Back to Work

I've been watching Dexter. What three seasons of watching people get stabbed won't do for a trauma you've gotten too comfortable with!

Honestly, it doesn't elicit more than a small twitch anymore. Used to be, someone would get stabbed or have their throat cut in a movie and it would send me into a trance for a while. I'd have to get up and walk around, shake it off. Now it's just a quick jerk into the dark place, and I'm back.

Small trips to the dark place are good for me - I've always been a darkly humored person.

The day of my wedding, I told my friends to let me know my husband-to-be arrived safely, because I was certain a tractor-trailer would kill him on the way there.

Things can't go this well for this long, can they?

I told my husband I want three children, because when one dies, you'll still have two to keep you going. I was serious.

But this is what you do - you hope for the best and plan for the worst, right? It's just smart. It's survival. At least I hope. I hope big. And I have this vague—not belief but—premonition...it will all be grand. Who knows? It could be delusion, another survival mechanism.

But I'm writing this book. I know how again. And my short story was picked up by North American Review, so I can no longer use the "I suck" excuse. I will write every day until I write as well as that again, remembering E.L. Doctorow's words.

Ugh. Hoping I can do; planning for the worst I can do; watching throats get cut and reading coroner's reports and reliving my own police interview I can do. It's all this goddamned work that I can't stand.

Open Letter to the Guy Who Has Volunteered to Be My Husband

I pity myself a lot. I thrash about, stay in my pajamas all day, let the laundry sit in the washing machine, refill my mug with hot water four or five times until the tea leaves have nothing left to give.

I lie down in the bath and blow bubbles. I stare at a shard of grout becoming dislodged from between the tiles. You ask me what's wrong and I look at you like you're the world's biggest idiot. Same thing that's wrong everyday, duh.

There are a hundred pieces of paper scattered on the floor of the office, each one is covered in ink, codes and symbols that mean something to me. They mean I am a terrible writer. They mean I am a coward. They mean I do not have the language to narrate the trip I took to the moon. How many people get to go to the moon? It should have been a better writer instead of me. "They should have sent a poet," exclaims Jodie Foster to the galaxies laid out before her in that ridiculous movie Contact.

There are pieces missing and, instead of writing them, I twirl the covers around me in bed and make myself into a burrito. I stare at the TV. I spend hours feeling my heart slam into my ribs.

I am obsessed with myself. My self. Self self self self self.

And this morning, when I whimpered, having been denied validation by another literary magazine—when I said, "I can't write a story better than this one"—you went wordlessly to our stacks of books, the ones that we don't have shelves for yet, and flipped through all your editions of Best American Short Stories from the 90s until you found the contributors' notes from Rick Bass and Poe Ballantine, both of whom fell into depressions, each clinging stubbornly to a story that had a fatal flaw in it that he refused to acknowledge and change, unable to fully see that flaw but ever sending it out until an editor illuminated it for him, and saved him.

I can't believe my good luck. You cling stubbornly to me despite my flaws, my insufferable suffering!, but some part of you can see the masterpiece, and trusts me to continue to edit, explore, revise, and append until I am the best version of myself.


Or at least the version that will get us some fucking money.


Thank you for marrying me. I've got your back.

P.P.S.

That's not true. I want to tell you everything, but I don't think I can speak the language.

P.S.

And there are some things I just don't want to tell you.

Not Writing

I'm really lost.

The book is printed out and all over my floor. I was hoping that if I squinted just right, I would see the finished product and know what to do to get there.

And then of course, there's E.L. Doctorow breaking my balls:

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

I've come to the devastating conclusion that I may have stopped writing this book a long time ago. All my obsessively making revisions to existing pieces and letting off steam in these blog posts are just me idling the car at a rest stop, using Armor-All wipes to polish it up. I'm stuck here, and I'm sad and angry and I want more fucking time and less fucking jobs and I concede that it will have to wait until after the wedding.

That's not the part that worries me most of all. The part that worries me is: will I be able to remember misery when I am happy? Or will I engage in subterfuge against my own happiness to recreate the misery I need to connect with to write the rest of the book?

