“The Letter” by Katherine Cart

THE OLD COUPLE’S bodies were found immediately. Not even a whole afternoon had passed. The little outlook over the northern sea, on which they had chosen to die, was once a very quiet place. Throughout their earlier decades it had seemed that only they and their little daughter consistently frequented it. But now, because the places that were once quiet were full of people seeking quiet, another couple–young, on a first or second date–found them lying on the warm ledge.

They were two old, soft-boned, wizened but muscular women who, in death, had forgotten to hold each other. They had in fact rolled away from one another, as they had long rolled at night in their old marriage bed, toward the separate edges of the mattress. Rolled not for any dislike at all, but with the ancient peace that stitches together the air between two people who know fundamentally it will always, at this point, be two–who cannot comprehend that it was ever, or could ever again be, just one.

THE WOMEN LEFT behind a daughter. The daughter herself was grown, financially stable, with a partner and two children of her own. She was a physician in an abortion clinic in a state which had long been in an undeclared war with itself. 

She treated women who had few qualms with the choices they were making. She spoke openly with some about the future of the country and the bodies of the people. And she treated women who did not speak at all, but who entered after a long, long drive, and wore sunglasses and hoods and sometimes hated but more often loved her. She was kind and tough, this daughter.

THE DEAD MOTHERS had written several letters to their daughter. But there was only one letter that did not address matters of postmortem logistical importance. Only one letter between them that served as some semblance of a goodbye. It was not terse, per se, but nor did it seem, to the daughter, appropriately long. 

The daughter had lived many years already. She had never felt precisely what she felt while reading this letter.

To our greatest love:

When we met each other, we knew straight away that we could spend a whole life trying to love the other. Which is what love is. The decision to try to love. Or, perhaps, the inability to do anything otherwise. You must forgive yourself in your failures of love, just as you forgive your lover.

We have arrived to the bit of our lives that seems unnecessary. We cannot go backwards into life, but we have decided that we might go backwards into nonbeing. It is a good, warm season for a quick extinction. The gist, dear one, is that we do not want to see each other corrode. And death is so expensive these days! Our bodies and brains are too increasingly shriveled to waste money in preserving us overlong.

We are sorry that we have not included you in this last decision. We are so sorry that you did not know the last goodbye was the last goodbye. We understand that there are stories that you will find you are curious about, stories that have no answers except the answers that might have been found in us. Let little E. and M. know a person can love in absentia.

This last thing that we do will hurt you. It will become part of you. But we are, it is obvious now, becoming someone other than ourselves. And that loss, to watch each other lose each other, we are surprised to find, we cannot face. We thought we were such toughies! Understand, sweet daughter, that we simply want autonomy over this last decision, to choose the how of it. 

We do not know who you will become. We know who you have become. You have astonished us every day. You have taught us every day. Promise us that you will accept the weird grief this will bring, that you will let it be like a birth–a violent beginning–and begin anew once it has moved through you. Promise us that you will choose how it is you shape all of what you feel. There is always a choice, as you know, to shape the stories that make sense of the nonsensical, that which is too large or distant. 

We have spent all our lives trying to love each other. That has been so much more than enough. To rage against what otherwise would be, the lack of love, succumbing to the void. Sometimes the stillest object is the object that is simply resisting a force that is, for the time being, its equal in power. You can outwait it. This is what we have come to know about love.

Our lives are not the most important thing in this world, but are simply the only thing we know. It is only this knowledge that allows us to say, with sensation beyond the ability of these words, goodbye to you, our daughter, our one true and greatest love. 

Mama and Mom

THE KITCHEN IN which the daughter read was full of white desert light. She put the letter down. It was so brief. It filled only a page and a half. She had read it sitting in the old chair at her kitchen table. She flattened the letter down on the wood. She picked it up again. Her hands shook.

What mothers would not write a novel for their daughters if words were all that they had left to give? Her hands themselves felt sick. She would tear it, burn it, chew and swallow it. She laid it down again. The hatred she felt for the letter existed in her throat. What do you do with such a thing? she wondered. What do you do with a letter that is not your mothers, but is all that your mothers, their final culmination of life, chose to leave you. It read to her like the preaching ways in which they spoke before protest marches, these excursions that they had so often taken when they were a young family, as other families go on camping trips or to the mall. She hated this letter just as she loved it. She got up from her kitchen table and looked at the parched, too-hot landscape outside. She wished that she had not taken the bereavement days. Their emptiness unfolded in front of her. She wondered about her many patients, she imagined their lives curling on like sprouting seeds, up past the one moment of abortion into many, many others. This is how she described it to women, sometimes. A moment is but a fraction of a tree’s ring. It will become the hardwood which protects the heart, given time.

