimes he tries to persuade me to go and live with him so that we could be there for each other the way we were after you died. I don't want to live with him but I don't want him to die either. I am selfish for this. He is old but I want him to go on living just for me, just so that I am not alone. I used to cry when I was young because I had no siblings, sometimes I still do.

I am writing this book for you mom. I think that I talk about it more than I actually write it but isn't that most writers do? At least I now know that the book is there, that it has always been there. It was not born out of your death but of my life. It took your death for me to find it though and now I will write it. I have great dreams for my life now, the ones you always said I would have. All mothers have great dreams for their daughters but how many daughters have great dreams for their mothers? One of my dreams is to recreate you. To expose you to those people who didn't get a chance to know you. It will be hard. It will be a you that I know and love and want, not a complete you but at least a complete idea.

So many people hurt. I am beginning to believe that everyone does. Before you died I carried the misconception that most people did not deal with tragedy until mid-life but life has so many terrible ways. The amount of pain I have seen within some people is remarkable. Pain itself can be a life force, a horrible throbbing and flowing force that is capable of carrying people in its river for years, forever. I do not want to live this way. I do not want to ride pain until the end. I want to grow and always be able to scream at the pain, not with it. I have grown so old since you left. You always thought I was wise for my age but now sometimes I feel ancient. Most of the time I feel young though.

There have been days recently when I have wished I were old. I have seen sixty-year old women on the street and wished I were they, wished I knew what they knew, or at least wished that I had more of an acceptance of what they knew. I wish I were past this awful mourning, past the trials of being young. For I am so young, only twenty. But I know that there are too many things that I would miss and that there are too many painful things that would still come, even at the age of sixty. It is so strange that you don't know me and don't know what I am doing with myself. In just two years I have gone so many places.

I left Washington that day to return to school. I left early. I couldn'tt be there anymore, in Candy's house with you in the hospital bed in the study. I waved goodbye to you and gave you a hug. Dad and I had just helped you into the old gray Acura so that he could drive you to the hospital for more treatments. I was desperate not to live that existence. I wanted to be the happy college freshman I had begun to be but was quickly slipping past. You were so sick. Your hair was half gone, limp and shineless. Your skin hung and had lost color. Your mouth worked up and down when you weren't paying attention. You weren't my mother. So I left. I said goodbye, probably told you that I loved you and that I would talk to you soon and then Dad drove you away. I went back inside and packed my things and got in my own car, alone and happy to be and drove to New Jersey. That was where I really wanted to be. Giddy about a silly boy and away from the hospital and your calling death. Still, I didn't think you would die.

I left New Jersey late that night to continue on to Vermont. It was dead winter and in Connecticut the roads froze. I drove past midnight, only eighteen years old, alone in my car smoking cigarette after cigarette. Myself and the cars around me were being led by two police cars down the frozen highway at only thirty-five miles an hour. For over an hour I drove that way. My thoughts just gone but my heart racing. The heater on full blast and the window partly down to let the smoke out. When I finally reached Vermont it was almost four in the morning. I drove that last 45-mile stretch in the dark, no cars around, just a couple of trucks. That was the last day I saw you.

I must have talked to you again but I don't remember. I remember that Dad called sometime around the twenty-second to tell me that you were going to die. He had told me that before. Something had always prolonged your life. He told me that it was serious this time and that there was nothing else that could be done that you had less than ten days to live but that it could be tomorrow. He told me that he had discussed it with you and that the two of you had decided I shouldn't come and that I should stay at school. He told me that it was my decision though. He told me I was old enough to decide. That was the first time he told me that and that was the first real decision I made. I have made many since but that day I decided that I did not want to wait for a phone call informing me of my mother's death. I left in my car. I don't remember what I brought with me.

Half way there I stopped in New Jersey. I told myself and Dad that it was because I was too upset. I was upset. But I wanted to see the boy and I wanted to be far from your death in a world where only the boy and I mattered. Dad told me to stay there for the night, that we would see you in the morning. It was already late. He told me that we wouldn't have gone to see you that night anyway, that your sister Pam was with you. I went to the boy. We drank vodka at his uncle's formica kitchen table until I was sleepy and forgetful. We went to separate beds. Dad called at three in the morning. You were dead. I still haven't forgiven myself. I didn't go to you. You, whom I would give my life to see again now. You, whom I don't know how to live without.

Your only daughter, Claire

January 24, 2000

Dear Mom,

Another year has passed and it is January 24, 2000. You died three years ago, Mom. I still miss you just as much, still want my mother back, would love for you to come waltzing into my life, straightening and declaring, still need that just as much as I ever have and ever will. Tonight I took off of work and I made potato-leek soup, a recipe I have perfected on my own but one that I could not have created were it not for you. Cooking, for me, is a way of finding you, a way of being with you now. It is something you gave me and I like to pretend that it is a way of conjuring you up from the steam and thick broth swirling before me.

It is strange how we come to mark our days. Birthdays, decades, centuries, deathdays, anniversaries, holidays. I can look at myself in so many different increments. The person I have grown to be between birthdays is somehow different from the person I have grown to be between your deathdays.

