My mom is doing karaoke in the kitchen, holding a microphone that our neighbor ordered for her on Amazon, belting from her chest. Her hair is silver. Her shirt, a creamsicle orange polo. Her glasses are thin rimmed, the kind that turn dark in the sun. Transition lenses, they’re called.
My mom is doing karaoke in the kitchen, singing Endless Love with the kind of off-key abandon that makes me want to build a moat around the moment. It’s been eleven months and ten days since her wife, my mama, swallowed a series of life ending medications, and died in the sun-soaked room upstairs.
The only thing I know about grief is that it’s always changing.
My mom is doing karaoke in the kitchen, bopping, and jigging, and jamming her feet. She first tried karaoke two weeks ago, at an Out Montclair mixer, where she performed Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Later, she tells me she was the oldest one there.
My mom is doing karaoke in the kitchen of a house she can’t decide if she should sell. Houses are like that sometimes. Containers for questions of where life is meant to be. I tell her not to keep the house for our sake, mine and my sister’s. I know what it’s like to walk into the smallest bedroom, the one with the linen closet, and have your task of changing towels, become a forced remembering.
My mom is doing karaoke in the kitchen, singing both the parts of a duet. If my mama were here, she’d make a joke about the hetero-assholes behind our new karaoke machine, the ones who decided to make some words blue and others pink. I can literally hear her voice, “those hetero-assholes.” All her teeth showed when she laughed. Pink and blue have never been our family’s hues, but duets have always been the music of our home.
My mom is doing karaoke in the kitchen, with sun glinting over the houseplants she now tends to as her own. I am beside her, an audience of one to a performance that is a radical act of living, which is really just a radical act of change. The sun hits her thin rimmed glasses, which darken in its wake. Her singing stalls, a musical interlude, a moment of transition.
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Jessica Petrow-Cohen is a Brooklyn-based creative nonfiction writer and the winner of the 2024 Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, The Washington Post, and her Substack “Claiming Writerhood.”
9 comments
B says:
Sep 17, 2024
You are simply awe-inspiring! Bringing me to tears and making me laugh and now I’m in laughing tears. Thank you for making people feel so much with your work.
Amanda Le Rougetel says:
Sep 17, 2024
What a fine piece of writing this is, and maybe this line especially so: “I know what it’s like to walk into the smallest bedroom, the one with the linen closet, and have your task of changing towels, become a forced remembering.” Thank you.
Ken Hillman says:
Sep 17, 2024
Wonderful piece of work! You are so lucky to have those memories.
Stephen Dolainski says:
Sep 17, 2024
The only thing I know about grief is that it’s always changing.
I love this sentence! Because it’s so true.
Eileen Cunniffe says:
Sep 20, 2024
I love the balance here between joy and grief. And that title is just perfect.
Filiz Turhan says:
Sep 21, 2024
A complicated moment rendered with the musical insight. Love this:
“Containers for questions of where life is meant to be.”
CG says:
Sep 25, 2024
Love this! I choked up a little. It’s Cyndi Lauper, btw, with a Y.
Dinty says:
Sep 27, 2024
The spelling has been fixed. Thank you
Catherine Stratton says:
Oct 1, 2024
Jesse, This is beautiful writing. We were neighbors in Maplewood and my kids, Jack and Rose, went to school with you. I knew your parents. Julie was lovely and I could picture her smile, which you described so beautifully in your piece. You are a wonderful writer and I look forward to reading your future work. – Catherine Stratton