Back to Issue 13.

[MY MOTHER’S UNPUBLISHED LETTER(S)]

Sam Taylor

My sister also finds one letter written by my mom. Its first sentence: I never write. 

Second sentence: I fear the permanence of putting ink to paper. What does she who was afraid to die mean?  

And she is writing these words to a writer in the last year before she knew of her illness. Not a famous writer. Not a writer of poetry or novels. A newspaper columnist for the Miami Herald so obscure that I can find no record of him now in a google search two decades later. This columnist seems to write, from my mother’s quotes, a brand of easy-listening humanitarian optimism.  

Even simple thank you notes are put off until I have waited too long. This letter too appears to never have been sent. 

Next first sentence: But for years I have admired your writing. Here’s where it starts to get strange: I have just read ‘A Year Later, Look What We Have Achieved.’ I had to write to thank you. I want to let you know how much you have touched my life and the lives of my family. 

How untouched she must have been to be so touched. And how grandiose her projection. He didn’t just touch her. He touched her whole family. As if we were petals or dancers that fell in upon each other, around her, at her suspiration. 

My son, Samuel Beckett Taylor, was on the staff of his school newspaper for four years, the last year as editor-in-chief. As a young teenager, he discovered your music column. He always admired your work, and I think, learned much from it. I too began to read columns, and discovered that you often had social comments along with your musical reviews. 

What does she want from him? She is offering me up thrice for his approval. That I was named after Samuel Beckett, that I wrote for my school paper, and that I was influenced by his columns, a claim I cannot support. It’s possible I read his column a few times, but I have no memory of its existence and feel certain it had no special influence on me. 

Your thoughts were always so insightful, yet real, down to earth. So, she is suspicious of insight, that it might not be real. I wonder if this expresses a general mistrust, or if it is a specific commentary on my father’s mysticism that haunted and taunted and failed her. 

You seem to have a great and compassionate understanding of the human condition, and the wonderful ability to put those thoughts and feelings into words. Again, what does she want from him?  

Is it just to tell her story? I no longer live in Miami. We rented a house in the Gables for 10 months after the Hurricane, while my son finished high school down south, and waited for a county decision on the elevation issue. By the time that decision came in May, we had already decided to move on. 

Is she really attributing their decision to move to having to wait for a county decision? What passive bewilderment. What an ability to encode and obfuscate the truth even to herself. And, explaining herself to a stranger! 

My mother, no writer, is astute enough to catch that “lovely” expresses her ambivalence and perhaps disappointment with this new place, and she edits it out, substituting the more enthusiastic “beautiful.” Also, observe her confusion as to whether moving was an act of pursuit or escape: were they reasons “to come” or reasons “to leave”? 

And, they are all bad reasons. Being “closer” to me is doubly problematic, a psychological placebo for an inappropriate problem. It was the season to let me go, and return trips home by plane to Miami could have been made as often as home-visits by train to Charlottesville. And why would she permanently move her whole life when her son was only going to be in school for a few years? And then her one-year-old: a confused effort to not release my sister and me, to recover an edenic past. 

As it turned out, her displaced fourteen-year-old was discovering the freedom of snorting Ritalin off a toilet in this safer, lovelier environment. And, her one-year-old would grow up without a mother. 

I don’t think my mother would have gotten sick in Miami, where she had a thriving community of friends, colleagues, and clients who loved her. In Virginia, she had no career and knew no one. She was alone with my father, who enraged her. I believe, like a poorly transplanted pot, it was then she started to die.  

So, a loose translation might read: “There were many reasons I decided to die.” 

The palm tree was sitting in the green swimming pool, among other things. 

Really? What a flair for the dramatic buildup of sentiment. And with so little responsibility to truth. And with line breaks!

Of course she feels a sadness! She never should have left Miami. She tones down “so many special things” to “still many special things,” just as her censor boosted lovely Charlottesville to beautiful. She regrets “having to” leave behind, not “leaving behind.” More passive bewilderment. Then more massive projection. New paragraph: “One of them is you.” New paragraph: “Thank you.”  

Is this a love letter? Were the winds of her heart locked in a box so lost?  

Or, does she just have an instinct for literary form? Coming to the edge of the page, there was no way to end with more closure or punch. It makes me feel almost queasy in its hyperbole, its mystification, its divorce from reality.  

And, she can—as she clearly has done—continue to read his columns in the commonwealth of Virginia. How exactly has she left him?  

Or, does she, though she was not yet sick, or did not know it, write as one who was already leaving the earth, as one whose name is writ in water? 

What I learn about my mother is that she was a naïve saint. What I learn about her face is that it is a repository of idealistic longing that she projects outward in confused panopticons. And I was the primary screen of her projected love. Which must be why it pains me to hear her sentences in which I go on looking for her. 

The irony is not lost: her fear was this permanence that I am now inscribing. I am sorry, mother. Maybe this is worse than the dancing. It was myself I was trying to expose. I was trying to go to the ocean. I was trying to take you to the sea. 

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