It is becoming harder though, to realize how much I have changed since I last saw you because I have changed so very much. The day that you died marked a new beginning for me, entirely altered the path I was headed down, and erased a way back to the person I was. So different is the path the I am now stumbling, meandering, running, crawling down that I sometimes forget the old one. At first it was easy to mark the changes. Oh, I never ate asparagus before mom died. Oh, I never did the dishes. Oh, I never fucking tried to take care of myself. Oh, FUCK. Now it is harder because those things are who I am now. You can never see yourself growing.

Last year I was still hurting so much, so scared, so raw still. In a lot of ways I never wanted to get past that. I never wanted to stop mourning you, because, in a way, I would be giving you up, letting you go and I never ever wanted to do that. I still don't but I am. I am continuing on. I am ceasing to mourn you but I will never ever let you go. You must hold on to me also. One can never plan ahead, never foretell the future. I know that I attempted to think about a future without you but there was so much that I didn't think about. In some ways, the hardest part after you died was a year and a half later when I moved here. It was one of the hardest parts because it meant moving forward. It meant realizing that I could live my life without you even though I didn't want that to be true.

Now I am going on two years living in New York. It has already been two years that I have been living on my own. It has been two years since I have lived with Dad. Tonight on the phone with him he was talking about what-ifs and mentioned "What if I had died instead of Mom?" I thought about that last summer with you on The Cape and how, on a drive to Provincetown, you kept stopping to drive down little winding roads where we discovered beach houses atop cliffs. You fantasized out loud about living there on your own and painting if anything ever happened to Dad. Sometimes I like to imagine that you aren't really dead, that you are in fact living in a weathered beach house all by yourself by the sea. I can see you in jeans with a glass of wine and some old jazz on the stereo, standing before a huge canvas. That you never really died, but instead ran away. I wish it were true. It is so easy to imagine, I can see the light in the room and the way you move your hair as you study the canvas.

Well, I am now halfway through college, working on a bachelor's degree with a concentration in creative writing. I have been working in the same restaurant since I have lived here and soon I will be a bartender there. I am focused, I feel hungry and ambitious, restless, as though I am hunting. It is rare, and usually within my writing, that I feel satiated. I am learning and growing, constantly moving. I told you I would go and go and go, as far as I could and never stop searching, that the search itself was what mattered. I still believe that and I am still searching. I am glad I told you that. I am glad I am where I am. I miss you and I love you and I will never be able to say everything I am and feel towards you in words. But, in your death you gave me a great gift and I suppose a word for it could be awareness. I love you, thank you.

Your only daughter, Claire

January 24, 2001

Dear Mom,

It is January 24th, 2001. You have now been dead for four years. Four years ago tonight I was at Candy's house in D.C., lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, knowing that I would never forget those moments and the ones that had come before. It has been another year. A year seems so long but then suddenly a date marks it and you look up, another cycle gone by. I just reread the last two deathday letters. Last year's was very calm and poignant, well written and loving. I wish this one were to be the same. It's amazing how much can happen in a year.

Last year, two days after I wrote your letter, my best friend, Julie, called and told me that she was in the hospital and that she had leukemia. What a long year it was. I flew down to Atlanta five times to see her, to hold her hand, to share her amazement and fear of life. She died two weeks ago from today. I was in Atlanta. I had been there for five days, holding her hand, crying in the waiting room, talking with friends and family. Two days before she died, she went unconscious and never woke up again. The night before she died I sat in her room alone, the graying, dusky light filtering in through the windows illuminated her sleeping face and I held her limp hand and sobbed. I lay my head down on the bed and just cried. Cried for the enormity of it all. That less than four years after your death I was saying goodbye to my best friend, that I was again being left by a woman I grown to so dearly love.

I cried also because I had not been there to hold your hand as you drifted past this life. I cried because I had never said goodbye to you, had never thought I would have to, couldn't bare the thought. Before Julie got re-diagnosed I had a dream in which she came to me to tell me that she was dying and that she had to say goodbye. As I led her to the door at the end of the dream, you were there waiting for her. I hope you really were. A few days before she died, she said that she was scared because she had never known anyone who had died and she was afraid that there would be no one there to meet her. I told her that you would. I cried and told her to tell you that I love you and that I miss you. Julie smiled and said that she already knew your reaction - you'd smile and nod, you knew.

Now, I believe that you are somewhere, somewhere better and different than here. At first, for the first few years after you were gone I thought that that was it, once you were dead, you were dead, that there was nothing after this life. Now, I feel that is an arrogant way of looking at life, that we are so great, that our lives are so great and important that this is all there is. It can't be. I imagine that in some way you and Julie found each other, you already had in so many ways. This is so hard for me though. I feel left alone, abandoned. Part of me, says fight, fight, do all those things you want to do, that your mother wanted to do, that Julie wanted to do, but the rest of me says why?

It's not really that bad. I still have so much drive in me, have grown so frustrated with the mundane. I still have great ambitions. I will begin my book this year. So many other things have happened as well since last year. I traveled a lot, spent important time with Dad. He grows older and older every minute and I am still frightened. What will I have left when he is gone? I will be so alone. The one great friendship I had made in my life is gone. Perhaps, I will look back on this letter in ten years and feel embarrassed. Dad will be ninety in ten years. Every year I walk through the day, the date that he will die. Just as I did with yours, with Julie's.

