What We Lose(19)

I am most troubled when my mother is very present to me, when I dream of her extra vividly and can hear her voice. Even when I wake up I am left with the eerie sensation of how I used to feel—scared, loving, and small, in comparison—in her presence.

In these moments, I feel that she is still alive and I am talking to her in my mind. But now she cannot answer back. I feel that I have some kind of beautiful secret. I love this new magical Mom who is always watching over me, whose counsel I can seek in an instant, whose advice frequently matches my own wishes and desires.

I don’t know how to place this new mother, my dead mother, with the mother who was alive. When I look at her grave, I feel it the most. How can she be there when she is still here, inside me?



My mother is dead. But I still see her. But I still feel her. I can still hear her voice, even right now as I am speaking to you.

But she is dead.

When I look at this picture of her at the beach, I can feel the sun on my skin. I can hear the way she spoke to me.

But she is gone.

I can dream her, and I can hear her cry. She tells me what happened that day, and she cries with me. She tells me not to be afraid.

But she is dead.

A part of her is still alive in me.

But she is gone.

She will live forever in heaven.

But she is not on earth.

Parts of her will live on in the trees and the streams and the birds of tomorrow. She is the water and the plants and the bits of dust I see swirl in columns of light.

But she is dead.

If I look long enough at a flower, I can see the color of her cheeks in the stigma.

But she is not here.



Peter comes to New York to decide what we are going to do. This magnitude of decision cannot be made over the phone; that is the one thing we agree on.

I leave work early to pick him up from the airport. When we get back to my place, I make us steaks. Halfway into cooking them, I realize that iron is one of those tastes pregnancy will make me abhor. He eats his steak and mine and we barely speak. I just sit there and watch him chew. I eat cereal.

We sit on the small floral couch in my living room, his hands wrapped around my waist. He lowers his head to my lap, his nose nuzzling my belly. I tell him that I’m afraid I won’t be a good mother, but I’m also afraid that I’ll let the time pass by, and I’ll never become a mother at all. We look up phone numbers and procedures on the Internet, and I tell him about the time with Aminah in college. I cry myself asleep in his arms.

On Saturday, we go through all our finances. Peter’s job is junior level. His pay is barely comfortable for a single person. He says he can leave the position, find a job in finance or at a bank. I see how sad this makes him look and tell him that he doesn’t need to. He tells me he has $1,000 in the bank, but he has just finished paying off his loans. The last part he says with such uncamouflaged pride, I can only sigh. My job keeps me afloat, but, living in New York City, I have no money left for savings. This brings us to another topic: Where will we live? I realize that one of the things I love so much about him might end up being the thing that keeps us apart: He loves Portland. And I love the East Coast. Neither of us will easily give up our respective homes.

The Sunday is beautiful, sunny and warm, and I wake late in the day to find Peter still sleeping next to me. In the noon light, I think I finally see him fully. He isn’t a spectacular man. He isn’t someone my father or even Aminah would be impressed with. My mother would lament his lack of upper-body strength and bank account. “Despite what you preach, Thandi,” she would say, “you have expensive tastes.” He is an ordinary man. He slowly stirs awake, smiling impossibly at me, as if we have been transported back in time, weeks before this situation occurred.

We don’t speak of the pregnancy today, but instead spend the daylight hours strolling around New York’s parks arm in arm. Peter has never been to the city before. He is surprised by the amount of green space we have and insists we hit up at least three parks. He marvels at every bit of nature as if it’s a rare find. “You have squirrels here?” he exclaims as we see one dart by. By the end of the day, he is annoyed with them.

It is an immaculate fall day, uncharacteristically warm, tempting many to come out in Tshirts. Some women wear bikinis and sunbathe on towels. We snarl to each other looking at these exhibitionists.

In my favorite park in Brooklyn, we find a spot on the hill from which we can see the rest of the borough sloping away from us.

It’s one of my favorite places, in part because nearly everyone here looks like me. There are mixed families all around us; all of their children look like they could be mine. Peter, I feel, notices this too, and I think it makes him uncomfortable. I try to talk to him about the baby again, but he tells me he is thirsty. He goes to the store to buy us bottled water. Next to me, a family with an Asian mother and black father play. There is an infant in a stroller and a girl of maybe five with wild curls and caramel skin who looks like my young cousin. As Peter returns to my side, I smile at her, and she approaches us, carrying a sycamore leaf that is as big as her head. Her parents look on consentingly, full of Brooklyn laissez-faire. She lays the paperlike leaf in my lap.

“Wow, it’s beautiful,” I tell her with the animation one reserves for small children. “Thank you.”

Peter takes the leaf from me, turns the stem between his fingers, and lets it fall to the ground.