I know a lot of mothers and wives have achieved a remarkable balance between writing and living, but I am so far from it, I ache. I physically ache, thinking about a distant future in which I can write fearlessly, freely, and for hours. Do I need to sequester myself to some abby to finish this book, alone and far from the things that make me feel complete?

Or should I just buy some pot?

What Dreams Do Come

I made a wonderful discovery this morning: I still dream of her!
I was beginning to worry; I hadn't seen her in a while - a few months maybe.

For the first two years, I dreamed of her two or three times a week. In the dreams, my depth of understanding varied. Sometimes I had no idea she was dead and acted totally naturally: fighting with her, hating her guts, pitying her, dancing around a thrift store with her and laughing.

Sometimes, I was breathless with fear. "Something bad happened to you," I said in one. But I forgot what, until her boyfriend entered the room.

In others, I was amazed that she was back from the dead - almost as much as I would be in real life. What are you doing here? You're supposed to be dead!

One time I even said, "We have to call the medical community! This is huge!"
Then I recited her Social Security Number when she asked for it, and I knew it in my dream because in real life I'd filled it out again and again and again.

In that same dream, I said I was sorry that death sucked so much; she'd said no one in the afterlife would talk to her. I said I was sorry and then I sobbed into her shoulder, "It's been so hard on me, you have no idea."

I suspect this last part had nothing to do with her death, at all.

This morning, I dreamed I'd had a baby. A boy. And I was welcoming my friends and family to a park to meet him. She arrived, a little rotund and greying, with these outlandish turquoise spectacles and colorful outfit. I called her "Grandma" and hugged her, and noticed that it felt all wrong. Her being dead, for one. But mostly because I never saw this happening - not when she was alive. And it makes me wonder, at what point was it too late? At what point could the course of her life have led her instead to a park to celebrate her first grandchild?

I could spend the day making a list of moments - and those are just the ones I was there for. It's not exactly the If Only I'd... trip. It's more an aching wish to see how all her alternate universes have played out.

My favorite dream - and this was pretty early on - a spider had stolen her simple gold necklace, which she hadn't worn since I was a child, and had spun it into a web high in the rafters of a barn. I said, "I'll get it down for you," but she didn't seem to care either way. And after struggling to get up there and realizing the danger, I decided to just let it be. That it was more beautiful that way.

When to say When

I did it because I was bored of the Murder Box. I know every scrap of paper in it. I know how many counseling sessions Victims Services paid for; I know exactly how much the mortuary wrote off the bill as "professional courtesy;" I know the three causes of death stated on the certificate, and I know the time of death, to the minute (which actually has nothing to do with the time she died, but the time when a living witness confirmed it, which was three days later. Never mind that for three days, she was as metabolic as a spinach salad.)

And because I'm an animal and animals will sniff around places of interest until they exhaust themselves or get driven off, I ordered the coroner's autopsy report from my home state.

And because I'm impulsive, impatient, and twitchy, I opened it right away.

And because I'm a selfish ass who's afraid of having a single private moment, I read the first page out loud to my fiance.

And because I did that, I undid the perfect, shiny veneer of polyurethane that my self-protective brain sprayed over the top of everything after the trial two years ago. I chiseled it off in short curls that fell off the sides of that horrible moment that I saw her, and I scraped and sanded until the rawness of those following days was restored to its original beauty.

Two years ago, I chose not to look at the photographs they presented as evidence in the trial - it was the one thing I didn't want to know - I gave myself that in a gesture of loving compassion. And then I undid it by reading the very thorough and unsugared prose of the coroners report of the scene as he found it. Of the body as he found it.

I put the 12-page report back in my purse without going further. I was shaking. I snapped at my fiance when he made a sound - a sound like he'd just discovered me poking holes in myself with a rusty pair of scissors. And I snapped at him and told him not to say a word and not to tell me I couldn't and shouldn't do this, because I had to do it. I will not only read, but illustrate, tattoo on myself, and eat each page of that report - crumple, chew, chew, and swallow every single page regardless of the risk of bowel obstruction.

Because I am an animal. A dumb, sniffing animal, hoping to lift my nose at last and turn to the pack and say, This - This is what it is.

