How to Forget: A Daughter's Memoir

Homesickness is a sickness of the heart, not of the mind. It is deeply subjective and belongs, inarguably, to the sufferer alone.

It had taken thirty years for me to understand that regrets do not dissipate, they do not abate into sadness—they harden until they have formed into a small fist that often rests quietly in the pit of your stomach but that can suddenly, and without warning, land a punch so powerful you are left doubled over in pain, gasping for breath.

Dr. Fortson, was at once self-assured and modest, his professionalism innate. He had learned from experience to present himself as calm, unhurried. He had all the time in the world for my mother, and I said to myself, You are wise, Dr. Fortson, because this is a woman who deserves all the time in the world.

Why then, I wondered, would my brother assume that our father, so near death, might yearn for the very sounds that only a month earlier had driven him crazy? Was the incessant chatter of women more palatable from the depths of a coma? Would that noise, which had so clearly offended him, transform itself into music, simply because he was dying? How very odd and strangely amusing to think that this man, who had disdained any form of idle conversation outside of the drunken, might suddenly long to hear the raised voices of his womenfolk, mixed with the darker tones of his male progeny, and even more curious was the suggestion from our hospice nurses that our voices might have a salubrious effect on our father. It was a well-known fact, they assured us, that hearing was the last sense to go.

The one thing that has set us apart had been taken from us, and thought we would joke again, and tease, and strive to recover a flavor of the old exuberance, we would never again laugh as we once had.

Fear is a starkly felt emotion, it is not nuanced, and as I looked around the room, I saw how it had manifested itself in each of my siblings.

As very often happens when we are consumed with the busyness of life, a condition exacerbated by the occasion of death, we are shaken when, at last, we find ourselves useless.

Ours was a bond without resilience. We had not fought for a friendship, we had not suffered because of the lack of one. We had taken wildly divergent paths and, in so doing, we had lost each other.

How is it that words so longed for can hit and miss with equal acuity?

I thought again about the miracle of time, its manifest cruelty and sublime mercy.

So many memories have dissipated in the mind-blunting of that period, when every thought, every feeling, every action was born out of intense anxiety.

It is only an organ, the brain, just as the heart is only an organ, and hearts will stop when they have been broken. We give full marks to the broken heart but are less tolerant of the broken mind.

Whatever ill we bore one another, it was always within the accepted confines of sibling rivalry, but in the absence of parents to inspire that rivalry we lost confidence in ourselves, and in our love for one another. We fought for life to continue as it had always been, we fought for our right to be in the house that we loved, we fought for stature, for respect, for equality.

With our father dead and our mother lost, we surviving siblings became unmoored. Unusual behaviors revealed themselves at inauspicious times. Simmering beneath the surface of our loneliness was a kind of inarticulable fury, reducing each of us to a meanness we despised. We longed to reach out to one another, but at every turn this instinct was thwarted, tangled in a web of suspicion and resentment. As much as we had loved one another in the fullness of life, we hated what we had become when that wholeness was eclipsed by loss. Mendacity, jealousy, and rage percolated on the back burner while egoism masqueraded as generosity. In our confusion, we second-guessed one another, and because we never learned to confront each other with frank vulnerability, we fell back into the roles assigned to us at birth.