Like Magic

a collaboration with my absence

Last week, I was given an odd writing prompt as homework. The gist of it was this: “Write about someone or something, a presence, you had in your life and don’t any more. And write with your absence, write as your absence.” We’d been talking about collaboration in writing, so we were now being asked to collaborate with something missing. You know, the usual. I added an extra element with myself: “Collaborate with those who share the same absence.” That helped. Now I knew who to turn to, how to begin.

This week, I spoke on the phone with someone who carries the same absence I do, someone I don’t call often. She holds this absence even more closely than I do. She’d read my piece about our shared absent love, and she was moved by it. She asked me what I planned to do with it and I said not much. I said I’d already shared it with those who share this same absence most intimately, with those whom I’d collaborated with. I said the story had already reached it target audience, and that I wasn’t sure how it would land for those who didn’t know and love our shared absence.

But she reminded me that everyone has an absence. Almost everyone has an absence with a similar shape to mine, and even if they don’t yet they one day will. Everyone has someone who once was and no longer is. So maybe there’s something in here for everyone, is what she meant by that.

Maybe. So here it is. Let me know what you find in it for yourself. And then hold your absences tight and talk about them and to them and with them and as them. Try it, let me know how it feels. I think it’s a special form of magic.

---

Like Magic

How would you begin? Not at all like me. You were never the writer in the family, you ceded that title, happy to give it up to those of us who fought for it. You would begin directly, with facts, with dates, with details. I won’t. I’ll let you get to that in a bit. I want to start with the magic. 

—

Here’s where I will begin: We first felt the magic that cold winter, when the days were still growing shorter. Perhaps magic was like the fruits, we thought, that ripened on the vine until golden with light, then grayed with time into dust. Perhaps magic showed up most when we began looking for it, when we began needing it, I thought. We all looked for it then, and attributed it to everything we found. The stray safety pin on the bed, the last night before, when you were still in your hospital bed, and then running into a friend with safety pin earrings the very next night, the first night after, when you were no longer. That was a minor instance of your magic, but I clung to it, and shared it, and we all made a thing of it. “Drive safe”, one of us said, like you always said. And that was it, our new short-hand. Once we began looking for safety pins, of course we noticed them everywhere, but it’s true that they did appear in strange spots. Found, at random, in a jewelry box; stuck, as if magically, to a wall; spotted, for the first time, in the bottom of a glass in the back of the cabinet, which hadn't been touched in weeks or more; and countless other places that at first all felt significant, and in time just became part of the stories, more minor instances of magic. These little stories, they could be dismissed as coincidences, maybe, but it was comforting to consider them signs, and so we did, and still do, and no one can talk us out of it. Who would bother trying to? Nobody we trust with the stories, anyways. (No one we love.)

And then when the heater went cold, just days after you did, that was bigger magic. The house was full of people then, for the memorial, but even a Californian December is a cold December, so we piled on extra blankets and wore our coats inside for a few days. Months later, when the chandelier exploded just as we were emptying out the house, that was real magic, confusing magic. No one had particularly liked the chandelier. It was one of those features of the house that just was, unquestioned. The light fixture had illuminated the dinning room for decades, had put up with generations of kids playing with the dimmer switch, had presided over countless casual family dinners and formal holiday gatherings, and no one had thought to look up to wonder if it was time it be replaced. How would we have known, anyways, if it was? And even an old chandelier isn’t expected to burst into a hundred pieces, to shatter all over the table below, to reflect light a million times over. No, no, that was unexplainable, that was magic indeed. 

Oh, and the dreams. The night the heater goes cold, I dream that I walk down the stairs, and you’re sitting in the rocking chair by the front door. You’re surprised to see me, you pull me in for a hug. Then you complain about having spaghetti for Christmas dinner. In another, you stand at the mouth of the hallway and tell us you’re leaving, and in our frantic rush to gather everyone, we miss the moment, and you’re gone. A few days after your house is no longer ours, I dream that we’re standing around the curved driveway when someone walks up and says his great-grandma used to live here. I show him inside, and walk him through the house, pointing out the renovations you had made over the years. In another, I’m standing in the kitchen, clearing out the cupboards. You tell me to save a salt shaker from the pile of things in the panty. I place it in the keep pile. More recently, one of us had a dream where we were visiting your house, and everyone was bustling around the big dining table, and you were sitting there, quietly. In your chair, at the head of the table, where you belonged. A dream indistinguishable from many real life nights.  