Oh, mom. I don't wish to while away and tell you the little things about myself. You knew everything there was to ever know about me, everything that would ever happen, every possible reaction I could have to those things. I just miss you. I feel that I have grown comfortable as a young woman without a mother. I am becoming used to it. I have taught myself well, how to mother myself. But that saddens me so much. I grow farther away from you and from who I used to be and I know that there is no choice in the matter, and that even if there were I don't truly know if I would give up who I have become. I'm not sure if you would want me to but I feel that I must find a way to have you closer to me, to bring you into my life more. I love you so much and I need you. Please don't stop searching for me or loving me or needing me.

Your only daughter, Claire

January 24, 2003

Dear Mom,

Today is January 24, 2003. You died six years ago today. This year more than ever, it is incredible for me to look back over the last six. I really have come farther than I imagined. I didn't imagine much that day six years ago, except the end of life, as I had known it. That sunny day, as I drove down the NJ turnpike in my old red Saab, I could not see anything that was to come, only the long straight lines of the road ahead of me, and the view through the rearview mirror, a view of the life that I was speeding so quickly away from.

But now it is six years later and I am sitting in the office of our new home in Los Angeles. The sun is shining, as it always is here and the light coming through the windows is reflecting off the pictures of you upon which I have adorned these walls.

Just in the last year I have accomplished so much of which you would be proud. I had my first magazine job and I reviewed restaurants. For the very first review I had to eat oxtail pate and knew as I sat there, the fork poised for my first bite, that I never would have been in that position were it not for you. I also would not have tried the pate without the conviction that you would have cursed me from wherever you are for not doing so! And it was good! You always said I should trust you...

And then I graduated college. Something you promised you'd be there for. And in a way you were because how could I have even have been there if you were not? It was a nice day. I was slightly hung-over from my birthday the night before and my friends were there and so were Pam & David. So funny to see Pam in Manhattan. She was so out of her element - you would have loved it! I took them all to a very NY restaurant, Pastis, and I wore your beautiful opal necklace with earrings from Dad to match. Strange that you nor Dad were there but that neither of you felt completely absent. That's a wonderful feeling to have. Thank you for being the kind of parent that makes your child always feel so loved.

In June, Mike and I packed up our little apartment on 5th St., where it felt as though most of my life had occurred. I don't think I will ever feel too far away from that place. I made my first home, on my own, there and discovered more about myself than I knew existed. Manhattan will always remain a part of my heart, as I know it did for you, even years after you had left. It made me feel close to you to leave, to be driven out of that city by someone I loved, headed for a place where the future was uncertain. I felt the same heartbreak that I now know you felt, as we drove over the first bridge and onto land that was not Manhattan.

And now I am in Los Angeles, a place I haven't imagined living in since I was seventeen. We spent the first two months living with Dad. Thankfully Mike put up with it without too much fuss - you would be proud. I can't even imagine you and Dad living together anymore - he has become such a bachelor. Sometimes we laugh and try to imagine what you would do if you walked into his apartment. We spend a lot of time together and once again, he has beaten cancer. He is so tough and so in love with life. That must be partly why you married him.

Los Angeles is better than I imagined. It is beautiful here and we have friends and a lovely home. You would love where we live - in an old 1920's apartment, up on a hill, at the base of the Hollywood sign. This place feels more like a home than our apartment on 5th St. When we lived together on 5th St. I always felt like we were playing house, like kids do when they're young, like it was all a game and just an idea of what was really to come. But here in this home, I feel like a woman for the first time. The kitchen is amazing - you would love it. Sometimes I walk into it in the mornings to make coffee and I have such a sense of it being mine - just in the way that I walk into other people's homes and know that it is theirs. At Christmas time Mike's parents stayed with us and I had that feeling more than ever, like Roxanne was my mother-in-law and I think she and I both realized it at the same time in the way in which she was being respectful of this place that I have so definitively carved out and in the way in which I tried to make her comfortable in my place. It was, at the same time, jarring and powerful.

It has also been close to six years that Mike and I have been together, which is so strange sometimes and so right at other times. I think you would approve. He loves me and shows it all the time. We complement each other in a way in which I can still be who I am within the context of us. My friends are starting to get married but that is not something I feel a need for. I know who I am and you taught me to be patient and to take life slowly, not to jump into things before I need to. I can't imagine committing my entire life to someone else right now, when I can hardly commit to being myself for more than a day at a time.

I miss you daily but it is no longer something that is conscious. It seems as though that rip in my life has settled, the wound has finally healed and there is just a scar. It is a deep scar that will never fade, the kind that rises above the skin and changes color with temperament but that no longer has immediate pain. Thank you for all the strength you gave me. When you died I felt as though something ebbed out of you and into me and I know for certain that it is still there. Maybe that is what it means to have a child. You are still a part of this earth, through me, and I will do my best to pass it down, so that you may always live. I love you.

Your only daughter, Claire
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