a thank you note to the author
Maybe it’s because I lost my own mother to cancer. Maybe it’s because a few days ago I celebrated her 81’st birthday in my mind and with only a couple of texts. Maybe because it’s Mother’s Day Weekend and Spring, and the rain that comes every so often is much needed but often saddening. Like, I’m unable to see the flowers on the other side of the soaking, saddening. Maybe it’s because I’m a father now, new to this adventure, to a baby just out of the newborn phase, that I feel a longing to fill his cup every moment, live my own life with him fully, but with the ever-repeating onus of John Mayer’s never-ending chorus, “am I living it right?”
Maybe it’s because I have lived and breathed words written by the author before, some 5 years ago in a theatrical production of one of my favorite novels. (I played Levin in Gwen’s adaption of Anna Karenina!) Maybe the letters, prose, and poeticism within the larger format of a memoir make this book so genuinely enthralling, so episodically endearing, so wise yet nonchalant, and ultimately, so full of joy! Like having a friend over for tea, because you don’t need any pretense or panache, for your raw, unfiltered conversations. You can simply fall into your natural rhythm of brutal honesty and succinct cutting-cleverness – a friendly pastiche of passion yet predictability – with natural ups and downs, and a shorthanded humor of unsolicited but always welcome downright reality and truth.
Did I Ever Tell You?: A Memoir
Genevieve Kingston (Author)
This book is hard at times. It talks about hard things, but it’s also hard to put down. There’s a gentleness to it too though, along with a shameless honesty that keeps you there, aware of your openness and willingness to settle in, that allows you to enjoy the ride.
There’s something to be said for memories. Nostalgia. Looking back. Memoirs. Hindsight. Like a documentarian from a distance. Distilling time and space to droplets of clarity, even the ambiguous or hurtful moments. Pinning it down and allowing the world to see and share in that specificity. There’s a strength in vulnerability and there’s always a truth to be shared. That we all share.
Maybe because someplace in my dad’s garage (and I’m sure attic if he had one) there’s a box of my old drawings and paintings and childish crafts, that now that I have my own child I will long to hold onto, and put his alongside mine. But I also long to clear out the old and cherish the new. How does one give your child everything or anything all at once? How do you guide them, support them, love them, let them…? How do you share with them the best version of yourself, your devotion and love, your life? How does one provide for them an image and experience from which to start their own lives? To start without sights on the end? And what if, God-forbid, that end is in sight? What then? What if you are staring down at the shorter end of what is to come, from what has already been.
What would you do?
This book, this story, is really two memoirs. It is the child grown into a woman; it is the mother loving her children through a life she never was able to witness. Somehow love triumphs over death, and a mother carries her little ones through moments in the future within a box of gifts. Gifts to be unwrapped at life’s moments she most wanted to share. And although lost in time are those everyday moments so small yet so magical; there is a desire and a love that carries her presence through and through and through.
I would read bits of this book over the nights when I would stay up a little while after mama and baby went to bed, and I would welcome being transported. To the little neighborhood drawn so lovingly – can you imagine the street where you lived? The backyard or park in which you played? The games or parties you may have had? Your school? Your dances? The porches and painted walls, pets, and people throughout your youth. Forgotten? I think not. For it is through the imagining of my own son’s future that I look back upon my past. I can’t help but at least glance upon that inward eye of memories gone by, as I strive to see this little baby all grown up.
I’m lucky to be able to look back with warm fondness on the days of my youth, though not without some pain. But simply the act of looking back. Reflecting. It’s a gift. Imagine your surroundings – the sights and smells of those parties, the cooking, the conversations, way back when before you mattered so much, or at least before much of life seemed so difficult. This child, this book, this author takes us on a journey throughout her mother’s illness with a sharp discernment, cutting to the core of a memory, with a keen yet kind energy. Ms. Kingston allows her reader to be right there next to her, bedside or on the floor, or grass or playground, or cemetery. With the blinking television or rustling leaves. These are worlds so purely painted, you can’t help but walk beside her and be her friend.
And yet, like most of life, you, as the reader, must allow the inevitable to happen. Watch, along with this little child, as she endures perhaps the hardest thing a child could – the death of her mother. The sickness, the waiting, the moments of curiosity and caring along the way. And then the community she eventually finds as she pieces together the woman her mother was long before the writer was a glimmer in her mother’s eye (as my father used to say!). The strong and bold, beautiful and diligent person before marriage or motherhood… and if you, MY dear reader, have a little one at home as well, then surely your thoughts are equal to mine just now – what am I showing my child of who I am or who I was? What am I showing him as an example of love, as an example of being a parent, a husband, a brother, a son? What was I before and what do I take with me in these new roles as husband and father? What do I give in grace and graciousness? What do I wish for us as a family? What do I wish for you, my dear little one, in the kin we share and community I’ve made for you, and ultimately, the life you’ll create for yourself?
I finished this book a few nights ago and it has remained in my mind, turning over and showing itself from time to time, much like the glimmering gingko leaf on the front cover from a tree in Autumn’s grasp, catching light and wind, shimmering until the end. The book sits on my coffee table and today my son, on my lap, latched on with his eyes, and I brought it closer, he was enamored perhaps by those same golden gingko leaves and striking black and white image and words, did I ever tell you? We played like that for a while, looking on at the photograph of the tender moment a little girl lifts her mother’s chin gently towards hers, then I opened it up to a passage and read it aloud – a letter from the writer’s mother –
I want so fervently and with all of my being to be with you for all of the important,
and unimportant things. I want to be here with you to love and protect you,
shield you and encourage you, help you see and know all that is best in you,
and help you work on the stuff that gets in the way of your happiness…
At 15 weeks it seems a far cry from “Peek a Boo Forest” but nevertheless I pressed on for a bit, before finally flipping back to the gingkoes. Afterwards I reached for a book about a hungry caterpillar and we devoured it.
There’s so much life to live – in each moment we are given. For none of us know the day nor the hour that such moments may never come.
Am I to be saddened at that fact? Hopefully not. For to live in fear of what might be, just might make you unable to live in what is. And the gifts we can bring into the everyday are truly what can feed and sustain and nourish those around us. May I always remember these things. The gifts my own mother gave to me (my father too, and siblings yes!) just by living their life with mine. Fully and free of fear. Or at least, fully, and full of love.
My heart now remembers the mirror images in my mind from Ms. Kingston’s depiction of the cemetery where her mother was buried, and the cemetery where my own mother was buried too. I recall the towering oak tree split in two and low concrete wall on which she sat with her grandfather, mirroring the huge tree and concrete bench by my own mother’s grave, on which I would sit with my dad, my baby’s grandfather. There are other moments too, split like that giant oak, many years ago — for it was often the case, in the dark of night, that childish games or tree-lined streets, backyard parties and college dreams, all mushed together when I lay in bed and allowed the story to rest with me.
And on the eve of such an auspicious occasion – the first Mother’s Day weekend I celebrate my own wife now turned mother. A blessed and grateful party of three! I have to say that I am so grateful for this book, being, as one of my favorite writer’s Sarah Ruhl puts it, “…a beautiful gift from a mother to a daughter, and from a daughter to her readers.”
Thank you, Gwen!
Michael Vitaly Sazonov 