Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me and Has Failed

a phrase from Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me”

“Don’t get old,” my mother says as I dry her back. It’s not the first time she has issued this warning, not even the first time today. Rolling out of bed in the morning, she reached for her cane, pushed herself to her feet, gave me a little smile. “Don’t get old.”

Helping her put on her shirt, I remind my mother that I have already breezed past fifty, am well along the path of no longer being young. Old age is coming for me sooner than I would like to consider, sooner than either one of us would like to believe. She looks startled at my reminder: how is it possible to have a child over the age of fifty and already nearing retirement? How is it possible to have lived so long?

She never expected to live this long.

“Don’t get old,” my mother says. Sometimes, making my voice high and light, I leap in to finish her thought: “It’s not for wimps, huh?”

“It’s not for wimps,” my mother confirms. By “wimp” she means someone who lacks the strength to do the tough, unpleasant job at hand. Strength of that kind is not a thing my mother has ever lacked, having been handed many tough and unpleasant jobs during her life, not the least of which was raising five children alone. She is the toughest person I have ever known and also the most fragile, unbreakable but easily fractured, prone to chips and cracks and dents. I keep trying to find the right metaphor, a way of capturing a woman who is the opposite of those White southern women they call steel magnolias. My mother is one of those Black southern women who grew armor in order to survive a hostile world but remained as fragile as a robin’s egg inside. A shelter built with crepe paper. A tank of woven spiderwebs. A fortress spun from glass. Something like that.

We finish her shower, an exhausting fifteen minutes for her, no pleasure, all chore. She prefers baths, but climbing in and out of the tub now is dangerous. I rinse out the stall while she shuffles down the hall to put her dirty clothes in the washing machine. I could do this for her, but it is important that she contribute to the running of the household, that she continue to do things for herself. When I first arrived, visiting after more than a year away due to COVID, I tried to do everything, running around the house in a frenzy, waiting on her hand and foot, until she said, “I feel so useless,” and I stopped.

I do not visit enough.

My mother lives with my sister on the other side of the country, the other side of the continent. I take off over the Atlantic and land over the Pacific and drive a rental car to my sister’s house. There are five of us, four girls and one boy, but my sister alone has taken on the burden of caring for our mother. The rest of us try to help when and how we can, but it is inadequate. It is all inadequate.

Don’t get old.

I make lunch: yogurt for me, a turkey sandwich for my mother, strips of meat on bread as soft and white as drifts of snow, the kind of bread I grew up eating and now, in my East Coast arrogance, disdain. My mother loves it still, and anyway, her teeth will not accommodate the hearty multigrain or crusty baguette I prefer, because in America poor people don’t deserve dental care. To the tray I add a small salad drenched in Thousand Island dressing, some chunks of watermelon and cantaloupe, a Snapple tea. She takes her noontime pills, four of them, including vitamins. She has already taken a handful of other meds after breakfast and will take another handful before bed, more pills in one day than I take in months. We watch The People’s Court or Judge Judy, shows that make me simultaneously feel better about my life and despair for humanity. What I know about Judge Judy is that she has been on forever and has made a ton of money and likes to berate people and thinks herself very tough and very discerning and very smart, which, compared to the people who come before her in her “courtroom,” she certainly is. It’s funny how people often confuse being in the right place at the right time with deserving what they luck into, but I will give Judy this: she has spawned an infestation of imitators. Every time I visit my mother (the only time I watch daytime television,) I discover another court show: Judge Mathis (a buffoonish, jive-shucking Black man,) Judge Faith, Judge Jeanine, not to mention Divorce Court and, astonishingly, Paternity Court. Even Jerry Springer gets to play judge for fun and profit in America. Everything about these shows seems petty and grimy and small, a relentless parade of accusation and humiliation and delusion. Especially delusion: people lying to others, people lying, time after relentless time, to themselves. When I ask my mother why she likes them, she shrugs and laughs. The perfect response.

“Put on Dr. Pimple Popper,” she says. Meaning, If you think that’s something, watch this. Dr. Pimple Popper, which I have never seen and which I cannot believe exists, is a reality show with a pretty young Asian dermatologist meeting people with all kinds of horrible, disfiguring skin conditions. She talks gently to them about the impact of their hideous growths on their lives and self-esteem and then proceeds to, yes, pop the pimple or pare the keloid or surgically remove the lipoma the size of a tennis ball dangling on the inside of their leg, all this right there on camera, blood and pus and stitches and all. I am sickened, but my mother watches with fascination. “Isn’t that amazing?” she says. “Don’t you think that’s interesting?”

