Feb
12
My Mother's Death in Her Own Words
The Last Pages of My Mother's Decades of Diaries
Tonight, I went in search of Shirley Temple, but I could not find her. In the last week, I read the account my mother wrote about Shirley Temple Black, by this point the US ambassador to Ghana and my father's supervisor. Black was traveling to California, where I am from, and my mother made sure my father gave her my grandmother's name and number. The two later spoke on the phone.
But archives are complex, and I couldn't remember exactly where this story was slipped in among the hundreds of pages of my mother's and grandmother's papers.
Instead, I ran across the story of my mother's death, a strange little story about desires and responsibilities, and one filled with foreshadowing. A story she wrote before she died.
Tonight, I went in search of Shirley Temple, but I could not find her. In the last week, I read the account my mother wrote about Shirley Temple Black, by this point the US ambassador to Ghana and my father's supervisor. Black was traveling to California, where I am from, and my mother made sure my father gave her my grandmother's name and number. The two later spoke on the phone.
But archives are complex, and I couldn't remember exactly where this story was slipped in among the hundreds of pages of my mother's and grandmother's papers.
Instead, I ran across the story of my mother's death, a strange little story about desires and responsibilities, and one filled with foreshadowing. A story she wrote before she died.