A Trip to The Murder Box

There's a plastic file box in my closet full of papers from Victims Services, my mom's taxes, paperwork from the sale of her condo, extra funeral programs, and other stuff I can't part with ever ever ever unless-the-house-burns-down ever. I call it "The Murder Box."

In Murder Box, there is also the booklet I was handed at midnight the night I found her, when we were huddled together at my grandma's house, after the police station. They'd sent a counselor to come talk to all of us. I remember thinking that everyone was incredibly nice to us. At the station, the cops had brought us burritos, which I couldn't even imagine eating. I may have even hugged a few. Cops, not burritos.

So this lady came to the house really late - maybe there's a graveyard shift for that sort of thing. Trauma doesn't take a break, after all. She gave us these little spiral-bound guides. I was reminded of Beetlejuice's Handbook for the Recently Deceased. There's stuff like "Helpful Coping Tips," and "Practical Considerations and A Guide for Survivors When Death Occurs." I cannot overstate how much I relied on this guide to do my thinking for me, and thank my lucky stars this didn't happen in 1892, or in Panama...or Do-It-Your-Damned-Self Texas, for that matter.

I'm flipping through it as I write the memoir, trying to recall my mental state - no, trying to inhabit that state, which will be difficult, considering I burned out most of those fuses in the days following. Whatever synapses still fired in that tiny corner of my brain were used to extinction three years later, at the trial. To this day, when there's something to be alarmed about, I smell smoke coming out of my ear. Hi ho.

There are scribbles all over this thing, in blue and black ink. Phone numbers, names. Underlines, circles. Check marks.

There's a section I didn't get around to, but wish I had. "Dealing With the Media."

Children already suffering from the trauma of crime are often retraumatized by exposure to the media. Children often lack the means to verbalize their emotions and may be misinterpreted by both the media and the public. You have a responsibility to protect the interest of children at all cost!

Re-read this passage, but substitute "children" for "people." Really, when this sort of thing happens, there's no distinction.

I wasn't egregiously misrepresented by the media, but you try to sum up everything your mother was and meant to you and how her dying the way she did affects you - and do it the day after you found her that way, over the phone, to a complete stranger - and not even William Butler Fucking Yeats will do it justice.

I swore I'd never try to talk about my mother again, except in this book, which has taken me five years to mash together in a sort of "this means something!" obsession, and which I'm STILL not convinced will adequately represent her. Or me, him, them, us, you, it. I called the reporter up the day the article came out and yelled at her.

When my book is published, who, I wonder, will call me up to tell me it is undignified, disrespectful, inaccurate, and poorly written?

It won't be anything I haven't already told myself, day after day after dee-diddly-doo-dah-day.

In 11 Years

In 11 years, this man will come looking for me. He will look for me because I am my mother’s daughter, and because I look just like her. That’s not something I could have acknowledged when she was alive. I loathed her, if you want to know the truth. The way she hiccuped, said heh-choo-ah when she sneezed, walked with a slight waddle, picked her lips with her tiny fingernails, the polish chipped off. Always chipped off. I’m in better shape than she was when I hated her, which started when I was around 12. She was 33 then. I am 33 now and I have no children. I will, but I have to make sure of some things first.

I hear her in my sneezes now. And she's all over the things I like: Fleetwood Mac, dirt under my nails from the garden, the smell of the ocean, cilantro. Once, I was in the shampoo aisle of Walgreens when this Fleetwood Mac song came on. It’s cheerful, it’s about love. Lindsay Buckingham’s guitar, soaring and swaying like the palm trees of the Southern California beach cities I grew up in. I heard that guitar and I began to cry. Cried so hard I had to close my eyes and pinch my nose with my fingertips so no one could tell. Like my mother. I’m fine.

The last time I saw her, she was burned to ash. I poured it into a creek in the desert. The sky was dark with clouds, so the water was grey and still—so still, that she just spread out in white clumps. I have a photo of it that I took with her camera. She looks like a galaxy.

Before that, she was a waxy face with lifeless hair. I told the undertaker to close the lid and then I nearly told him that I loved him.