She wanted, at one time, to be a nurse.

When the pimple show is over, I dig out a checkerboard from the cabinet. The last time I visited I tried to get my mother interested in puzzles, in sudoku, in embroidery. No dice. I long ago gave up trying to interest her in reading, gave up trying to understand why our childhood home was full of books she never opened. I opened them. They set me on my path.

My sister has also given up trying to get our mother to write her memoirs. “I wouldn’t want to depress people,” my mother says when I ask again. Six months from now when I visit, she will have forgotten that she was opposed and say, “I was going to write a book about my life, but I can’t remember it. My memory is so bad.”

She wanted, at one time, to be a writer.

She says yes to the checkers, though mostly to shut me up, I think. I plan to go easy on her, but after listening to my refresher of the rules, my mother quickly captures half my men, lands three kings, then takes the rest of my pieces. I am surprised and delighted and a little chagrined, the competitive instinct being what it is; it’s like the first time your child beats you in something fair and square. I ask if she wants to play again. She shakes her head.

“I’m trying to remember what I did with all my time,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t play checkers, never liked to play card games. I was not a big reader. I’m trying to remember what I did with all my time.”

“You worked,” I say. “You worked hard.”

She nods. “Working outside the house or working inside the house. No time for myself.”

Rocking herself to her feet the way the physical therapist taught her, my mother grabs her cane and heads upstairs to nap.

I used to think I had a pretty good grip on aging, that I understood and accepted the inevitable. I would not be one of those people who go around saying things like “Age is nothing but a number” (yes, and so is miles per hour and so is blood pressure, and both those things can kill you if the number grows high enough, so what exactly is your point?) or that fifty is the new thirty (it isn’t) or that being around college students keeps one young (they exhaust me.) I would not be like the middle-aged men I dated postdivorce who described themselves as “just a big kid” and who, in fact, dressed like toddlers and acted like adolescents and labeled women their own age “yucky” but believed themselves to be magically, eternally youthful, men who at forty-five or forty-eight still wanted to settle down and have children “someday.” I would not be ridiculous.

I believed my equanimity about aging came from not having loved childhood or adolescence that much. I was an odd outsider child, an odd outsider teen, a depressed outsider twenty-year-old. My twenties were full of confusion and yearning, my thirties a blur of depression and marriage and child-rearing. A lot of stuff happened and a lot of stuff was accomplished, but through most of it I felt like I was sleepwalking. At forty I stirred, my eyelids fluttered, light filtered in. At forty-five I sat up and looked around. I see. Okay.

Fifty I greeted not with dread but with exhilaration; I knew who I was, I knew what I wanted and did not want, and finally I liked myself. I didn’t fear losing my looks because I had grown up thinking I didn’t have any. As a teen and young woman I thought myself fat and ugly; not until I was well over thirty did that hegemonic delusion subside. Somewhere around forty or maybe forty-five I realized that not only was I not ugly, I was actually pretty damn attractive, even beautiful. (Around this time my niece, doing a project for some college class, asked me how “pretty privilege” had impacted my life. I started to protest that I never felt pretty but stopped when she raised an eyebrow. Not being aware of privilege does not negate its power. For that brief moment I felt like a White person.) At first this realization made me sad; in some ways, though not others, youth was wasted on me. Had I known I was beautiful, I would have cut through the world of men like a warrior instead of sneaking around like a beggar seeking alms. But girls who come to womanhood valued for their beauty can learn to lean on that beauty like a cane, atrophying the muscles needed to stand upright. I came to womanhood believing that my brain and not my face would be the source of my salvation. My brain was myself.

This was a gift, in the long run. At fifty my face was wrinkling, my body softening, beginning to sag. But my brain was stronger than ever. Well constructed, meticulously maintained, it was firing on all cylinders, free from the gummy oil of youthful obliviousness and ruinous self-doubt. I threw myself a fiftieth birthday party: three cakes, two changes of outfit, sixty people roaming my house and me not giving a damn. I played the music I wanted and ate the food I wanted and talked to whomever held my interest until they didn’t. I danced and danced and danced. I was not afraid of turning fifty; I was liberated.

