Editing My Mother's Memoir Without Her
Every comma is a conversation we can no longer have.
My mother died on a Tuesday in March, and on Thursday I found her memoir in the freezer. Not the fridge... the freezer, double wrapped in plastic bags, wedged between the frozen peas and a tub of dal labeled in her small square handwriting. I learned later that writers of her generation sometimes did this, because paper in a freezer can survive a house fire, and she trusted the cloud about as much as she trusted the neighbors.
Two hundred and fourteen pages. A title page that read: The Long Way Home, by Sudha Malhotra. Underneath, in red pen: DRAFT TWO. And under that, underlined twice: DO NOT READ YET.
I read it that night, all of it, sitting on the kitchen floor with the freezer door hanging open and the peas sweating on the counter.
You have to understand what my mother was like about that book. She started it six years ago, after a community center class called Writing Your Life, taught by a retired journalist named Mrs. Kapoor whom she alternately worshipped and fought with. She would not show anyone a word. At dinners my brother would ask if he was in it, and she would say, "Everyone is in it. That is the problem." I am an editor by trade. I copyedit chemistry textbooks, which is to say I spend my days making sure nobody dies from a misplaced decimal. She loved telling people that. My daughter fixes books for a living. Then she would point her fork at me across the table: "When mine is ready, you will fix my commas. Only my commas. If you touch my voice, I will haunt you."
She died of a heart condition nobody had detected.
Sixty-eight years old. Twenty-two chapters planned, nineteen written.
I found the outline in her desk drawer, index cards rubber banded together, chapter twenty in blue ink, twenty-one in black, twenty-two nothing but a title: The Long Way Home. The same as the book. She was saving the meaning of it for last, the way she saved the best piece of mango for whoever finished dinner slowest.
For four months I did not touch the manuscript except to move it from the freezer to my suitcase to my desk, where it sat under a brass paperweight like something radioactive. My husband stopped asking about it. Then one Sunday in July I opened a new document, typed Chapter One, and began.
Here is what nobody tells you about completing a parent's memoir: every single decision is a fight you can no longer have.
She spelled it grey on page twelve and gray on page forty, and I sat there for twenty minutes hearing both versions of her voice argue about it. She wrote that the flood in our town happened in 1988. It was 1989. I checked the newspaper archive twice. Do I correct her? Or was the wrong year part of how she carried it, true to her even when it was not true to the record? She overused the word suddenly. Mrs. Kapoor had clearly told her so, because in draft two half of them were crossed out with a note in the margin: fine, KAPOOR, fine. I left every surviving suddenly exactly where it stood.
Only my commas.
I kept the deal where I could.
Then I reached chapter fourteen.
Chapter fourteen is called Asha. I assumed it was about her sister Asha in Lucknow, the one with the parrot and the grievances... It is not.
It is about a daughter.
Her first, born in 1971, four years before me, who lived eleven days. My parents never spoke of her. Not once in forty-nine years of marriage, not at weddings or funerals, not in the long slack afternoons after my father's retirement when they told every story they had at least twice. My mother wrote eleven pages about eleven days. She described the hospital blanket, yellow with white ducks, one duck missing where the print had failed. She described the night nurse who pretended not to see her staying past visiting hours. She wrote: I named her Hope in a language my grief could pronounce.
I called my father. He was quiet for so long... I thought the line had dropped. Then he said, "She put that in the book?" And then, softer, almost to himself... "She kept it in?" That was when I finally understood the drafts. Draft one was her deciding whether she could write it. Draft two was her deciding to keep it. There was never going to be a draft where she took it out.
My aunt said cut the chapter, some things belong to the dead. My brother said it was not ours to publish. For about a week I agreed with whoever had spoken to me most recently, which is grief's version of editing too.
You cannot edit the dead back to life. You can only keep their sentences company, and refuse to let anyone quiet them, including yourself.
Chapter fourteen stayed.
The endings were harder. Three chapters she never wrote, three index cards in two colors of ink. I tried, once, to draft chapter twenty in her voice... and it read like a stranger doing an impression of her at a party. I deleted it and sat with my head in my hands until the screen went dark and showed me my own face. In the end I typed the three cards exactly as she had written them, one to a page, abbreviations and all, and let the book close in the shorthand of a woman who fully intended to come back and finish.
Somewhere in those months I started writing pages of my own. Small ones. Poems, mostly, because spending all day copyediting her grief left mine with nowhere to sit. I wrote about the grief directly instead of around it, which Mrs. Kapoor would have approved of. One night at two in the morning I entered one into a monthly poetry contest, mostly because I wanted a stranger, someone whose job was not to love me, to read it and decide. While I waited I kept rereading an essay about why safe poems lose, and I thought about draft two, and how the least safe chapter in my mother's book was the one she fought through two drafts to keep.
The memoir comes out this March, a small press, the first anniversary of the Tuesday. The cover is a photograph my brother took of the road into our town, the one the flood ate in 1989, whatever year my mother says it was. My father has asked for six copies. He says they are for the neighbors, and we both pretend to believe him.
I printed one extra copy before the files went to the printer. I double wrapped it in plastic bags and put it in her freezer, between the peas and the dal my father still cannot bring himself to eat.
Some manuscripts you fireproof. Some mothers you keep exactly where they left themselves.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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