Guest blog post: Eating Cake on 9/11
Kate Whouley, a memoirist and instructor in Bay Path's MFA in Creative Nonfiction program, wrote this beautiful piece, "Eating Cake on 9/11," originally published in Obit magazine and which I'm sharing today with you. Why today and not yesterday? One reason is that I find the official commemorations sometimes drown out individual voices on the actual anniversary. There are speeches, civic events, news articles. The booming language of the official - the codified gestures and words of public memorializing - make it hard to hear one person speaking. One person illuminating, in a quiet voice, what it was like to be alive that day - and the days since.
And so I post Kate's essay today, September 12.
And so I post Kate's essay today, September 12.
Eating Cake on 9-11
This
year on 9-11, I plan to eat cake. Chocolate cake with chocolate icing—my
mother’s favorite.
My
mother turned 67 on September 11, 2001. It was a time in her life when she went
to a lot of doctors. Accompanying her in the weeks and months—and even
years—after the attacks, I felt wary whenever I provided her date of birth. I
tried out September 11th,
rather than 9-11, hoping to skip the
beat of stunned silence before a receptionist, a pharmacist or a health
professional would ask, “What was the year again?”
On
that blue-skied September morning ten years ago, I planned to fly to New
York. I’d meet with my clients—who
published law books—and by late afternoon, I’d be back on Cape Cod. Just in
time to pick up a cake and prepare my mother’s birthday dinner.
For
reasons I no longer remember, I postponed my 9-11 meeting, opting to catch up
by phone instead. Strange, I thought when I made the call: no voice mail, no
receptionist, just a fast-busy. It wasn’t until I made another call--to a
friend in Chicago--that I learned why I couldn’t reach anyone in New York.
“Do you want to come
over to watch my TV?” my mother asked me, when she called a few minutes
later. I didn’t. I didn’t feel any need for video
verification. Instead, I wanted to make phones calls and send e-mails and
perform a sort of virtual-shepherding. I
was especially worried about my friend Tina, a Boston-based flight attendant
for American Airlines.
“Should we still have the cook-out tonight?” I asked my
mother when I called to report Tina was fine—or at least on the ground.
I hoped she’d postpone.
In the face of so much loss, it felt wrong to fire up the grill and keep
on living. Maybe by the weekend, I thought, we won’t feel so numb, so sad. But
my mother did not favor a change of plans.
“This is not a time,” she said, “for us to sit in our
separate houses.”
Traffic was eerily absent when I ventured out to pick up a
birthday cake; the whole world seemed to have stopped. My errand felt absurd
and almost sacrilegious, disrespectful of the dead. At the bakery, I was the only customer. A
yellow-haired woman about my mother’s age was patient with me, pointing at each
cake, repeating as I failed to take in the information. The one with the white and yellow roses, I
finally decided. The baker loaded her
frosting pen and squeezed, spelling out Happy
Birthday Mom in green cursive before she pushed a tiny candleholder and a
single yellow candle into the center of the cake.
“It feels so strange to get a birthday cake today,” I
said.
“It is a terrible day,” she agreed. Like me, she had been
listening to the radio since she first heard the news. “But even so, your
mother still has to have her birthday.”
A few hours later,
my mother, her companion, Bill, and I sat on the deck, eating hamburgers spiked
with chopped tomato and onions, miso, beer and black pepper. We shared reports
we had heard; we swapped theories and we shook our heads. Both Bill and my mother had memories of Pearl
Harbor; both Bill and my mother agreed we’d witnessed another act of war. But none of us knew exactly what war it was.
Not then. Not yet.
After dinner, I carried the cake to the table, placing it
in front of my mother, instructing her to make a wish before she blew out the
single flame. One wish did not seem
enough that night. I should have loaded her cake with candles.
We
moved indoors to eat the cake, and for a few minutes, we were lost in its
goodness, and in the memories of cakes past—all delicious, and all from the
same yellow-haired baker who wanted my mother to have her birthday.
I
wonder now whether my mother already knew—or feared—that something was amiss.
Did she depend on Bill to drive that night because her always-challenged sense
of direction was morphing into an inability to find her way? Did she notice she
was losing her car keys more often, and forgetting how to use the
coffeemaker? Or did she inherently
understand that that every day, every moment spent with those we love is precious?
Four
and a half years after our 9-11 cookout, my mother moved to an assisted living
residence. She participated in the
selection process; she agreed to move.
At least that’s my version of the story.
Hers was much different. “You had
no right to just pack me up and send me here.”
For many months, she was angry with me. “You are the only kid in the
family who put her mother away. You took the path of least resistance. You should be ashamed of yourself.” My English-teaching, Latin-speaking mother
could no longer spell—even her signature was hard to write, but she hadn’t lost
her ability to string a sentence together.
Sometimes, we exchanged harsh words.
But I came to realize she never remembered them.
It was about this time that my mother—a lifelong reader,
writer, and promoter of language arts—embraced the role of editor. She blue-lined the less pleasant elements of
her life story. As her memory grew less reliable, her disposition
improved. It was as if she were happier,
as if her living were lighter when freed of her old sad stories, freed of the
memory of her younger, troubled selves.
Visiting, we laughed together; we had fun. I might show her
a picture: the black and white shot of a glamorous young woman directing a high
school play—or share a story I remembered from her bouffant-hairdo days.
“Well, wasn’t I something!”
“You still are something, Mom.”
The next day, she would complain on the phone: “You haven’t
visited in ages.”
Eventually, I stopped reminding her that I’d visited the
day before. I came to understand what she meant to teach me with her birthday
cook-out: we must not only seize the day, but make the moment matter. Even when
we know the moment will be forgotten.
As my mother changed with her forgetting, I considered how
many variations compose a single life. “She just wasn’t herself anymore,” said
an unthinking mourner at my mother’s wake.
Who are we, anyway—any of us, at any time? If we are lucky
to live long, we are all—a hundred, a thousand—different people. I am not the same person who picked out that
birthday cake 10 years ago. Minutes
after the attack, no one in our country could claim to be unchanged.
When I light my mother’s candle this year, I will think of
all the souls who left the planet prematurely, of their friends and families,
who begin another decade of living without them. I will think of my mother—in all her versions
and variations. And I will not eat my
chocolate cake alone. My mother and the bakery lady were right. In joyfulness
or in sorrow, in celebration or in mourning, in remembering or in
forgetting—now or then—this is not a time to sit in our separate houses.
#####
copyright
2011 by Kate Whouley
This essay originally
appeared in Obit Magazine
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