Sweeping the living room the day after my party, I realized I had no memory of my mother at fifty, this new and wonderful age. Had no memory of her taking a step back and surveying her life with satisfaction, no memory of her coming happily into herself. In my memory, my mother is first young, harried, and beautiful, and then suddenly, one day, she is old. What explains this abrupt transition? Part of it, probably, was my own selfishness. During those middle years of my mother’s life I was preoccupied, focused on my work and my depression and my marriage and my children and my own monkey mind. I checked in on my mother from a distance, both geographically and emotionally. I thought the best thing I could do for my mother was not add to her considerable burdens. By leaving her alone I was helping her. So I told myself.

My navel-gazing probably explains part of this, as does the fact that in her sixties my mother developed a serious illness, one I believe was caused in part by the stress of her life. But even before that my mother seemed older than she actually was. Older than my ex-mother-in-law, for example, though she was, in fact, younger. Older than a White woman friend from my church.

Sometimes people ask my mother’s age. In the first part of your life, people ask you how old you are, then they ask the age of your children, and finally they ask the age of your parents, if your parents are still alive. Sometimes people ask my mother’s age and I give it, followed by a qualification. She’s 83 but it’s really more like 120. She’s 84 and it’s amazing she’s still alive because life for her has been no crystal stair. She’s 85 but it’s a hard 85.

Some people age like trees, well tended and watered. A tree grows from seed to sprout to sapling to mature to elderly to snag. Most trees spent the bulk of their years in maturity, bearing fruit or acorns or pecans or pine cones, seeking only to reproduce themselves. Left alone, certain species of oaks can produce for three hundred years before spending another three hundred in a gentle decline toward death.

Some people age like trees, and some people age like animals, each year compressed. Some people’s years are like animal years not because those people are “animals” (well, all people are animals, but you know what I mean here) but because of how they’re treated by life. Some people age like trees because they live in a forest, and some people age like animals because their world is a zoo.

A woman I know had a stroke recently. Eleven years younger than me, perfectly healthy, no warning signs of any kind. She survived, thank God, but the road back to recovery is long. At least three women my age I know have high blood pressure. Another has fibroids so painful and debilitating she needed surgery. Another woman takes drugs to curb her compulsive hairpulling, a painful and complex disorder that probably results from a combination of genetic and environmental causes. I could go on.

Strokes can happen to anyone. John Fetterman, the White senator from Pennsylvania, had a stroke, as did two sitting senators from New Mexico and Maryland. Strokes can happen to anyone, but in America but strokes happen to Black people far more often and with more deadly consequences. Black women are twice as likely as White women to have a stroke. Black men are 70 percent more likely than White men to die of stroke.

Seventy damn percent.

There are physical risk factors, of course: weight, diabetes, long Covid. But every Black person in America knows the biggest risk to their health by far is the simple fact of being Black. Or, more accurately, being Black in a society undergirded by interlocking systems of oppression, what the writer and scholar bell hooks aptly summed up as “imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy.” Let’s call it IWSHP for short.

Even setting aside the question of how IWSHP collides with epigenetics (gestating under the wide-ranging impacts of structural racism impacts a fetus’s health, like how those whose mothers were pregnant with them during the Dutch Winter Famine of 1944 were more likely to develop conditions like diabetes and heart disease), living under the weight of IWSHP creates a stress that is real and cumulative and, for far too many of us, ultimately untenable, a stress that is without question worse for those trapped at the bottom of the ladder but felt even by those at the top—ask Serena Williams. I grew up poor but since college have lived an economically stable, even privileged, middle-class life. Still, I marvel that I survived the depression of my twenties and thirties. Still, there are days I return home inexplicably weary, barely able to make it through the door. For three or four weeks this fall, right around the time I learned of my friend’s stroke, I found myself walking around exhausted, as though carrying the weight of the world. At the same time, I chided myself for feeling this way. There was no discernible reason; I spend my days sitting in meetings and fending off emails, not out chopping cotton under the glare of a White man on horseback. Though sometimes I see newspaper articles about Black men out chopping cotton under the glare of White men on horseback. Hello, Louisiana, my old friend.

Finally I said to a friend, a Black woman from London, “I’m so tired, and I don’t know why. What’s wrong with me?”

She said, “Weathering is real.”

