“Let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest.” — O. Henry
My mother is the ghost of my life, like her mother was the ghost of hers.
In deciding not to have children, this is how I have ensured no more children will see ghosts. Or become them.
In 1965, my grandfather, who never forgot the education he lacked, told his daughter to finish her college exams and not to worry. Your mother is unwell, he said, but she’ll be fine. My mother sat her exams, drove to the hospital, and saw the lie for herself.
My grandmother was gray as a pea. Then, in a few hours, she was gone. Stomach cancer at 43. It was not my mother’s powerlessness to stop death that hung over her. It was the lie that stoppered her grief.
The loss and the lie remained tangled together for the rest of my mother’s life. The death, unbearable. The deception, unforgivable. I wasn’t let into my parents’ life. I wasn’t trusted with the truth. I wasn’t gifted a goodbye. She carried this injustice like a spell in her spotting white fingers, promising me, before I could know what she meant: I would never lie to you.
My grandparents traded the truth for my mother’s future, not knowing that would destroy it.
It was a lovingly intended sacrifice.
A gift.
Just like the man who sells his pocket watch to buy his wife hair combs (only to find she’s cut off her hair and sold it to buy him a watch chain).
Just like my mother couldn’t have known she was leaving me.
“You say your hair is gone?” Jim said.
“You don’t have to look for it,” said Della. “It’s sold, I tell you— sold and gone, too.”
Eventually I would see the irony of such a bargain, how my mother, in losing her mother, also became lost to me. As the hair and the watch. When I was 16 and she was 43, to account for her ritualistic sobbing in the evenings, my mother told me about the lie surrounding her long dead mother. I understood then how it pulled her attention from me and my brother, the phantasmatic children seated at her unset dinner table, to the past where she lived.
How it swept her utterly away.
Author’s Note: The number of lines of each section of this piece corresponds to the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical sequence possibly dating to 200 BC, and introduced in 1202 by Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci, in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones (ie: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etc.). The sequence also appears in nature and biology, such as the branching of trees.
Melisse Gelula co-founded the media company Well+Good and is currently writing a mother-daughter memoir about being raised by a child psychologist who starts to hear voices. She has written for and been quoted in dozens of outlets from the New York Times to Electric Literature and Vogue. Melisse recently founded Memoiring on Substack, a book club and writing community that hosts memoirists such as Melissa Febos for Zoom discussions and workshops.
