So, Joyce Carol Oates surprised me in the end. Her novel Missing Mom — which I picked up for obvious reasons — was pretty slow in places and predictable in the series of events that propelled the story to its conclusion, but its that last line that got me:

“In this way ended my first full year of missing Mom.”

Set in upstate New York, the story is narrated by Nikki Eaton and chronicles the year following her mother’s murder. Within which, she waits for the trial, watches her family fall apart and begins to take over her mother’s life. She begins innocently enough, responding and speaking what she knows her mother would have wanted her to say to this individual or that in the community. Then she comes up with a perfectly reasonable explanation why she must move into her deceased parents’ home “for the summer.” And yet when the season changes, she is still there as well as taken up her mother’s hobbies of baking bread and visiting elderly relatives, even attending her swim class.

My own enticement to drive my mother’s last road or the odd comfort I received from the kids this year attending the elementary school that she last worked at didn’t seem so unusual anymore. Obviously, I’m not the first to think of interesting ways to be close to my mother. Granted, the road and the school were choices made for me, but they felt good and right. And if I had received it, I would have been as thankful as Nikki to stay in my mom’s last house to sort out, sort through and hide from the emotions that come – whichever may be best in the moment.

There was another odd haunting coincidence – the last she saw her mother was on Mother’s Day, the last I spoke to mine we were preparing for Mother’s Day. But mostly it was simply consoling to hear and be able to identify with another human being’s reaction to being thrust into the shoes of loss and grief — to hear how she works through — and to hear that she actually does begin to work through.

Yeap, that’s all. I feel quite stunned and it was nice to watch someone else be stunned too. To see the big city girl turn to bread baking, sleeping, surrounding herself with Mom and a cat. Then to know her anger at being watched or whispered about or avoided in town. To feel my own self in her and to know that I am not alone.

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