Then I feel guilt for the paucity of ways I’ve offered the world to wonder about my mother. Every time I read an obituary online or a news story about a tragic death or even the inscription of a memorial bench, all of which I do more often than is perhaps normal, I pause to wonder about the deceased and who is left to remember them.
Now, years later, I am haunted by the impersonal nature and sheer brevity of my mother’s obituary in the Las Vegas Review Journal. I did not understand that I could do anything else.
Though I seem to have erased all but the most traumatic memories surrounding her death, I think I Googled obituaries, and I probably followed a simple template. Besides, now that she was gone, it was time for me to be a proper adult. But my father tasked me with writing my mother’s obituary because I was born and raised in America, and what were my English skills for if not to be my parents’ voice when they needed it. I was all of nineteen, and the only deaths I’d reckoned with up to that point were those of her parents-whom I’d met only once as an infant-and those of my pet guinea pigs. I did not know how to write an obituary when my mother died.
