1957, or The Year in Writing and Failing

Could I be someone who fails precociously? Or one who precociously concludes that she will fail? (My sister, Liz, at one time simply said I was precocious, and left it at that).

Here's why I ask.

Each year in December, I sum up my year in writing (here's the post from 2019), and literary translation. I list articles and essays that I've published, and grants for translation projects I've been fortunate to win. 

The year-end taking-stock has been an enjoyable new ritual as I am able to log a few solid accomplishments each year even though I am still a completely unknown writer (trust me) and an emerging literary translator (emerging at my tender age, by the way, not so great).  

I usually don't begin writing the post until toward the end of the year.

But 2022 is diverging so thoroughly from the outline of my writing goals for the year that in a fit of despair, I am going to tell you about it right now. I am going to say right now that while I am writing, I am failing.

And it's because I'd decided that 2022 would be the year to write about the uncle I never knew.

What I didn’t know: it would also be the year I struggled to write about the uncle I never knew.

Nicknamed Spike, he died long before I was born -- before he could even become my uncle. And now halfway through what I’d dubbed the Year of Spike, I feel unsure of how to tell his story, unclear which elements should be my essay’s focus. And it’s making me nervous. 

It’s not that I can’t write about Uncle Spike next year. It’s just that I set aside his year in my writing life because it marks the 65^th anniversary of his untimely death at age 18. Sixty-five years since his fatal car crash in 1957, which deprived my mother, a nursing student at the time, of her beloved younger brother.

And I've already set aside the story many times. Each time, in fact, that she said of the brother she lost, "We were very close."

How many times must she have said that over the years? I can hardly guess but in the past decade I know for certain she has said it several times -- often enough that I finally realized if ever she speaks about Spike when she and I are alone, she repeats some combination of those words: We were very close. Or: "My brother and I were very close." Without fail.

She said it during a rainy July 4th weekend eight years ago while Leo was napping in the bedroom on the second floor and Mike was reading sci-fi stories over his toddler shoulder, leaving me alone with my mother in the living room below.

I noted in my diary then, "This morning she said it again: 'My brother and I were very close.' ... Perhaps as a means of remembering something that’s now so long ago, it’s been thoroughly cleansed from her life."

I went on to write in my diary, "Who was Spike Tisdall? But more than that, I want to know what was Mommy like when she was with Spike Tisdall? What was lost when he was lost? I almost feel like he might have been the coolest person she ever knew." 

Those words finally shook me from the selfishness that often hovers at one end of the parent-child relationship (i.e., my end).

It was an indication that I needed to investigate this moment in my mother's life. Because whenever she's pronounced those words, it's as if in a trance. Because despite having four daughters and a husband to whom she was quite dedicated (lucky him!), she didn't say those words very often. She was a wonderful, traditional mother but also someone who would admonish us when we were growing up with this piece of her mind: "I don't want to be your best friend."

All of this speculation and rumination about Spike swirled about when I had recently enrolled in the MFA program at Bennington College and was busy bumbling down the road marked 'Fiction.' I (stupidly) wasn't thinking about Nonfiction. So the light bulb that I needed to study my family history remained flashing on low in the back rooms of my mind while I worked on other essays and projects. 

Until my father got sick, that is, and it became clear my mother was in the early stages of dementia. 

At that point, I had already laid the groundwork for gathering the information I needed to know about this beloved brother and the close bond he had formed with Mommy. One of the first tasks had been: finding out when Spike died. I can't tell what that says about our family dynamic: I didn't know when he died until 2015 when I searched online for his obituary.

That unleashed me down a rabbit hole of speculation. Up until that moment, the dates that anchored me in time as far as family history were 1936 (the year my father was born), 1938 (the year my mother was born) and 1966, the year my parents married. What lay between was a bit of a no man's land. Not anymore.

Similarly, I am haunted by the casual way my mother supplied the date that Spike died during a conversation I recorded last year for posterity. Age 84 at the time of the interview and more or less housebound, she had already begun to slip into dementia, spending her days chain-smoking, unsure of the month or sometimes even the season. 

But when I inquired if Spike had died during the summer, barely a second passed before she said, “July 25.” 

The way she would recite our birthdays or Christmas Day. Like a bullet train conveying the information to me, cutting through her mental fog.

So, early on in this project, drafts were littered with references to famous dates in history: July 4, 1776, for example, and December 7, 1941 – the day for our parents and grandparents that lived in infamy -- as I aimed to construct a realistic timeline of her life (and the dates that resonated with her). I was so struck by how quickly she summoned the date of his death from her addled brain that I began reimagining her personal calendar of milestones. It’s the day, I now suspect, that divides her life in two. And I was trying to couch it in light of other moments. One more unneeded detour, I suppose.

So many other interesting tidbits have emerged while I've been researching my lost uncle -- including documents I would otherwise not have had. For example, an archival newspaper article about the crash from a now-defunct local publication, The Patent Trader, which covered Westchester, where my grandparents had a lake house (one that sat about a mile or so from the site of the car accident). I keep a print-out of the article on my bureau so the five-word headline greets me every time I reach for a pair of socks: "Youth, 18, Killed in Crash.” 

It’s a basic news headline. Yet when you know the “youth” in question, it has all the sorrow of a Shakespearean tragedy.

Also: he was driving a brand-new convertible that had been a graduation gift from my grandparents. He was headed off -- possibly on scholarship, my aunt says -- to the College of the Holy Cross for his freshman year.

And sixty-five years later, some of his old Brooklyn Prep classmates (octogenarians whom I tracked down on the Internet) remained so shocked by his death that they hastened to reply to my email, offering little remembrances that seem to be spit out of a time machine. One said Spike was a bit of a wild man and mentioned something about "smoochie-smoochie basement parties."

It's been nothing short of exhilarating to finally know more about this phantom in my family tree. And that's an end unto itself.

But I so wish to publish an essay about it and have failed again and again to gain an acceptance, even as I have approached the material from various angles and in differing formats (flash CNF, for example).

Why do we write? Why do we bother?

I don't know. I only know I am galvanized -- no, haunted -- when I think about the annual silent vigil my mother has possibly kept on July 25. This secret part of her life that I ache to know more about.

I will keep writing -- this practice has saved my life too many times to abandon it. But it's not without failure. Not in 2022, the year of writing and failing. I will report back in December as I always do. In the meantime, we'll all keeping toiling away so we can map out on paper the world we imagine in our minds, the world we hunger to illuminate through words.

-30-