Amy Lu's View

(Author’s note: This is another piece I wrote for a recent church service, and Chad helped with it a bit).

When our family’s beloved elderly Siamese cat, Chester, left this mortal coil, he climbed up on my mom’s lap, shared some of her bagel and cream cheese (just like he did every morning), and then he died. 

It’s a beautiful image of a peaceful and loving final exit. 

I don’t think it really happened. 

It’s what my mom told me happened, but my mom had a way of presenting reality so that it conformed with her inner truth, rather than mere objective “fact.” So although I didn’t witness Chester’s death and I was living in a different state when it happened, I doubted my mom’s retelling of the event. 

I’m not saying my mom was a liar. She just never let the facts get in the way of a good story. When she did stray from the truth, I don’t think she even usually realized it.

My mom was an entertaining and renowned storyteller. Or maybe not exactly a storyteller–she didn’t necessarily use a narrative form to captivate her listeners. But she was constantly sharing anecdotes and scenes and vignettes and interesting tidbits, some of the “friend of the friend” type and some about immediate family members. For simplicity’s sake, I think of all this content as “stories.”

My brother and I call these stories my mom told “Big Fish,” after the movie and book about  a son – in the last days of his dad’s life – grappling with some of the fantastic tales his dad told throughout his life. The son’s relationship with those stories is pretty complex. He is bemused, inspired, and frustrated by them. I can’t speak for my brother, but I definitely identify with the son. 

Trying to share my mom’s Big Fish “stories” is challenging–many would come off as highly confusing without a lot of set-up and our time is limited, so I’ll just focus on her lore of my birth. (If you are clamoring for more, I have blogged about quite a few of her stories and will probably continue to do so). 

My mom had a lot of stories about my birth–how she got pregnant even though she was on the pill, and the doctors told her because of that I was likely to have brain damage and a severe cognitive disability. Also, I was a breech birth, so the doctor asked her if they should break my arm or leg to deliver me, but then I eventually did come out butt first. And because I was born butt first, I was the most beautiful baby because my face wasn’t all red and squishy. Oh, I also was born 6 weeks earlier than expected, but I wasn’t in the least bit premature. And double oh–my mom also made a point of highlighting that she and my dad rarely had sex, in fact, only two times–and I was the third kid. 

Obviously, my mom’s Big Fish stories are important to me because they keep me feeling connected to her. Every time I think of one, and especially if I tell one, it keeps her memory, and even a bit of her essence, alive. It also connects me not only to her, but also to those who hear her stories, and especially to my brother and my now deceased sister and everyone who heard my mom tell her own Big Fish. 

These stories also help me make meaning–of my mom’s life, and her death, and my family, and myself. They’re my inherited mythology. Sometimes these stories feel like a key that helps me unlock some of the mysteries of my mom. Why did she tell some particular strange and funny story over and over (beyond her love of performing, which I definitely relate to). What does the story say about what she valued? How she saw the world? How she saw herself? How she wanted us to see her? Even if I’m completely factually wrong in my theories, the  questioning still seems to lead me to some type of truth. 

Maybe we all have a Big Fish. Maybe a whole school of them. I hope so.

I never did question my mom about just how true her story ofChester’s death really was. What would be the point? Chester would still be dead, and the real truth of her story was that he was loved, and that my mom wanted to make Chester’s death as easy for me as possible because I was loved.