Maybe I’m a writer because I find such power in words, in naming the unnamed. All Black women are indebted to researcher Arline T. Geronimus, who proposed the weathering hypothesis in 1992. She was trying to explain why Black women had better pregnancy outcomes in their late teens than in their mid-twenties, while White women, by contrast, faced a much lower risk of pregnancy complications in their mid-twenties than in their teens. The answer was this: the toxic stew of racism and sexism in which Black women simmer from the day we are born takes a toll on our bodies, takes a toll on our health. Weathering.

Not everything is about race is such a funny thing for a White person to say to a Black person. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard it. I can’t count how many times I’ve rolled my eyes in response. Not everything is about race. Nobody wishes this were so more than Black people.

Here’s an example. There’s a critical long-term research study known as the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation, or SWAN. Since 1994 SWAN has been tracking the health of middle-aged women, becoming a major source of scientific knowledge about menopause and female health. But researchers at Stanford University decided to assess the original data set of potential participants, women ages forty-two to fifty-five, and found that many Black and Hispanic women had been excluded from the study early on. Why? Because the study was focused on premenopausal women, and these women had already undergone menopause. SWAN failed to account for the fact that Black and Hispanic women tend to undergo menopause earlier than White women. Why? Because of weathering.

Slotting these women back into the study (theoretically) produced some startling results. The average age at which women—regardless of race—experienced heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes was lowered by nearly twenty years. For Black and Hispanic women, insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes, began eleven years earlier than original SWAN data calculated, while heart disease, the number one killer of American women overall, began five years earlier.

Meaning that by the time doctors using the SWAN guidelines begin screening us for these diseases, it may already be too late.

Not everything is about race. Weathering is real.

That same week my friend reminded me of weathering, I read a story about Erica Gardner, the young woman who became a police reform activist after her father was choked to death by a NYC cop while crying, “I can’t breathe.” Three years later Erica Garner died of complications from a heart attack. She was twenty-seven. Her sister, Emerald Snipes-Garner, described the stress of racism and white supremacy and police violence that took her sister’s life: “They pull out one piece at a time, at a time, and another piece, and another piece, until you sort of collapse and you start losing pieces of your health and well-being.”

I did not mention the story to my friend. I didn’t have to.

“Weathering is real,” she said.

“Yes. Thank you for reminding me.”

“War of attrition,” she said.

Talking about weathering I felt oddly, immediately strengthened. The flip side of my depression has always been a certain stubbornness, the silver lining to the cloud. It’s one thing to consider opting out of a world full of pain and unkindness, a world where, like it or not, bad things happen to good people and where, reports to the contrary, the assholes usually win. It’s another thing entirely to be driven from it. The idea of being killed by white supremacy at this late date is enough to get my Scottish up.

“I am not the victim here,” said James Baldwin. Damn right.

Put another way: this is for colored girls who have considered suicide and might consider it still, but who sure as hell are not gonna let y’all take us out.

A reporter writing a story for Mother’s Day once asked me for the best piece of advice I ever received from my mother.

I am not a fan of Mother’s Day, for many reasons. Primarily, I dislike all days of consumerist obligation, sincerely fail to understand why receiving supermarket flowers or drugstore chocolate on a day designated for such should make me feel special and thought about and loved. I told my husband early in our courtship that I didn’t really need trinkets of affection but that if he was ever inspired to buy them anyway, the one day he should absolutely resist the urge was Valentine’s Day. Giving flowers on Valentine’s Day, like going out on New Year’s Eve, is for amateurs.

But my dislike of Mother’s Day is not what stumped me at the reporter’s question. It was the notion that my response would be printed alongside the answers of other “notable” women. I suspected—correctly, as it turned out—that much of that advice would fall along the lines of “you can be anything you want to be” and “be kind to people” and “get up each day with a smile.”

This was not the kind of advice my mother gave. My mother’s advice tended more toward warnings of disaster, predictions of failure and doom. My mother’s advice came in the form of orders:

Get up. You can sleep when you’re dead.

Don’t get pregnant: it will ruin your life.

Nobody wants a nasty woman. (Nasty meaning both dirty and sexually promiscuous.)

I don’t care what they called you. As long as those White people are not putting their hands on you, you stay up there with them and learn what they know.

All of this was true, more or less. All of this was wisdom in its way, just not the kind I longed for as a child. I wanted a mother who sat on my bunk bed (I wanted a bunk bed, desperately) and listened to my childish troubles and told me the sun would come up tomorrow and everything would be fine. I wanted a mother who kissed my forehead and told me she loved me. I wanted a mother who told me to get up each day with a smile.