SHE SNARLED AS she grieved. She and her partner and children grew in many various ways. 

The country in which her mothers had raised her had changed and continued to change. The ugliness that had once been hidden from some people became naked, obvious. Her job became dangerous. The change was insidious and then very overt. She helped women. She made snide jokes at family dinners about weak-willed mothers who absent themselves from the screaming baby. She helped women. “I am the baby,” she said once to her partner, while they rinsed off their separate days. Her partner studied her in the bathroom mirror, placed a hand on her hand, said nothing.

She nodded with her patients who said, “Can you imagine bringing a child into this world?” No, no she could not. She had already. She did not know how much the new and booming fear she felt was magnified by the sense of sudden solitude. She had not known that her wizened little mothers had remained for her the greatest bulwark against the heaving of the world. In their place she built her own fortifications. The world rippled and seized and slammed against it and she built it stronger again. She helped women.

That seed of first rage, born of astonished disappointment, sprouted, eventually, into many other things. Because she was the daughter of these two women whose various parts had been donated to science and buried in burlap to rot in a secret grave, she knew how to cultivate this thing that, from beneath her soil, had cracked open, sent out roots and stem and twig and grown into a brawny trunk.

She chose, early on, to shut the letter away. To refuse to try to talk to this last thing. There was often steely silence now, when she thought of her mothers.

THE EARLIEST PICKETERS were often nunlike, gentle, vicious. They had always stood on the corner grass or sidewalk by her clinic. They were there long before she began practicing, muttering prayers, smiling. Signs of bloody flesh and wailed condemnation. From inside the clinic she could hear the beeps of the vehicles whose drivers supported them. She understood that she would never quite understand these people. Truth was a snarl of stories. 

When the bomb threats and bellowing began, and a sense of danger billowed around the quieter sign-wielders, engulfing them, she wondered if they had simply turned up their volume or if a new wave of hate had arrived, carrying with it a new wave of people. There was not much time to wonder. Phoned-in threats ruptured moments of medical and emotional delicacy. The increasingly militarized police were called and called again; their presence was not a peaceful thing; fewer women came. The women she helped grew quieter. Their eyes narrowed against the world, against their own bodies. She learned how to speak in silence to them, she learned how to speak in warmth. She learned how to speak about incredible intimacies across gaps that felt like fences of cutting wire. It was not, she found, about the number of words exchanged, but the quality of space that existed between and before and after the words. People everywhere either spoke endlessly, toiling after conclusions, or not at all.

Her children grew up. Their beliefs mirrored, contradicted and expanded upon her own. Her partner went quiet for a year and then began to talk again and they never discussed the why of it. During the untalking, they both simply looked at the silence between them as though it were a neighbor’s strange child they could not figure out how to tactfully send home.

ONE DAY, AS she unconsciously examined each car in the sun-scorched lot before exiting the clinic, she realized that she had simply come to accept imminent harm. In that moment, she was walloped as she had not been for a long time by the loss of her mothers. How she would have liked to tell them this thing she had realized, as she might have once shown them a full-marks test score.

She went on helping women, helping families.

The patterns of the world ruptured and stitched, ruptured and stitched. Her children briefly became people she did not know if she liked very much, though the love for them was effortless, immense, too much. She could never, she thought, leave them with nothing more than a page and a half of writing. 

The clinic closed for a few years. For those years, many things were shuttered. Many people suffered. She began a phase of her life she could not have imagined when she was a child, that of a covert physician. There was no money, there were few supplies, there was no trust or talking. It was so dangerous, what she was doing, but it was what must be done. There was always a choice to retreat, but it would usher in a silence to her life that, she knew, would suffocate her. She witnessed and did such frightening things.

She would never know quite how that specific loss of her mothers changed her, nobody can ever really know such a thing, but she knew enough to know that it had. She understood the world as she understood bodies. They grow, they scar. The cells multiply, growing a new body, until, simply, they don’t. She lived through iterations of a type of war. She lived a long time. 

She lived to see that joy was in fact resistance. That love was in fact resistance. She laughed at herself when she looked around the inside of her mind and found that she had become, somewhat, just like her mothers.

