Memorial Drive

When I begin to say out loud that I am going to write about my mother, to tell the story of those years I’ve tried to forget, I have more dreams about her in a span of weeks than in all the years she’s been gone. She comes back to me, first, in the house of my early childhood, my grandmother’s house. I am a child again in it, watching her go about domestic tasks: hanging wet sheets on the line, ironing, or leaning into her sewing machine, a few pins held between her lips. In other dreams she appears in scenes from my current life, in places she’s never been, unrecognizable at first, as though she were someone I’d not yet met. I am startled to see her then, and always I am older than she is, older than she ever was. When I dream us back into the house we shared with Joel, he is there too. But I am not a child, and I know I have lived the last thirty years without her. I know, too, that he has been released from prison after all this time, but somehow he has not killed her yet. I am aware, in the dream, that this makes no sense and yet I still believe it, so I struggle to think of ways to keep her alive. In the last dream I have, she is the old woman she never became, thin and slightly stooped, her hair silvery gray. We are in a room I’ve never seen, and I watch as she walks around it, moving slowly, touching several objects on shelves, on a table. It’s as if, at the end of a long life, she is contemplating the things she’s collected over the years. When I wake, I try desperately to recall them, certain that those objects hold the story of who she was, the parts thus far unknowable to me. Then it hits me: I’ve not actually seen the objects she touched. The whole time, her back was to me.

From Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey. Copyright © 2020 by Natasha Trethewey. Excerpted with permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.