Instead I got another kind of mother. And what’s funny is that the mother I had was not the mother my siblings had. Ask each of us about our mother and you’ll hear a completely different story, five blindfolded men describing an elephant. That makes my mother at least seven or eight different people: the mother I wanted, the mother I had, the mother of my siblings, and whoever she really was. And the mother she has, in old age, become.

Age and dementia have softened my mother; it’s easier to forgive what one forgets. The grudges of a lifetime are finally lost to memory, the anger and resentments released. Maybe that’s what wisdom is: forgetting. Maybe my mother has grown wise. She has let heal the wounds of childhoods, wounds which festered all her life. She is loving, asking for a hug when I enter, another when I leave. She never mentions my father, and when the subject of an estranged relative comes up, she just shakes her head and sighs. When I call her to tell her I made it home safely on the overnight flight, she tells me she loves me, which rarely happened when I was young. In old age and dementia my mother has become the mother I always wanted. Or maybe it’s truer to say she has become the mother I thought I wanted. So unlike the mother who shaped me. Who helped make me who I am.

A friend of mine used to lie awake at night terrified that her mother would die. That she would fear this as a child she understood, but the fear extended into adulthood, growing instead of diminishing, until by forty it was an all-consuming thing. Then one day a family secret came out, a secret held by her mother, a secret that reshaped my friend’s understanding of herself. Suddenly the paralyzing fear of her mother dying disappeared. My friend feared the death of her mother because she had sensed there was something she still needed from her mother, something valuable that had not yet been transferred but still could be. Both those things are key. I don’t remember ever fearing the death of my mother. I must have, as a child, but I don’t remember doing so. What my mother had to give me, which was nothing short of life, was long ago transferred.

Another friend, who nursed his mother until she died, says that tending an elderly person is a lot like tending a baby, except that with a baby the work is infused with promise and expectation and hope for the future while with an elderly person it is not. Raising children is about trying to correct for all the shortcomings of one’s own childhood, to balm the wounds and ease the slights and fill the holes. Tending an elderly parent is about trying not to see that soon it will be you on the other side of the table, watching Judge Judy and waiting for your lunch.

It’s amazing to me that people fear death more than this.

Six months after my last visit my mother’s memory has worsened. She looks at the family photos hanging in her room and asks me who the people are. That’s your son. That’s your daughter. That’s one of your granddaughters. That one is you. She refuses to believe the gray-haired woman with a cane and a mask is her, though I can’t tell if this is true confusion or just the kind of disbelief that hits us all when confronted with evidence of our aging bodies. Last week I looked in the mirror and thought, “Not bad for your age!” Feeling cocky, I took a selfie. Big mistake. The mirror flatters and lies, but the camera gives not a damn.

In my mother’s room I pull out my phone and show her other pictures, pictures of her as a young woman, pictures of her beloved brother, now passed. She tries to tell me stories about this brother, stories I have heard a dozen times, but she can’t remember the details, and this frustrates her, even when I chime in. I redirect to stories of other relatives, great-aunts and uncles she admired and loved. I ask about her mother, my grandmother Iola. My mother doesn’t want to talk about her mother. Some things are best left to fade.

After an hour of this I need a break, so I go downstairs to the kitchen. Ten minutes later she is standing at the top of the stairs, calling plaintively: Hello? Hello? Afraid she has been abandoned. This becomes a pattern: one day all she wants to do is sleep, the next she is more awake and alert and does not want to be left alone. The challenge is to find something that will hold her interest. You want to go outside? No, I don’t like outside. Want to go for a ride? Not really. Want to play checkers? No. Read a book? No.

The day stretches on.

We watch television, but few shows hold her interest. Even when one does, she finds following along challenging. Over and over she asks, “What did she say? What did he say?” My sister thought this was a hearing issue and got my mother expensive hearing aids. But the questions continue even when the hearing aids are in and, anyway, she doesn’t like wearing them, which I can understand. When is it too late for new things like hearing aids? When is it too late to try to make life better than it is?

Anyway, it’s not just the dialogue. “What is she doing that for?” my mother asks, staring at The Cosby Show. “Who is that? Why is he walking that way?” The commercials are worse: “You ever heard of GoLo?” she asks. I say no but explain what it is. Fifteen minutes later the same commercial comes on and she asks again. And then again. It reminds me of when my children were young and constantly asking why, why, why. A preschool teacher told me it was normal for four-year-olds to ask as many as three hundred questions a day as they tried to make sense of the world. Your job was to be patient and responsive and reassuring. Your job was not to let it set your teeth on edge.