WHEN CLINICS OPENED again, it was in the middle of a time of wide-eyed mania, hope, lingering fear. Everyone had changed entirely. Everyone was still human. Women came to her with roaring stories, wanting to be heard in that specific way a physician can offer. Women came to her with no stories at all, rocked by what they had lived through. Women came and asked her how she did it, this thing that she was doing, day over day. Women came to her for help. Women wept and laughed, lived. She helped women. Every year, she took stock, to see what it was she had learned from them. She thought that just maybe by the end of her life she would know enough to begin to understand the shape of herself.

It had occurred to her at some point that the greatest shock was not the material loss of her mothers, but rather that she had not, after all, known them that well. That sort of realization always comes too late to fix.

THE EARTH TURNED, stars fell. One day, many years later, she sat on her stool, beside a young woman reclining on the exam table. The woman was speaking about the glorious life of the child she would one day raise–just not now. The woman was younger than the daughter’s own children by nearly two decades. Though the woman knew all the past histories well, she could not really imagine their reality. 

This young woman, the daughter understood, had simply made a decision that was unquestionably hers to make. Earlier on in the visit, the woman had mentioned the few remaining picketers and their tired go-to-hell signs. “You gotta wonder,” she said, “about poor people like that. Why they got so mean.” It was good, the daughter reflected, to be once more living in a time with room for so much pity.

THE ERA INTO which the daughter was born, through which her mothers had aged into their final years, was shaped into a collective, resonant memory. Something distant, like a bad scar. It was not perfect and bits of it ached. Perhaps, the daughter thought, when she was very tired, and walking past those beleaguered picketers, a total fatality would have allowed for a more complete irrigation. But for now, the schisms of her life began to shrink. 

Her children had settled into people who dumbfounded her everyday with pride. She saw her mothers in their movements, heard them in their words, felt them in the arrangement of their lives: intense, bound to impossible, imperfect, imperative work. Sometimes, when she looked at her children, now grown, and she saw how the bad years lingered in their bodies, she felt a terrible surge of guilt. Who was she to have brought children into this world? But of procreation, one of her patients had put it well: “It just takes one, misguided season of hope.”

 Women came to her with all the same stories. And the talk, though solemn, still often frightened, grew warmer again. Grew wider. She could not believe what she and they had lived through.

ONE BRIGHT YELLOW spring day, decades later again, she sat at her kitchen table. She had old hands. They rested on either side of her mothers’ letter.

She had retired a few years before, when she began to feel a pleasant yet profound fatigue, as though a hard, fine day was closing towards night. The schism she felt growing in her now was that which existed between herself and life. It was only, she believed, the growing need of her last atoms to turn finally again to soil, to return what had been briefly borrowed. She had not read the letter in years. 

At the time of her retirement, she had been worried that she would feel purposeless. But she found that her world had always also been made of small things. Purple mint growing wild in the terracotta pot. The banshee scream of her children’s children. Her partner had begun a comical and ungraceful aging into greater gentleness. She had enjoyed the removal of the last unnecessary bits: tiresome habits, certain friends, silver butter knives, tall shoes, regret.

She was rolling a blue pen beneath a fingertip. She had sat down with the aim to write something back. Her mothers’ wedding day photograph hung on the wall beside the window. Mama and Mom, laughing at the camera as though they were in on a joke and pitied the photographer for some unknown ignorance. It seemed so sentient, this letter. A page and a half of words. Typed, jovially formal. 

She knew, finally, that there would be no last answer and that it was no longer an answer she wanted. Rather, she sought the work of it. The work of trying to stitch together what felt so irreparably broken, of trying to love what felt lost. Of speaking into the void of oneself and listening in utter silence to who spoke back. Outside the window, her partner was sitting in the green garden chair, watching the soil thaw. It was, like every spring all her life, unseasonably warm. 

Unseasonably warm, she thought: the language of a sustained rejection of a new, worse norm. Language itself is an act of memory, and some memory an act of resistance. 

It seemed to her that a person at the end of their life comes to understand that there is no combination of words that will ever do the act of living justice. It’s why the elderly grow so quiet. And so we, the elderly, she thought, smiling at the word, sink into the silence of ourselves. And it is enough to know that we have loved and we have lost and we have struggled to be good in the face of the strangest sorrow.

She flipped the letter to its back, took up the pen and wrote her reply in one swift, strong movement, like a scalpel to skin, just below her mothers’ signature.

What happens now?

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