There’s more magic to be gathered up, once I start digging for it. I collect these stories, they bring me comfort. I string them together, pin them up to examine more closely. I want more, more, more. “What’s your favorite story about the magic?” I ask. “Tell me your magic moment,” I text. We can’t discuss these over the dining table anymore, so it’s in the group chat that these are shared. (The group chat is still named for you: we call ourselves your people. We invoke you every time we text.) 

“Her car horn wailing!”

“I didn’t know about that one.”

“Didn’t her car horn break - didn’t one of you twins deal with it? Maybe I’m confused.” 

“I’m not saying it didn’t happen, I just either didn't hear about it or forget. Fill us in, honey.”

(An absolute non sequitur that does not connect to what was said before or after, an aside that leads us down a deep rabbit hole.

And then back.) “Car horn? Wall heater? Doorbell? Front door lock. There was stuff. I can’t recall it all. Who’s starting a shared doc for these? I have some other people’s stories.” (I am. That’s what this is.)

“And I did randomly find 1 safety pin the day I shared about the pennies from dad, from heaven.” (We believe in other forms of magic, too, other people’s, other signifiers. Pennies for one, hummingbird for another, butterflies for a third. But today, I’m only interested in yours, in safety pins.)

“The night of the memorial. We had a full house. I chose to sleep in her room. For the first time, ever, on her side of the bed. And was sayin that I wanted her bedside lamp, and just then it flashed on. In a dark room, ‘this little light of mine.’” (Like your favorite song, the song you taught to all your preschool classes, the one we sang at your memorial.) We know the reference, we don’t need to be filled in on the backstory. The connection is left unsaid, and we all make meaning for ourselves. 

“!!! For the first time since… or ever?” 

This is how these stories are told now, are turned into stories, are turned into magic. I don’t write these stories alone, I couldn’t. What would be the point? They’re not mine, they’re ours. Are they yours? 

—

What would you say to all of this? You would lean back in your chair, listen. You would let us tell our stories, let us talk over one another, ask for the peas, please, ask to repeat what you just said, I didn’t hear that, ask about that other story, you know the one, deliver the punchline before the joke has been set up. You’d listen, you’d laugh, you’d love it. “As long as you’re not fighting, as long as you all get along,” you’d say. What do you know about the magic that I don’t know, that I can’t know? Can you claim some instances as your own and dismiss other instances as true happenstance, odd coincidences? What about the dreams? You would dismiss the dreams, wouldn’t you? Always a stoic, never one for the mysticism the rest of us turn to. But never one to turn down a good story, either. 

How would you tell these stories? Would you? Matter of fact, as always, if at all. Straight to the point. Not at all the way I tell them. You’d begin at your beginning. How would you introduce yourself? Like this, like what you wrote about your mother, and about how you came to be: “Suse met Reinhard Stern at a dance sometime around 1923. Suse and Reinhard – called Reini – were married on August 9, 1924, at a lovely restaurant in the Berlin Zoo. Reini worked on establishing his business as a patent attorney. Two years later their first daughter, Annemarie, was born, followed four years later by the arrival of the second daughter, Elisabeth, called Lisel.” Straight forward. Direct. Matter of fact. I don’t have to make it up, to collaborate with you, I only have to go looking for it. I only have to ask your people for it. 

What details would you hold onto, which would you let go of? Keep this one: “The large dining room table usually had a crowd around it at dinnertime. Dinnertime was in midday.” You knew that detail mattered, so much so you recreated it at your own table. Dinnertime was dinner time, though. 

