Abstract
In her vulnerable and evocative essay “Essence of Mom,” Kerry Malawista revisits the complex of memories that swirl around the early loss of her mother, and which return with a new urgency upon her own pregnancy. As she feels the stirrings of her baby, she grapples with the realization that her mother has, in fact, been fading from her thoughts, and that her child will never know her. Unsure what to do, she finds herself driving to the public library in a small New Jersey town, to “the place she had left us,” in hope of finding something . . . she’s not quite sure what.
We stand behind Malawista as she spools through 20 years of microfilm to the day of the accident, May 8, 1970. The landing of Apollo 13, the burgundy smell of her mother’s new Ford, the newspaper report—all pass before us like so many associations. As we follow her deeper into the past, to “driveway camping,” a do-it-yourself roller rink, and on-the-fly lessons in eye shadow, we meet something of her mom’s irrepressible spirit, and we learn something about memory—memories that fade, and those which persist—fragile, fleeting, evolving, but never gone.
