In the weeks before my mother underwent the scans that revealed her cancer had not only returned, but spread to her bones and liver, she had been thinking–excitedly, ambitiously–about starting a new novel. In the nine months left to her, she managed to draft forty thousand words of it, working through the uneven agonies of her treatment. After the initial chemo cycle proved ineffective, my mother approached the prospect of her impending death stoically, painstakingly relegating to others the duties of her busy life. To the beneficiaries of the time and attention of almost sixty-seven years would fall the responsibilities she bore as wife, mother and grandmother, daughter to nonagenarian parents, and older sibling to an autistic sister living independently for the first time. In her final weeks, my mother wrote and revised her own celebration of life ceremony with the same liveliness, wit, and care with which she wrote everything else, and bequeathed to her three sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren particular keepsakes.
To me, she left The God of Lunatics, that unfinished novel, with the instructions to “to do with it what I saw fit.” When I asked her what she meant, exactly, she smiled and said it would sadden her if I came to view finishing the book as a burden. If, one day, the very icon of the file on my computer screen obviated my desire for my own work, she wanted me to trash it, but the thought of that possibility saddened her, too. “I think it was going to be really good,” she said with a sly smile.
Six months after her death, I was finally able to read what she’d written. The draft would be categorized, I suppose, as historical fiction, but it differs from the two Tudor novels, At the Mercy of the Queen (2012) and Queen Elizabeth’s Daughter (2014), that are my mother’s best-known published books. The God of Lunatics is set some 300 years closer to the present than those two novels and it takes place in West Virginia, state of her girl and early motherhood. There is, also, a marked difference in voice and authorial ambition. Reading the first page was enough to convince me she’d been right to be excited by this project. The book starts—“The newly dead are resplendent. They carry a burdensome beauty.”—and the rhythm of those two sentences struck me more forcefully than the sentiment, so much so that I read two whole pages aloud for the sheer pleasure of enacting the sounds of my mother’s composition.
She’d chosen to tell her new story from two distinct perspectives. One is of a middle-aged man, a mortician by trade, who is also an amateur scientist. He is the author of those first two sentences. His discovery of a new formula of mummification and the subsequent record of his experiments, experiments problematized by his transgressive fervor, make up roughly one third of the manuscript. The second perspective is that of a young woman, miserable in her marriage, who is involuntary imprisoned in the state asylum by her husband and father. Though her story is told objectively, we get glimpses of her voice in letters she writes to her brother and husband, letters which are desperately strategic in their restraint and optimism.
The circumstances that will, in the pages yet to be written, bring these two characters together originate, like the backgrounds of the characters themselves, in the actual history of the small town in which my mother came of age, the town that remained her imaginative home all of her life. My mother based her mortician on an actual early 20th-Century personality of the West Virginia panhandle. A man named Graham Hamrick did, indeed, spend his life perfecting a technique of mummification. He started small, preserving pieces of fruit, expanding to include body parts of animals, then entire carcasses that he found or hunted. His legacy depends, however, upon two human corpses that he somehow procured from the Trans-Alleghany Lunatic Asylum in Weston, which means that the other perspective in my mother’s draft is also based on that of an actual, if anonymous, person.
The two women who became Hamrick’s prize specimens may be unknown, but what became of their bodies is its own strange tale. The mummies survive to this day, after having surfaced during a particularly large flood in 1985 when the river that runs along the main strip of town rose high enough to dislodge them from the basement of a private residence and send them floating down main street. The town decided to take over their care and display them in the town’s defunct train depot, which had been converted into a local museum.
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“It is the object of my invention to provide a more simple and economical method…which, in preserving the body for a great length of time, is found to be remarkably effective.”
—Graham Hamrick
Years before, Graham Hamrick’s story had grabbed ahold of my imagination, too. The titular poem in my first collection contorts Hamrick’s formula into a short ballad. The quote above serves as epigraph to the poem. It’s taken from the patent issued in 1892 and still on file at the United States Patent and Trademark office. But, whereas I’d been drawn to Hamrick as heedless creator, the untold story of the young women victimized in life before they were, literally, objectified and anonymized more completely by their mummification, captured my mother’s interest and sympathy. In the initial pages of The God of Lunatics, her mortician rhapsodically confides his motivation for finding his formula—a belief that death initially perfects the body’s beauty. His desire, then, is to make this beauty permanent. Soon, though, the narrative shifts to the young woman recently committed to the asylum, and the portrait that emerges is that of a friendly young newlywed, sad but optimistic, whose response to her enclosure is to focalize her natural capacity for curiosity and wonder. From her small window in winter, she counts seventeen shades of white, naming them according to the order in which she distinguishes the colors.
As I read the manuscript, I deceived myself that I’d detected a glimpse of my mother’s working mind. I wondered if she’d been remembering her own early adulthood during which she spent her spare moments writing out her longing to be free while two boys who rarely slept toddled at her feet. Did she, a college student miserable in her own reckless marriage, remember the books she imagined she would one day write once she’d undergone the long process of finding and developing her gift? But how could I, in the adolescence of my grief over her death, finish this last book she’d started? Its first two sentences break me each time I read them, thrusting me back to that January morning when my brothers, stepfather, and I stood around the hospice bed, desolate in our disbelief that we’d lost her.
