It’s snowing in Pittsburgh today, the first real snow of the season, and enough for the public schools to call off, universities to delay. A “proper snow day,” I called it on Facebook this morning. Not a move to online learning as we all got so used to during the first days (years) of the pandemic. No “check your Schoology app for assignments which will be due tomorrow…” Just a day off, properly, when the temps are Arctic and the roads (still, in our neighborhood) impassable. I had worried like many parents that the ubiquity of Zoom would render such days obsolete. I’m glad that, at least today, they have not.

And at the same time, I’m about to write a love letter to Zoom.

The last time I wrote about my mother, the view from my small bedroom desk out the window looked exactly the same as it does right now:

The day my mother shares with me the details of REDACTED, Pittsburgh sits under a foot of snow. The pine trees outside my bedroom window look exactly like their iced facsimiles that might surround a gingerbread house at Christmastime. It’s odd to me that when I see them, I see first the analog, the metaphor, and not the other way around.

I started the above essay, which is still only a draft, during the week between Christmas, 2020 and New Years Day, 2021. My mother died of small cell lung cancer on May 17, 2021. Sometime in the months before, she told me that she wanted me to interview her about her life, which she knew would be ending soon. “I have some things I want to say,” she said.

I won’t tell you that I didn’t wince at the thought of this at first. I knew it would be among the most painful experiences of my life. Talking to my dying mother about her life? Impossible.

And I also knew it would be one of the biggest blessings and that I would do it, absolutely. There was one problem: we were all in lockdown without a vaccine, miles and states apart.

Enter Zoom, a platform I had become familiar with teaching my students when we couldn’t meet face-to-face. While the interviews–and there are seven of them, one for each decade of her life–would have been different had I been able to fly to her home in Port St. Lucie and sit across her kitchen table with her, drinking coffee in between crying and laughing, I’m not sure they would have been better. The screen gave me just enough distance from the raw emotion of those moments to be able to center myself (some) and ask her questions I thought would be meaningful for her and me both.

It also meant that I would have video footage of my beautiful mom in her last months, as well as pages and pages and pages of AI-generated transcripts to mine for…something.

During our talks, she told me that she always wanted to write a book. This was among the many things I did not know and would not have guessed about my mother prior to these Zoom sessions together. From the draft essay,

“A book about your life?” I ask.

“Yes, but I could never figure out how to do that. I’m not a writer like you are.”

“Did you have a title for this book?”

“Yes,” she tells me, without hesitation. “It would be called Is it Real or Is it Imagined?”

“That’s a great title!” I tell her, and I mean it. I don’t say, “You can still write it!” because both of us know she doesn’t have that kind of time left.”

She’s not going to write a book, but I am. She wanted me to. 

I expect it will be memoir, though I bet poems will emerge, too. Whatever form it takes, it will surely be difficult, unwieldy, and, I hope, beautiful and true.

This space will document the process as I re-play the interviews for the first time, then read through the transcripts to sort through what I find and begin to make shape and sense of them. (I’m starting a Substack for this documenting, and I hope my blog subscribers will follow me over there for this very specific project. I’ll use this space for other things.) It’s called “The Dog Looks Like Three Boxes,” though I almost called it “Sometimes My Bowls Look Inside Out” because these are both things my mother said while I visited her (thanks to a just-in-time vaccine) during her last month of life. Admittedly, both nod toward my kinda dark sense of humor in the face of death (see also my just released essay collection about my father’s death. Oof, I’m a ton of fun at parties!), because these are things she said in the throes of declining cognition and I immediately recognized their metaphorical potential, and opportunist poet that I am, wrote them down for later.

So now is later, the trees look like gingerbread and the dog looks like three boxes. All of which is to say that there are (I expect) surprising things to be found in places you think are familiar.

I suspect it’s both real and imagined, Mom.

You were right either way.