I knew a man once who stopped visiting his mother in a nursing home because her dementia caused her to rage whenever she saw him. He could not bear the change from the soft, self-sacrificing mother he had always known. I knew a woman who blossomed in the declining years, enjoying a string of relationships with gentleman friends in her retirement village after her husband passed on. I know a woman who at age ninety and in active congestive heart failure eagerly seeks book recommendations and refuses to allow an oxygen machine in her home because it is “ugly.” I know an imperfect woman who did imperfect things and heroic things and led a life that was both wide-ranging and painfully constrained and who, toward the end, became a version of herself no one could have foreseen.

There’s no real way to predict what kind of old person a person will become. Not even oneself.

My mother is napping. I write her a note so she will not be frightened if she wakes and finds herself alone, then head out for a walk in the crystalline California sun. It feels good to walk, to still have use of my body, to feel competent. I hike a nearby hill, determined not to stop or slow down until I reach the top. Sometimes when walking I catch myself curling forward; when this happens, I force myself to stand up straight, to lead with my hips instead of my shoulders, determined not to turn into one of those old people who walk with their face to the ground. Sometimes my knee throbs, but I ignore the pain. I have not bothered to see a doctor, not wanting a knee replacement. I am past the time of repair, focusing only on maintenance. My goal is limping out with the joints I brought in.

Don’t get old, my mother says.

I used to answer, “It beats the alternative!” It seemed the thing to say, the upbeat, encouraging way to beat back the pain behind my mother’s words. Don’t get old. Sure, but at least it’s better than being dead! Being dead is worse than anything!

I don’t say that anymore.

When I wake my mother from her nap, I ask if I can lower her bed, which is so high she needs a stepladder to climb into it. This is a falling hazard that frightens me, but my mother likes to sleep high. Maybe for comfort. Maybe for safety. Maybe to be closer to God. She says no to my offer. When I insist, she looks me straight in the eye.

“I don’t like change,” she says. “I’m old.”

Downstairs I try to entice my mother outside into the sunshine by suggesting we take a walk to the mailbox at the end of the drive. No dice, though my mother used to love getting the mail, loved sorting the flyers and magazines and appeals for money, hoping something good and magical had come. Today I bring back only a solicitation for life insurance. My mother wants to read it, but I take it gently from her hand and throw it away. Last year I went through her paperwork, discovered a dozen garbage life insurance policies from AAA, United of Omaha, Colonial Penn. Junk policies for the most part, worth less than the amount my mother had dutifully plowed into them. Policies meant to ensnare and impoverish the vulnerable elderly. Fucking greedy, predatory, unregulated capitalism.

“You don’t need life insurance,” I tell my mother. “We’re grown, all launched. You did your job.”

My mother shakes her head. “You have to leave something behind,” she insists. If you don’t leave something behind, you’ve failed.

We look for something to watch on television, something to pass the hours until dinnertime.

“Not Hallmark,” my mother says. “I don’t like Hallmark. Nothing but White people.”

I laugh and tell her about all the White people I have seen on my daily walks around the neighborhood. Many, many White people, dozens upon dozens, striding the sidewalks of the upscale little neighborhood like they own them, gliding along the pathway next to the canal like it was made for them. Some of these White people have been genuinely friendly, like the guy who caught me jogging backward one morning and said, “You’re making me feel old!” Others have been pointedly cold. I take both with all the salt in the nearby Pacific. But on that morning’s walk, for the first time, I encountered a Black woman. Seeing her lifted my spirits. She was on the other side of the street, but we called out to each other over the passing traffic, hands raised in greeting, hands open to signal all was well.

“I was waving like a fool,” I tell my mother, exaggerating the gesture to make her laugh.

My mother smiles. “Life is funny,” she says.

“Life is funny,” I echo.

My mother is eighty-five as I write this. A friend is amazed. “You’re the only Black person our age I know whose parents are still alive,” she says. My mother’s mother died at seventy-two. I am nearing sixty. Trees can live for hundreds of years, but all of us will eventually snag.

“Life is funny,” my mother says again. “And then you die.”

Read more from Issue 20.2.