She couldn’t, but she said something that changed my life. "Watch her carefully right now," she said, "because she’s teaching you how to live."

I remind myself of this when I cannot get any work done: to live as if I am dying, because the truth is we are all terminal on this bus. To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence. Time is so full for people who are dying in a conscious way, full in the way that life is for children. They spend big round hours. So instead of staring miserably at the computer screen trying to will my way into having a breakthrough, I say to myself, "Okay, hmmm, let’s see. Dying tomorrow. What should I do today?" Then I can decide to read Wallace Stevens for the rest of the morning or go to the beach or just really participate in ordinary life. Any of these will begin the process of filling me back up with observations, flavors, ideas, visions, memories. I might want to write on my last day on earth, but I’d also be aware of other options that would feel at least as pressing. I would want to keep whatever I did simple, I think. And I would want to be present.

My mum had a huge chest freezer in the kitchen for over fifty-five years full of things she had cooked and frozen. A few years ago it finally broke and, when she defrosted it, I asked if she’d found a leg of dodo at the bottom! They don’t make appliances like they used to, that’s fo’ sure. She eats Jamaican food most days. Even when she comes to my house she brings her own food, not because I can’t cook but because she knows I like her cooking better.

He would smile, perhaps relieved by my unaffectedness. Sometimes Yasmeen cried. I thought two crying daughters would be too much for him, so I trained myself to wait until I was alone, in my closet or in the bath. My father would wipe Yasmeen’s face, hug us both, ask us if we wanted chocolate milk.

“Good girl,” he’d whisper in my ear. I was good because I was restrained. My father, I believe, carried a lot of hurt from his relationship with my mother. He did not like to see the related pain radiating from his daughters’ eyes.

Those letters taught me about longing. Reading them in front of my father taught me to hide it, often even from myself. I know now what a dangerous kind of denial that is. It leaves you ravenous. It makes your seismometer vibrate when the phone call you are shocked to discover you have been waiting for your whole life offers you precisely what you are terrified to want: Hello, Nadia. This is your mama.

When she [my mother] spoke Fante on the phone with her friends, she became like a girl again, giggling and gossiping. When she spoke Tiwi to me, she was her mother-self, stern and scary, warm. In English, she was meek. She stumbled and was embarrassed, and so to hide it she demurred. Here’s a journal entry from around that time:

Dear God,

The Black Mamba took me and Buzz out to eat today. The waitress came over and asked what we wanted to drink and TBM said water, but the waitress couldn’t hear her and asked her to repeat herself but she didn’t and so Buzz answered for her. Maybe she thought the waitress didn’t understand her? But she was talking so quietly it was like she was talking to herself.

There were other moments like this, where the woman whom I thought of in my head as fearsome shrank down to someone I could hardly recognize. And I don’t think she did this because she wanted to. I think, rather, that she just never figured out how to translate who she really was into this new language.

I think that my parents would like me to know how they contributed to our freedom. My professional skill and proximity to the primary sources should make telling their story an achievable task. But all my elders were trained in forgetting. Some of this was struggle discipline. Some of it was survival. And then there is the passage of time, decades in which some memories were lost entirely and others faded to the point that they can barely be seen.