For more than two years, I waited. During this time, I composed two novels of my own, drafted to attune me to the form. They, too, remain unpublished. Finally, when I did turn my attention to my mother’s manuscript, I decided to separate the two narratives. Perhaps sensing her time shortening, my mother chose to write them simultaneously, sketching out the overall arc of the novel. She must have hoped that, once complete, she would find renewed strength to work through the manuscript again, enlivening and smoothing the transitions between the two perspectives vying for the reader’s sympathy. At the very least, she must have felt she could leave this task to me, if she could only write to the novel’s end. It was a goal her disease did not allow her to reach.
The two characters don’t actually meet in the pages she wrote, though it’s apparent that they will come to know one another. The young woman has been released from her initial confinement and is traveling to Pittsburgh to visit her sister and complete her recuperation, but the reader is led to doubt her success and there are hints her freedom is quite temporary. Even so, how she comes to die inside the walls of the state institution and how her body falls into the hands of the mortician will be details I will have to work out. Bound by a clip in the left corner, the two narratives appear like block fletchings on my desk, angled toward their meeting somewhere along the line of the shaft of a giant arrow. I tell myself that the ending, indistinct but perceivable, lies further along that imaginary fused line and will begin when mortician and young woman meet. As I began my work, another realization bodied forth. As she wrote, my mother’s interest in the young woman’s story grew, caught as her heroine is by the inexorable and implacable forces of misogyny and patriarchy, as much as the selfish and indifferent whims of the individual men in her life. There’s an energy present in these parts of the manuscript, one unmanifested in the mortician’s musings, however striking his turns of phrase.
My mother began her writing career relatively late. A twenty-year tenure as a high school English teacher and the challenges of raising three boys stood between the dream of her adolescence and its fruition. When she did turn to writing, she went for training not to the local graduate program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the prospect of which brought her down from the mountains of West Virginia some twenty years before, two small children in tow, but to UNC-Wilmington, four hours to the east. The two of us began our graduate studies the same year, actually, and this was another of her great gifts to me. It was pure pleasure for me to go through our respective programs together, hashing and rehashing our plans and prospects, sharing our works in progress. After graduation, she wrote voluminously, publishing a memoir of growing up with her sister, At Home in the Land of Oz: Autism, My Sister, and Me, the two novels of historical fiction, a collection of short stories, and a cozy mystery, not to mention hundreds of essays, articles, reviews, and poems. But that mountain town in West Virginia never receded from my mother’s mind for very long.
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“Even now, the afternoon of her arrival at the asylum came back to her like a sequence of photographs. Dr. Strather’s kind face filled the frame of one, her bed another. She felt as if she were flipping the pages of an album, testing her memory before checking the back of a photo for names and places and dates.”
When I finally printed out my mother’s manuscript this winter, sitting at my desk and marking up the margins with an increasingly illegible scrawl, I knew I wouldn’t finish. Eventually, even the slight bending of the corner as I turned a page felt like sacrilege, desecration. My work felt editorial and profane. I began to revise what she’d written by attempting to recall the few conversations my mother and I had had about her vision for the book. But I couldn’t translate her thoughts into a language enough my own that it might sustain me for the one hundred and fifty pages I’d figured I needed to end her story. On the day I again pushed the manuscript aside, I realized what I’d been doing. I’d taken possession of her original draft, injecting it with my own voice rather than mimicking hers. I’d set out to be dutiful scribe to my mother’s manuscript, but had become reckless, treating the pages as if they were found materials, as if I were proprietor, ruthlessly shaping this last record of my mother’s mind into permanent form.
The dilemma confronts every translator, for the act can be as evaluative as it is evincing. The translator’s sin is the transgression of judgment and the inevitable infection of another consciousness, however conscientious. Attempting to build the arc of my mother’s story would demand that I insert my voice into the work she had already done in order to unify the real with the imagined, what was and what might be. Almost immediately my hand grew tentative and the effort soon seemed to me a greater betrayal than never having started. I stopped, broke down, and in the funk exacerbated by the pandemic, wrote this essay.
About a month after I abandoned my mother’s novel for the second time, I was asked to judge the creative nonfiction contest named for her the year after her death. The Anne C. Barnhill Prize, initiated by Elizabeth Damewood Gaucher, West Virginia native and editor of the Longridge Review, honors “Anne’s generous spirit of support for all who love to read and write.” I’d delighted in reading the finalists and winners of this contest the two years prior and I grew almost giddy when I thought about reading the entries that would come my way that fall. I pledged to seek the same reverence for language and seriousness of purpose I watched my mother bring to such tasks, perhaps remembering her own long push to publication. To be taken seriously and read well was often the only encouragement she needed. Afterwards, my mother’s word file would still be there, epitaphic, in the left-hand corner of my screen while I waited for the day I might look on it as the precious heirloom it is and not an easy vessel for my grief. That day, perhaps, I’d be ready to finish her story.