Before that, she was covered by a blanket. I only saw her hand. The pictures they showed at the trial have it caked with brown blood. I was confused, stuttering up there on the stand. That’s not what I saw, I said. In the picture in my head, her hand was always clean and pink, her fingernails tiny and free of polish. It was a nicer image than the real one. It seems that in the absence of a mother, you will protect yourself from the dark.

So the man. He is in prison for 11 more years. He is not crazy, or especially dim-witted, nor dangerously smart. He was an unemployed meth-head with a history of domestic abuse. My mom was a fighter and a drinker. It was only a matter of time. That’s what the defense attorney and I agreed on, in the stairwell, where no one else could hear. My grandma and the DA were angry with me for talking to him in the cafeteria, where the jury could see. They didn’t care about probability, her family. They said he was pure evil. They said this about the public defender. About the man who killed her, they said he was just an asshole. This is how my mom’s folks are.

I have been thinking about writing to him. (Not the public defender; the man who killed my mother.) His name is Junior. Swear! You’d think we lived in the Deep South. But we lived in California, on the beach, surrounded by million-dollar houses and salons and Coffee Bean and Tea Leafs and she’s killed by her boyfriend named Junior. While cutting fajitas. That’s how he justified the knives, anyway. I believe him on that one. She did love fajitas.

When I tell the men in my life I want to write to him, they get very defensive. The men in my life are my fiancé, my brother, my friend who was with me when I found her, and my writing teacher. The fiancé, brother, and friend say they worry about the emotional toll it will take on me, inviting this troubled man into my life. The writing teacher says it will make great material. But he only says this after he says he worries about the emotional toll it will take on me.

I have told them all it doesn’t matter. In 11 years he will find me. He will want my forgiveness. I do not know what I will feel by then. What if I can’t give it to him? Can I live with his suicide? His poverty, rejection, and homelessness? Can I save him by forgiving him? Also, in 11 years, I will be 44. The age my mother was when he met her. I will be the spitting image of her. I will not sleep well that year.

People say things like they hope Junior will “get it in the ass” in prison. They say they hope he rots in there. They say he might get shivved, or shanked, or whatever can happen with homemade weapons in prison. When I think about this, I want to write to him.

I wrote a short story about him before the trial. In it, I followed him around at prison as an objective third party. I referred to him as “the man” and gave him very few feelings and thoughts. At the end, I showed up as a character and asked him what my mother’s last words were. People didn’t like that I was so minimal with him. They wanted to know what he was feeling. I said How could they know when he doesn’t even know? They said that it seemed like I was afraid to go there, as the writer. I said, No, he’s afraid to go there.

A year after I wrote that story, he told me her last words, at the trial. He said they were I’m Sorry. I knew it would be something like that. I knew because I sound exactly like her when I sneeze, and I am sorry for everything. Telling a joke wrong, writing a terrible sentence, feeling depressed, Darfur, litter, euthanized dogs, Polar Bears disappearing, Junior rotting in prison. My grandmother sniffled in the hallway at recess. Can you believe that asshole says she was sorry? Of course I can.

I figured that if I wrote to him, I would have access to his feelings. Or at least I would know if I was right; that he didn’t even know his own feelings. That the level of denial he had to submerge himself in just to get by would have to be such that her name and face would become ruins, crumbling and chipping away like the polish of her nails. And if it disappeared, he would leave me alone. He’d stumble into the sunlight in 11 years, blink twice, and start over. He would not need my forgiveness, nor need to see my face. We might both be free then. My letters would remind him, even though the jagged squiggles of my writing would be so different from her graceful loops. She was right-handed, I am left. She was slow, I am quick. She gave up. But we would both have done this. Written to him. We would both start the letter the same way. We would both begin with I’m Sorry.

I Always Have Waitressing

Herman Melville turned in his manuscript of Moby Dick, flushed with pride, certain he had a masterpiece, certain he would achieve fame at last. It was panned critically and ignored by a public whose attentions had flitted to the Wild West. He died in obscurity, a customs agent.
Stupidly, stubbornly, I inch my way to the front of this long, long line.

