Memoir Time Travel

I’m currently residing in 1999, and it’s not a party.

I have hundreds of pages of emails with my mother.

While writing about my mother, I seek to uncover the complex gestalt of her, the big picture. How? By digging into who she was at the pixel level.

To accurately capture and analyze details, I move into the past. I get on a virtual plane, walk back into a room that may not exist anymore, dig into old correspondence, re-fight an old fight. Even if I’m writing about something I didn’t witness, I have to time travel, to reconstruct the defining moments of the past, discover the undercurrents and breadcrumbs and epiphanies.

Sometimes those defining moments relate to death, and there are four big ones in my book. The one I’m immersed in now occurred from 1999 to 2000, during my maternal grandmother’s final days. I wrote a play about this time, so have already mined its extensive drama and trauma. Coming at it from a nonfiction angle, though, recasts the villains and heroes. Now, accuracy is my guiding purpose, which means the story will no longer wrap up neatly in three acts.

I’ve been rereading the first emails my mother and I wrote to each other. We’d stopped speaking for almost four years, beginning in 1995. In summer 1999, email became a new form of communication for us, the way we’d start to reconnect.

Reading what are essentially contemporaneous transcripts of those fraught times, I notice how reality differed from my memory. For example, in December 1999 I visited my grandmother on her deathbed and called my mother on the way to Dulles Airport to tell her to get to Washington as quickly as possible. My memory was clear: this was the first time we had spoken in four years. And that’s true. But I hadn’t remembered that we’d gotten back in touch months earlier. In long, conversational emails, we dealt with some of the issues of our reconciliation. I was reintroducing her to her grandson, whose toddler and kindergarten years she’d missed. So yes, that memorable phone call was our first time hearing each other’s voices, but less shocking than it would have been without the emails.

Our complications back then may have felt momentous, but were just a grain of sand on life’s Adversity Beach. Only in retrospect can we identify “the good old days.” And only now can we see those days had plenty of issues, but were still “good” because they included people now gone.