How would you describe the political tides that forced you from your childhood home and country? I would tell this part that comes next so differently, but you wouldn’t like my editorializing. So I’m leaving this bit up to you. Matter of fact. Stoic as ever. No sentimentality, no anger. “For the Sterns, the six years at Kurfürstendamm were happy ones, even though the political situation in Germany was steadily worsening. Anti-Semitism became more and more rampant, fueled by a Jew-hating Hitler and his Nazi party. Many, like the Sterns, believed it just couldn’t last. But in November of 1938, it blew up… Even though neither Reini nor Suse had ever practiced the religion of Judaism, they knew that Hitler only cared about their ethnic origins. It was clear that the family had to make plans to leave Germany.” You were eight that November. Eight. Too young to understand, but too old to ever forget it. And yet, what did you ever tell us about that night, about that time? Nothing. About leaving your home? Only that you missed your scooter, left behind. About your own departure, on one of the last Kindertransport boat out of Germany, only: “What strength it took for parents to send their children away from them for safety!” And what of the eight year old saying goodbye to her parents, her home, her country, her scooter? What of her strength, her bravery? Her safety?

What details would you choose to hold onto? The funny ones. The ones that make for a good story. That emphasizes strength, downplay despair. “The Sterns spent a lot of time working to get the proper papers to leave Germany. They also packed up their belongings in a lift, which is what an overseas moving van was called. Besides their furniture and other belongings, Suse packed many, many sanitary napkins in the lift. What with two daughters and herself, she figured they would be handy to have. (This lift never made it to America, probably taken by some Nazi officials. We hope they were happy with all the Kotex.)” This is too good for fiction, too good to leave out. (Did you get your stoicism and practicality from your own mother? Yes. Did you pass it onto mine? No.)

How would you tell the story of your ending? Not the way I tell it. No tears, not sentimentality. No poetic embellishment. The same way you told your mother’s. Facts first. Emotions sparse. Neutral narrator. Like this: “Sadness came along for the Nichols one cold winter. After a few years of declining health, Liz was admitted to the hospital on the eve of Thanksgiving, 2019. She was upset at the idea of having guests at her house without her there to care for them. And yet, her whole family, now all adults except for the youngest grandchild, were more than capable of making a Thanksgiving feast without her. Of course, they still used her recipe for peas and onions. On Thanksgiving day, one of her two grand-daughter brought her a plate with a taste of each dish to her hospital bed. On the next day, she returned home, and they had their traditional post-Thanksgiving meal around the dining table, together again. But she did not make a full recovery. Only two weeks later, she was back in the hospital, and this time, she did not leave it in. The Nichols would spend their first Christmas without her, their last Christmas in her house, only two weeks after her passing. A few days later, on the 29th, 20 days after her death, the Nichols-Stern clan held her memorial service at the school where she had taught for years, and which her five children had attended. Afterwards, her living room was filled with those who had loved her, whom she had loved in return.” You probably would be even more sparing, even less detailed. Of your own death, you would say the same as you said about your mother’s: “Her final hospital stay was blessedly brief. Her pain was over. So ended the life of Liz Nichols, born Elizabeth Stern, the most remarkable woman.” Except you would never go as far as to call yourself remarkable. Too stoic, too self-effacing, even at the end, even for that. So I’ll do it for you.  

—

But that is not my ending. It might be your end, but it’s not an ending at all. Just like the rabbi said at your sister’s funeral, quoting a physicist: your energy did not end, it only got reassembled. Into signs, into safety pins, into stories. Into magic. 

Here’s a different ending. It’s not mine, and it’s not the end, either. But it’s a good final scene, for this, for now. So: A few years after your death, some of us went to an exhibit about Jewish delis, in L.A. The museum wasn’t too far from where you had once lived, as a young girl and then a young mom. On the way in, on the lovely, woodsy path, we saw a butterfly. One of us commented on how it offered comfort: a sign from one family member to another, neither present at that moment. A sign seen by those it wasn’t intended for. Those of us who saw it still appreciated it, still took it in. “Now all that’s missing is a safety pin,” one said to the other. 

And then. The last exhibit before leaving. We walked into the room and we were greeted there by art pieces made up of thousands upon thousands of safety pins. Greeted by you. By magic. 

The End.