It also distanced us. When I prepared to move to Savannah, Ga., for my first daily newspaper job, she joked, “I’ve thought about it; you can’t go.” Still, she squirreled away money to help me fly home for holidays; when I mourned the lack of autumn leaves in coastal Georgia, she mailed me Buckeye leaves to burn to recreate the smell.
My family has always been proud of me, but using my maiden name and living in a blue city in a blue state and having kids who identify as queer furthered the divide between us. As I made my third and final drive from Virginia to Ohio in Mom’s last days, my 26-year-old son asked me over the phone, “If Grandma knew I was gay, do you think she would mind?”
I sputtered, “Of course she wouldn’t.” But I had no idea. He loved that she’d once taught him to gamble with nickels and dimes playing a card game called “Oh Hell.” Still, Max hadn’t visited since he’d come out at 18, though they had been close.
From her bedside, I texted him a snapshot from her photo album; he was 4. The two were playing with a yard-sale Playmobil castle. Max wore a headband he’d fashioned from a ribbon, taking on the role of princess. Folded into a miniature chair, Mom beamed. She was his prince.
Four days before she died, Cookie and I made small talk next to Mom’s hospice bed. A houseplant arrangement I’d given her two years ago sat nearby on a windowsill, spindly and parched. My relationship with my sister was equally anemic.
Cookie and I hadn’t spoken much in the past 30 years. She was 13 years my senior, and our lives had diverged early; when she was just out of high school, she had a child. She spent the majority of her life less than 30 miles from where we were raised. Like Mom, I was an agnostic. Cookie had skipped my wedding so she could attend a revival at her rural, fundamentalist Christian church. We exchanged Christmas cards and occasionally played fiercely competitive games of Boggle online. I never noticed her expressing political opinions, but recently she’d taken to posting pro-Trump memes to Facebook.
I was closer to my brother, Tim, who used to visit annually to see our youngest in high school plays. But we, too, had grown apart since 2016. He’d missed the invitation to our son’s senior play after unfriending me on Facebook. “Because of all the liberal [expletive] you post,” he later explained. I wasn’t sure exactly what he was referring to. But that bewilderment was all a part of our lost shared reality.