Mom

My mother died in 2020.

This isn't a biography of her. I'm not sure I could write one if I tried. What I can see, looking through these pictures now, is what she left in me.

The pictures are the years I have, in order.

She left my father when I was turning five. I spent a lot of those years at my grandmother's house, where her brother lived. He was the uncle I learned to interpret the world for. I didn't know then that learning to understand what someone was trying to say—not just what they could say—would become important to me.

She married Gordon in 1983.

I asked why about everything as a kid. Not occasionally. Everything. My mother had an answer she gave me so many times it wore a groove:

Focus on what you do want.

I doubt either of us knew what she was giving me.

I use those words now. A business owner will sit across from me and tell me everything that's wrong. The employee who isn't working out. The customer they don't want. The problem they can't solve. The thing they don't want to happen.

I listen.

And eventually I ask some version of the question she taught me to ask: What do you want?

I've watched the room change when I ask it.

More than fifty years later, I'm still using my mother's answer to a little boy who asked too many questions.

The other lesson came when I was about seven:

You don't judge someone by their words. You judge them by their actions.

She had learned that one the hard way. She made sure I got it the easy way.

That one went deeper.

I have spent much of my life listening to people. Words matter to me. Conversation matters enormously to me. But underneath the words, I'm always watching for what someone does. How they show up. Whether the words and the life agree.

I think she put that in me too.

She is in seventeen years of this archive.

Thanksgivings at her table, Gordon carving. Christmases. Donovan's wedding. Sea World in 2012, three generations sitting in the stands. Whitewater Canyon in 2013, where she hiked with us without complaint.

Ordinary days that didn't seem particularly important while we were living them.

Then Gordon got sick.

For about a year, I helped take care of them both. After he died, she moved in with Suzanne and me in February 2019.

She hated feeling like a burden.

Every morning I made her coffee. She loved the coffee, but I think she loved the visit more. She knew my routine because she knew everything about me, and she knew I was changing it for her.

So she had me buy her a Nespresso machine.

Now she could make her own coffee. I could have my mornings back.

Then she'd come find me anyway.

The pictures from that year are quieter.

She died the next year.

She was the last person in my life who had seen all of me and needed nothing back for it.

I don't think I understood immediately what disappeared with her.

It took me about a year to feel steady again.

Then Suzanne and I bought an RV and drove away.

For the next two years, the pictures stop being pictures of a life in one place. They become roads and landscapes and unfamiliar towns. A different kind of life.

I didn't know where any of it was leading.

I just knew it was time to go.

That is the next chapter of this archive.

And it starts here.