Nonfiction: On sharing a soul

Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated mentors, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.

In her 92nd post, Helena recalls a childhood walk with her mother that included a larger-than-life question. Enjoy!

My mother and I are walking up Crown Street. We must have just turned the corner of Schenectady Avenue onto Crown. Schenectady Avenue also intersects Montgomery Street at the south end, where Aunt Dot lives, at 899, in the corner apartment on the fifth floor. We must have just visited with her. I called her Aunt Dot, sometimes Aunt Dotty. My mother only called her Dot. Two of my cousins called her Aunt Dorothy. She was my mother’s older sister.

I must have been a ponderous child, as ponderous as I am as an adult. My mother was a worrier, but she was as far from being ponderous as I can imagine. Yet she was deeper than she knew, deeper than I would suspect for a long, long time.

The Family, the Bailensons, all had an underground river of knowing. Sechel, in Yiddish. The ch blown at the back of the throat. The thing my father had, though he wasn’t a Bailenson, but fit with my mother’s family like the world had found him, called him kindred, and brought both my parents here, upstate, to a camp one summer, where they would meet. Upstate, where I now live.

Why was I pondering what I was next to ask, walking hand in hand, as we were? My question could only have come up from that river, up from the depth of love for my mother that lived in its waters running deep under the surface of life.

My mother and I are still floating in the atmosphere that tucked the three of us, Aunt Dot, my mother and me, into my aunt’s kitchen. It wraps my mother and me as we walk.

My mother was one with her sister, and I was one with them—I was one with all my family, no skin in between any of us. It was as if we shared a soul.

We’d just passed Mr. and Mrs. Hochman’s house, diagonally across the street from 657 where we lived—the Hochman’s son would later marry my cousin, Aunt Dot’s daughter.

In my peripheral vision, the Hochmans’ brick house passes slowly; we’re on to the next house. We were not hurrying. And it was then I suddenly asked my question:

“When you die, where will you go?”

“I’ll be in you,” my mother answered without a pause. She spoke as if she knew, though my grandparents were still alive and the deaths, coming so quickly, one after another, were still years in the future.

I didn’t believe or disbelieve what she’d told me. She’d said it, and it went into me, woke me into remembrance, and became a thing to enter into the storehouse of pearls I was already gathering and had begun to string. Time would prove those pearls to be real. Finally, I’d have enough of them for a necklace. Somewhere I’d found a gold clasp that fastened them, one that couldn’t break. When it grows dark, I take them out from where I’ve forgotten they’re hidden, somewhere deep in that river bottom. Then I put them on, wear them. Their iridescence lights my way.

I spent twenty years mourning my parents. Mourning by tears, until the sadness somehow became transformed into the who and what of me.

My parents live in me. My mother was right. They live, not in memory; they’re alive. All of our love has grown clearer, brighter, it shines. Now my mother, and my father, carry me again. I am borne for them to carry me in their arms, for me to call upon, now.

Here alone in the woods, struggling with under-seasoned wood that only burns a cold fire, putting on my sweater, I tell her—“Mamma, you knew. Yes,” I say, very quietly to myself. “This is the way it is.” A secret, a whisper.

Until it shouts its joyous, elemental, saving reality.

Do you remember having a conversation about death with a parent or loved one when you were a child? Have you written about it? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.

Helena Clare Pittman is a writer, painter, teacher, and author of 18 books for children. Her children’s classic, A Grain of Rice, has sold more than 363,000 copies. Helena holds a BFA from the Pratt Institute and an MA from Antioch College and has taught creative writing at Hofstra University and the CUNY Queens College graduate program, as well as in schools, libraries, and workshops in New York City, Long Island, and upstate New York. An award-winning illustrator, she has also taught art at Parsons School of Design and SUNY and been the recipient of a New York State Council of the Arts “Arts in the Community” grant. Helena is available for mentorship in six-week generative writing sessions for those seeking guidance in short form memoir, fiction, writing for children, and line editing manuscripts. The next session begins Tuesday, July 21.