Without a Star, Keeping

Editor's Note:
This is the second installment in a three-part essay. Read Part I here.

I’m stuck in the elevator of a storage facility with four movers, and, when an hour passes, I climb the stack of boxes holding books that used to line my parents’ library. The men joke with me in Spanish and lean into the armoire, the dresser, and other furniture cleared from our childhood home. My phone is open to Larry Levis’s “Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern in It,” as I search for the lines I want to send my mother for reassurance during this move, just two months after my father’s death: “What are we but what we offer up? / Gifts we give, things for oblivion to look at, & puzzle over, & set aside.” The youngest mover looks up at me and laughs, Don’t worry, we won’t do anything to you. As we wait for firemen to pry open the doors, all I can think of are the boxed things I’m sitting atop, the things from my childhood home that crowd us in the elevator, and how my heart does feel pillaged, but not in the way the young man imagines.

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August 1992: I was 19 years old, we were at Lollapalooza, my sisters and I, right up front, center stage, when Soundgarden’s guitar licks reached their apex, the crowd pressed forward. My knees hit the dirt, the crowd a tidal wave of flesh as security blasted jets from a firehose; I was pulled from the ocean of bodies by the bouncer, clinging to his neck for breath as he lifted me over the rail and into the wings. 

We got home to our furious mother; the news announced Hurricane Andrew was officially a Category 5. Protect, tape, seal, guard, hide, close, keep, save. Take only essentials to the shelter. The morning after—every tree and plant was uprooted, broken, or blown away; the windows shattered, doors ripped from their hinges, the walls covered in leaves and dirt, our house flooded with water, ankle-deep. I found a Paddington Bear in the grass and thought I used to have one of those. I turned the corner and found the entire north wall had fallen from our house and all our belongings were strewn across the yard. Not just our kindergarten drawings and baby clothes, but our toys and doll’s clothes, all the things my mom had boxed as mementos. Our exile from El Salvador was the first cleaving, and then Andrew culled some more.

After that it was surviving 90+ degree heat amid the smell of rotting wood and moldy furniture, the incessant churn of chainsaws and power drills, the non-stop, day after day hauling and cleaning. National Guard patrolling the streets; news of looters encroaching just a few miles away; 7am-7pm curfews; the impossible nights, with mosquitoes and the whine of power generators. We spent three weeks without power, and it took more than six months to rebuild. On the hottest night, I applied Ben-Gay all over my body just to feel the creeping iciness of the first minutes. Then flames washed over my skin.

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Even now, one year after my mother’s death, all I write is fractured. So, I take recourse in needle and thread and embroider pages fallen from my parents’ old books. I sew stitches through highlighted paperbacks of Seneca’s teachings to make erasure poetry: That leak / Dizzying / Of / Years / Poet / It escapes you / Daily / To distraction. Sometimes the needle punctures my finger and blood dots the pages to become part of the poem. I feel the desire to record, but my body needs to process the physical loss of my mother before my brain begins to make sense of her absence. 

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As I sort through my mother’s belongings, I find Rilke’s Duino Elegies on her bedside, “Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need? / Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware / that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.” I need to inhabit her final moments and soak up whatever remnants of her energy are left in her last home. So, on the day before my sisters and I hand over the house keys to the new owners, I decide I will create a kind of Stations of the Cross. I want to be the guttering candle that kept vigil for 40 days, next to a full glass of water and a clutch of flowers. The fire sees, the water swallows, the flowers emanate. I film videos of myself lying down in the different places where my mother passed her final days. 

The empty house serves as a white canvas and I lie down in the empty rectangle where her bed stood; I lie down in the sunny nook where she read her books; I lie down in the kitchen corner where she worked on her computer; I lie down on the terrace where she smoked cigarettes in the afternoon; I lie on the bathroom tiles where she collapsed; I lie in the hallway where she gave her last breath, heart centered right in the exact place where the paramedics broke a white tile trying to revive her. I need my body to experience my mother’s Via Crucis because I have so many words collected in notebooks, boxes of her letters and photographs, and I have the impulse to spark a revelation, to create a narrative and come to some kind of understanding, and this is the first time my heart might be ready to withstand such inquiry. 

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When all my elders died, the roof of our house was sheared, its interior laid bare. There are no elders above us now, just the vast sky. I am now the matriarch. I cannot give everything away as some of my siblings want. I am the open hand, offering: let me carry it. Pile more atop me, keep me grounded, so I don’t sail away.

My sisters and I sort through my mother’s things. Photographs no one can identify, which they want to throw in the trash—so many bonnet-wearing children, women in pantyhose, and slick-haired men—but I keep them and insist one day they will be named. All her clip-on earrings, we photograph ourselves wearing them as nose rings, cartilage cuffs, nipple rings. I keep those as well. Porcelain soup bowls, silver tea sets, her wedding dress—I will keep. After one week, we see the shining aluminum walls of the empty storage unit. Half of its contents will be loaded onto a ship and delivered to my house in another country. In my carry-on, I bring the two black boxes holding my mother’s and father’s ashes, which I keep in my studio surrounded by their shell collection. I have a gold bracelet my mother wore daily, a selenite heart she kept on her desk, my father’s onyx ring; I fumble these with my fingers, feel their weight, and then Philp Levine’s poem “Inheritance” circles back to me: 

… I could call them
“Infinite riches in a little room”
or go cosmic and regard them
as fragments of a great mystery
instead of what they are,
amulets against nothing.

My mother was repulsed by fake flowers, and she passed that loathing on to me. She’d say: It is beautiful because it doesn’t last. Because the living flower is a flag of survival. A gasp to say, I was here, and my progeny will live on in seeds. She would post all kinds of stock photos of nature and quote Keats: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Not beauty forever, not joy forever, but every time, those fireworks of wonder—red tulips, poof and gone!; hummingbird, poof and gone!; a redwood forest, even that, one day, poof, gone! My mother knew she was not immortal. She guilted us, Scorpio that she was, by saying, who knows if I’ll still be around? in response to our, talk to you later, Mom. She used her stinger freely. But she was so big-hearted the jabs were nothing compared to her light. What will survive us is love. 

The author Kathryn Shulz says, “We are not here to keep, but to keep watch.” It was my mother who cultivated that attentiveness in us, the curiosity that is the first step of creativity. Once, while driving the station wagon, my mother corrected her absentminded swerve toward the canal, lowered the window, pointed upward—as the glowing head of her cigarette flew off, soared above our heads, and sizzled into the upholstery—and said to us kids: Look at the moon.