What We Lose(25)

Their four small figures cut against the expansive stage and American flags behind them as well as the huge park itself. The thousands of supporters below them were seen wildly celebrating as heard in their cheers and the flashbulbs that popped at us from the TV screen.

From the negative space above and around the new first family, one could infer the presence of the departed, of all those who had made this day possible. I imagined Obama’s ancestors, and freedom fighters, civil rights leaders, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, even Jesse Jackson—those whose names we knew through history—and Obama’s own father, a specter of fear and incomprehensibility for many.

And then there is Ann Dunham, who planted so many seeds, but died before she could see any more than the faintest green hint of his promise. One imagines her looking on from whatever heaven she’s chosen, utterly surprised, satisfied beyond comprehension. This is the orphan’s ultimate fantasy.



I think sometimes that had I known [my mother] would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book—less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. In my daughters I see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. I won’t try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.

This passage comes from the preface to the 2004 edition of Dreams from My Father, which contextualizes the book nine years after its original publication in 1995. Obama had secured a book deal following his history-making election as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. A few months after the book’s publication, Obama’s mother passed away from cancer. The year 1996 marked his official entrance into politics after he was elected to the Illinois State Senate.



My leave from university meant that when I returned, the few friends I’d made were gone. Thankfully, that included Dean and his new girlfriend, who, I heard through the grapevine, had moved to a loft in Brooklyn and started a band together. I had taken classes at a college in Philadelphia to keep up, but still graduated a year late.

I studied politics and philosophy, and graduated cum laude. Aminah, Frank, and my father showed up at my graduation. Aminah was her usual overbearing self, snapping countless photos and asking me to pose with her in front of ivy-covered buildings and rusting statues. My father was proud but distracted.

In order to pay my bills, I had to dip into my inheritance account, and every time I withdrew, I said it would be my last, or that I would slow my spending, but gradually, the money was eaten away as if by the cancer that killed her. By graduation, half of my inheritance was gone. It devastated me to think that she worked so hard to save that money, and that I spent it so easily.

The night of commencement, we had dinner at the Mediterranean restaurant at the bottom of College Hill. The place was filled with other cap-and-gown graduates clutching balloons and flowers. Aminah inspected them.

“That girl is so beautiful,” she said of one student I’d seen around campus. “Could they be any louder?” she said of a group of boys. I could offer no comment on any of them—I knew not a one.



I took a job in New York, at a government agency that dealt with AIDS research. I found an apartment in Harlem, in an old brownstone on the same block where James Baldwin once lived. My job paid for me to take classes toward a master’s in public health at Columbia University, so usually I was busy nights and weekends. My father and Aminah visited me from Philadelphia sometimes, and they took me for the only nice dinners I ate.

Aminah moved back to Philadelphia after graduating from NYU. Frank found a job at UBS, and they bought a duplex apartment not far from Rittenhouse Square. Their wedding was on the grounds of the college in our hometown, where I was a reluctant maid of honor in an awkward one-sleeved dress.

Frank’s brother walked me down the aisle. Aminah wore a figure-hugging sheath, and when I saw her in the dressing room all done up, I felt for the first time what breathtaking meant. I couldn’t help but get emotional, even though it—the white dress with the five-figure price tag—was not something I believed in. It was also something I knew I would never have, because the only person who would have forced such a ceremony on me was gone.

After the ceremony, Frank’s brother hit on me relentlessly. Formerly the awkward geek, I had morphed into something he now found appealing. He whispered in my ear something so saccharine it made me blush, but I did it for the hell of it. Thirteen-year-old me was applauding from the bleachers. When nearly everyone had gone home, I followed him to his childhood bedroom, imagining that I was Aminah—sixteen, gorgeous, and a daring guest in that stately old home. The next morning, I watched Frank’s brother sleep for ten minutes. His hair was thinner, age rounding out his features—a shadow of his teenage self. I felt myself wanting more.



I have yearned for certain sensations—the feeling of being able to contain someone’s hopes and fears in one touch. I have longed for it with Peter, although at other times with him I have felt it.





Over the phone the next few weeks, Peter and I begin to think about how we will share our child. In my mind, I think that this is betting on a lot. It is so wishful of us to plan, that first this child will be born, that I won’t die in labor or kill it by dropping it on its head. There are endless ways this child can die, and they are all the result of my possible mistakes.