Dead Letters

The mail stopped coming. And when it did, it felt exactly like everyone said it would. Only, they weren't talking about receiving your deceased loved one's mail; they were talking about grief. One day, you'll wake up, they said, and it will be gone. You don't notice it's gone until several months later, when you happen to be sitting on your front porch, staring at the mailbox, noticing the extra name you had written there.

Then a whole new layer of grief is revealed: I'll no longer see her name through the plastic window of some homeowner's insurance solicitation. The endless credit card offers. One time, AARP even sent information offering their discount on a certain cruise line. My mother was 49 when she died, but as far as AARP was concerned, she was still kicking around and just beginning to ask for her senior discount at the movies.

One time, she received an offer for financing from a funeral home. If that isn't the nadir of marketing savvy. It's nice to know that, at least in death, we'll all have such good credit.

And then, once that's over, it's like the real death. After all, when someone is absolutely certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they can't make a single solitary dime off of you, you are free, you have slipped the surly bonds of the economy, and have floated off into the ether.

I moved, and I forgot to include her name in the forwarding request I sent in to the post office. This was 8 months ago. All that mail the new tenant must be receiving, and marking "Not at this address." Somewhere in Texas, a dead letter office filled with opportunities for her.

A Lesion of the Liver

Yesterday, while doing a sonogram to get to the bottom of my sudden abdominal pain, they discovered a lesion on my liver.
"Just one?"
"Well, it could be several. It's hard to tell on the sono. I'd like to schedule an MRI for tomorrow."
"How about today?"
"It's not an emergency, because the blood tests show only a minor elevation in liver enzymes, but if you want it—"
"—I want it."

I went into the backyard to pick weeds. It had rained a few days earlier, so they came out easily. Rip. I love the feeling of pulling something out by its roots. Finding the sturdiest point on the stem, wrapping my fist around it, the slight give, and the sensation of each unique root. Some roots are one long tap root - you can feel those slide out a long length of earth. It feels like you are cleansing the soil of a long-seeded ill. Others are shallow, hairy root clusters. You tear them out like hair from a scalp. Or like pulling the tab up on a cold, really gassy soda can. Rrrrrip. Ahhhh.

Sometimes, the root is too strong, the ground around it dry and tense. This happens with the bigger stalks, the ones with thorny leaves and a pretty yellow dandelion growing up top. The stalk tears and the plant's juices splatter my hand and mix with the dirt and seep into the invisible cuts on my knuckles and stings. Take that, bitch. This really pisses me off, so I toss the plant and dig my fingers into the ground, working my fingers around the first few roots I come to and tug. It's not a satisfying rip, but at least it's gone. The fucker.

I don't miss my mom very often anymore. It's been five years. I miss her when I need a recipe, or to know who sang "Free Ride." Now there's the Internet for those things. But I missed her like hell then. Pulling those weeds, a lesion on my liver, probably nothing, but I wanted to tell her most of all. My fiancé is appropriately worried. I tell him not to be, that liver lesions are common and usually benign. Still, he holds me a little tighter and gets quiet more frequently. I told my dad, after he stopped filling me in on his work day, and afterwards, he regaled me with his medical history. This is not to say he doesn't care—this is just how he cares. He relates. I told my brother. Then we both changed the subject.

Still, after telling the three people who love me most in this world, I kept wanting to call one more. I posted it on Facebook. I told my coworkers. I responded to worried questions and well wishes. And still, I wanted to tell one more. One more person. One more who would care as much as I did that there was something potentially dangerous in my body—one who would be devastated if I died.

Not that I thought I would. It's just that we get only so many people like that, and I want my one more back.

Form Follows Function Follows Form Follows...

A novel in short stories? What the fuck was I thinking?

Input phase

Now that my freelancing gig is over, I have more time to write. So that means I'm not writing.
I am, however, working the stories out in my head when I fall asleep. And then I forget what solutions I came up with. Hi ho. If it was the right solution, it will come back as I'm writing.

If I ever write again.

My conditions for getting into a serious rhythm with this book, which is now due in 6-1/2 months:

Find another job that lets me make enough money to pay all my bills, grocery shop regularly, take my dog for her annual senior wellness exam, furnish my house, buy a wedding dress and cake and caterer, and fix my radiator.

