Between the Lines

truth, fiction, and what remains unsaid.

My mother left a year ago this week.

It was a cloudless night in late November, the last gasp of gold on the trees, air tinged with the first breath of winter.

She died on her birthday — “on her actual birthday?” everyone repeats — coincidence, symmetry, a statistic. A move that felt curiously in character. It was just like her not to want a fuss, to pack the remembrance into one calendar day. Or perhaps she couldn’t stand another well-meaning nurse wishing her a happy birthday in a saccharine singsong and summoned her will to leave. Or perhaps she didn’t know, the concept of time already beyond her wake.

Whatever the answer, she took it with her, leaving us to gather our fictions. Like any legacy. Like any truth.

*

My mother once boasted that she didn’t read fiction. Life was too short, she said, to devote to things that weren’t true.

For one, this wasn’t an accurate statement. Our home was littered with novels, many with well-worn spines. She always brought a hardcover to the beach — Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, The Firm, The Joy Luck Club — the very same copies that now grace my shelf.

If anything, I think fiction may have been too true. Too human, like holding a polished mirror in a room full of unforgiving light. Everyone reads the same words differently, projecting their experience all over the page. Such is the nature of subjectivity — you’re never wrong, but your impressions are yours to carry.

We are all fiction, as far as I’m concerned, even as we live and breathe. Unknowable to others, our internality a vast and unmappable landscape. Context imagined; subtext imposed.

Each of us lives in a made-up reality. And all of it is true.

*

My mother loved books and encouraged me to love them, too. I suspect, in part, because they said all the things she couldn’t.

She never refused me a book, never turned down a chapter before bedtime. Still, it was her story I was after — the unfathomable tale of a person who existed before me. “Tell me a story,” I’d say, issuing prompts until she relented. Tell me who you used to be. Tell me who you are.

Were these anecdotes accurately reported, vividly remembered, embellished for effect? It hardly mattered. Truth has nothing to do with any of that.

*

My mother held many opinions but was often short on words. She was emotive, but not expressive. Her love dressed up in riddles, hid behind actions, danced between the lines.

Short an omniscient narrator, I tried to fill in the blanks.

So many words remain unsaid. I know how much she meant them.

*

I’ve been reading a lot of fiction these days. Not to escape, but to connect.

In grief, we learn to dwell in the spaces. Not only the voids left by loss itself, but the awkward gaps that stretch across our everyday encounters. The sudden awareness of dimensions. The curious nature of time. The questions that go answered.

What would you have made of this moment in history? What is the meaning of a life? How do we make the most of it? Was I wrong, was I right, did you know what I meant? What comes next? Is it — are we — going to be okay?

But the questions beget more questions. So instead, I let her speak. It’s about as logical as having tea with Cleopatra. Yet I hear it all the same.

“Tell me a story,” I say. And I listen for the answer.

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Changing it up a bit this week: a special card reading will be sent to paid subscribers on Wednesday. I’ll also be opening up a handful of appointments for virtual 1:1 readings.

As always, thank you for being here. x