you understand why your mother has a problem with the memorial website?” Caron asks. “Why she wants you to take it down?”
I know that I’m supposed to say yes—after all, we’ve been going around and around on this topic all summer long. And I could just do that, because technically, I do understand the problem. I did something very public, and I did it without Mom’s permission, using private family photos of Dad. But I don’t understand why having a website in Dad’s honor makes her so crazy. I thought she’d be happy when she saw all the photos I scanned and uploaded, and all the quotes I posted, and the Word of the Day section featuring his favorite words of all time.
But she wasn’t happy. She was pissed. And when she realized that I didn’t really care that she was pissed, and that if she wanted the website taken down she was going to have to figure out how to do it herself—all hell broke loose.
I think what freaks my mom out the most about the site is that it’s an open invitation for people to express their opinions. I run the site, and I can make changes to it, but I have no say in how people respond. And it turns out that there are all sorts of people who knew Dad well, and they have things to say about him. Mom doesn’t like that, because she can’t control what they write.
Which, of course, is exactly why I do like it.
“Rose, are you still with us?” Caron asks. She usually gives me about three seconds to think before she makes a comment implying that I’m not paying attention.
“I guess I don’t really get it, no,” I lie.
“The problem, Rose,” my mother says, her overt patience communicating just how impatient she is with this conversation, “is that you went behind my back after I specifically asked you not to, and you got Peter involved by using his credit card.”
“Can you tell Rose how that made you feel?”
“Betrayed. Betrayed at a very vulnerable moment.”
I’m tempted to roll my eyes, but I know that would probably also be betraying my mother at a very vulnerable moment. It’s not that I don’t care that she feels betrayed, it’s just that I think her reasons for feeling that way are ridiculous.
Maybe that’s the same thing as not caring. I’m not sure.
“It also scares me,” she continues. “There are a lot of people out there who prey on those who are grieving. And Rose is now having interactions with people she’s never even heard of before, who claim to know her father. It’s dangerous in many ways, including emotionally.”
“Can you explain to Rose what you mean by that?”
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. That’s Shake-speare for here we go again.
“Rose launched the website on the anniversary of her dad’s death in June. Within a few hours, there were nearly fifty comments on the site about him. Some were nice, some were odd, some were from people who obviously didn’t know Alfonso at all and just wanted to make themselves feel important and involved. It would have been extremely confusing and painful for anyone, but it was especially so for a teenage girl missing her father. Rose didn’t leave her room for three days.”
That’s not entirely true. I left to use the bathroom and to eat occasionally.
“I was just reading the comments and writing back to people,” I say. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
“That’s part of what you were doing, Rose. You were also having an emotional breakdown as a result of being assaulted by all the information that didn’t reflect back to you the person you thought you knew—”
“Kathleen,” says Caron in her special voice. This is some kind of code they’ve established, because every time Caron says her name like that, my mother looks guilty and then stops talking.
So what if I’m in touch with people we don’t know who knew Dad? So what if some guy he knew for, like, two days in Iraq posted about how they’d had a beer together and how he could tell that Dad was the “genuwine article”? Why is that less valid than my story about him showing me his twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary for the first time?
I don’t really know how Kathleen and I got here. I feel like things were fine, and then suddenly they weren’t. We had this heart-to-heart conversation last year on my birthday and it seemed like everything was finally going to be okay between us. She apologized for “abandoning me to my grief,” explained that she needed help and asked if I would come to therapy with her. I said I’d think about it.
What a mistake that was. Two months later, I launched my dad’s site and when I refused to take a shower after sitting in front of the computer for a few days, she practically dragged me by my greasy hair to see Caron for the first time.
“So, Rose, when you hear your mother talk about feeling betrayed by you and scared for you, what do you feel?”
This question has come up before, but I guess I didn’t answer it right. Maybe I’ll try telling the truth today.
“I feel annoyed,” I answer. This is a very different response from my usual I feel bad.
Caron’s eyebrows shoot up.
“Annoyed?” my mother repeats very slowly.
“I don’t understand why we have to keep talking about this. It’s starting to get annoying.”
“We have to keep talking about it because you refuse to take the site down, even though you are unable to explain why you want to keep working on it when it clearly upsets you to be in touch with those people.”
Those people. She means Vicky.
I just got an email from Vicky this morning, reminding me to have fun on my last free weekend before school starts on Tuesday. Vicky checks in on me from time to time, emailing me little inspirational sayings or pictures that she’s scanned as part of her ongoing project to scan every photo she ever took with a pre-digital camera. She only sends me funny photos of herself, like from Halloween or from some party where she did something big and crazy with her hair. Vicky is from Texas, and she’s a hairdresser, so she’s had a lot of practice making big hair. Every time she sends me a new photo, it’s the biggest hair I’ve ever seen. When I told her I had the lamest, flattest, straightest, most boring-est hair in the history of humankind, she said I needed to “hightail it on down” to Texas and let her take a crack at it. “When I’m done with you, honey,” she wrote, “you won’t even recognize yourself.”
Vicky raised her son—the sergeant, Travis—and daughter alone. A “good, single Christian woman” is how she describes herself. She’s never told me anything about the father of her children, although I read a letter Travis’s dad wrote to him that she posted on the website. And she doesn’t say much about her daughter. I kind of get the feeling that she and her daughter don’t talk much. But she loves to write about Travis, and she always ends every email with, Your dad is watching over you, just like my Travis is watching over me. God bless, honey.
I was raised agnostic, bordering on atheist, but there’s something about the way Vicky writes God bless, honey that makes me feel safe from all the awful stuff that goes on inside my head and out. When Vicky says she’s praying for me, I believe it, and even though I don’t