Accomplish all of the above.

Then, let the writing commence!

Until then, I will be working the stories out in my head, growing ever more distant from the trauma itself until I will have no better expertise for recollecting it than anyone else would.

Gargggghhhh.

The End

At the Guardian, James Lasdun unpacks Chekhov.

. . . the unpredictable shapes of his stories (ask yourself, as you read them, where they might be going: it’s almost always impossible to guess, and yet when you get there it feels inevitable and entirely natural), the endings that “solve” nothing in the conventional sense but do indeed finalise the “correct presentation” of the problem—all this is premised, not on some simple ambition to strike a new note, but on a new way of looking at reality that required new methods to express it. . .

I've noticed a trend in my stories. The narrative, driven more or less by the internal processes of the protagonist, almost always winds up derailed by an event that occurs outside of their making, forcing them to deal with it in the finale. A middle-aged woman breaking it off with her young lover is nearly killed by a passing ship in the last scene; a girl unknowingly stuck in the anger phase of grief is in a violent fight with her support group on the beach, when a Flamenco dancer appears out of nowhere and walks into the waves.

They are neither inevitable nor entirely natural, so much as they are the intersections of universes. Still, teachers have referred to them as unorganic. But when I try to rewrite them as simpler endings generated by the main character's own intense emotions, it feels totally inauthentic and against my worldview. As a child, I reacted and responded and adapted to the chaos around me - I had little direction, just dreams. As an adult, I'm aimless, waiting for tragedy and trouble to give me something to do.

So isn't it just my artistic vision that my stories end this way? Is it really fear of staying with the character's intense, climaxing emotions - as I was quick to suggest to my teachers; or is it simply the way my world turns?

Is it necessarily a weak choice to bring in a deus ex machina to simulate the trauma life throws at you while you were in the midst of some completely different crisis - a crisis that now suddenly seems so pathetically impotent? What if it just happens naturally, as I follow a story on the page?

Is not my work, too, premised "not on some simple ambition to strike a new note, but on a new way of looking at reality that required new methods to express it"?

Chew chew chew. Finding myself as an artist, trusting myself as an artist. Chew chew chew.

Affirmation

I'm so close to actually sitting down and incorporating the changes I've been thinking about, I can hardly stand it.

Try To Make A Change

So I haven't touched the book since the beginning of the month, and my resolution was to work on it a little every day. Done in October.

Take inventory.

Have:
1 story near its final form
1 story that needs major reconstructive surgery
1 story that needs life support
1 story that needs a ventilator
1 story that needs a face
1 story whose death I refuse to call, even though it's not responding anymore

Need:
to establish the mother before she dies
to hire a better writer to write this book for me

I tried to work on my closest-to-fine story this morning, but it took me an hour and a half just to read through it to the part that needs to change. When I got to that part, a plane hit a building here in town. My fiancé came home from work and made me a bagel. 1) Open mouth, 2) accept food, 3) chew and swallow. Repeat.

I have to quit for today. I have work I am supposed to do so I can get paid. Besides, editing and proofing is easier today than creating people out of thin air. Or RE-creating them in all their perfect, hellish beauty.

Here's one more attempt:

She found a crab claw on the beach when my brother and I were kids. She would use her fingers to make it talk like a puppet.
She'd make it say, like Señor Wences from the old kids' show, "Joo want to talk to my crab?"

At first we wouldn't want to, but then we'd laugh and laugh and forget whatever we were angry about: that dad wasn't picking us up that weekend, that everyone at our new school called us "loners," or that the new jerk she was seeing sat on the couch watching "The Judge" all afternoon and made us miss our cartoons.

She was funniest when everything was miserable.
"S'alright?" we'd ask.
"S'alright," went the claw.

Don't Bother

I once found my mother dead. You have to be careful when telling people this, but in those first hundred days, I freely shared it with anyone within earshot. Check-out girl, person in an elevator, customer service representatives. (Lots and lots of customer service representatives.)

Five years later, it’s something that has been so deeply absorbed that I now say it out loud just to remember that it’s there. This happened. The experts refer to this as a process of assimilation, adding that it can take several years to assimilate something like that – even a lifetime. Butwe're all assimilating something or other: what’s the difference between finding your mother murdered and enduring a childhood of unflagging emotional abuse? Finding the love of your life in bed with someone else and surviving a plane wreck? I have a friend who still winces when people move too quickly near him. He was beaten savagely as a kid. Who but him bears the standard of his horrors?

Then there’s the guilt of context: Rwanda, the Congo, Somalia, Bosnia, the Holocaust, the Spanish Inquisition. Jesus, just being alive in the 14^th century sucked worse for even the wealthiest, most syphilitic aristocrat than it ever has for me and my one lousy dead parent. Even if I was the one who found her like that.

So why tell this story, at all? Am I that narcissistic? Well, why not - everyone else is in this Internet Age. The noble answer is: I’m a writer and have a duty to report on the extraordinary in life. The psychological answer is: If I don’t, it is going to eat its way out of my head like some squealing H.R. Giger monster.

I was always like this. I wrote an autobiography at 12 called If God Could See Me Now. It was three pages long. (Three pages is a lot for someone who’s enjoyed only about 7 years of thoughts more sophisticated than those of a Fox Terrier.)

It dealt mostly with the feelings of isolation and abandonment that succeeded my parents’ screwy, long, and turbulent divorce. I still think it’s one hell of a good title, only it would be re-imagined by some Focus On The Family-style proselyte with a junior-high understanding of matters spiritual and intellectual, and packaged as “Inspirational” reading for the Costco and Sam’s Club set. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Costco and Sam’s Club set. I hope one day to be purchased in such a fine establishment, tossed in a basket with some recalled designer jeans and a 4-month supply of frozen weiners.

The answer to my inner critic is: It’s not Elie Wiesel’s Night, but it matters.

When I tell people “my mother was murdered,” they often have the same reaction. They stand silent, nodding, waiting for the next bit of information. Grateful for what they’ve already received. Someone once suggested people are just trying to absorb my story, which I find funny and stupid. Absorb it? It happened. Just listen to me. I’m telling you. What’s required of you?

But in these five years, I have learned that by telling a stranger, a friend, a neighbor – pretty much anyone but a sociopathic personality or a therapist trained in maintaining boundaries – I bring them into it. It becomes interactive.

As the executrix of my mother’s estate (an awfully funny word for a condo about to go into foreclosure and several unpaid bills), I had to make many phone calls to customer service representatives. I relished these calls. These antagonists of society! -- refusing to reverse your overdraft fees, remove a charge from your cellphone bill, lower your suddenly jacked-up APRs, and, too often, speak to you without a script and without that confounded robotic voice.

“Hi, Becca, I’m calling on behalf of my mother, who was killed last week by her boyfriend. I have her account number here, and of course I can fax you a death certificate if you need one before talking to me. I just need to get a list of all of her balances for the probate. Hello? Hello, are you there?”

We’d end up having a conversation for half an hour about someone she knew who died. Everyone has a death they’re holding onto. One guy, at Countrywide of all places, confessed his 3-year-old nephew had drowned in a swimming pool some time ago. I cried with him. He couldn’t hold the forbearance, but he got me a direct line to the supervisor who could. There are no direct lines at Countrywide – at least, there weren’t then – so I’d had to explain the entire story to three different people every time I called. Giving me the extension number was a huge gift.

Another woman – I can’t recall from where – lost a mother to breast cancer. I told her that her story was worse. Maybe it was. Maybe half the people who buy my book will have worse stories than this one. Sometimes I feel guilty for being somewhat well adjusted. It doesn’t make good television, as they say. I can’t promise to fall apart in front of you for your entertainment. I can’t even tell you anything about death that someone hasn’t before, and better.

I can tell you this: you have to go into her house to look for photographs, music, and clothes for the service. A man is inside, wearing a paper jumpsuit. He is still wiping the fingerprint powder and purple splatters of Luminol off of the floor, the ceiling fan blades, the kitchen cabinets. The sink is full of steak knives. “I guess it wasn’t one of these,” he tells you. And you watch his face immediately pale. “The mattress is in the van,” he says quickly. You accept his apology and thank him. You thank him three times.