Unseen Endeavors: Navigating Grief and New Beginnings
The life you want will cost you the life you have.
It’s what I told myself as I told my mother it was okay to die. No matter who says it or how I hear it, the sting is always the same.
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably read my other blogs on A Language of Dragons and Say You’ll Remember Me, maybe even the others I’ve written on the Now What? A Podcast website. If you have, I’m extremely grateful to have your continued attention. If you haven’t—that’s fine. All you need to know about me is this: I’ve experienced what it’s like to lose. I’ve lost things, pets, people, pieces of myself. Threads of my life have been cut and put to their own conclusions.
And the only thing that will help me sleep at night isn’t that it’s the nature of things to end. An ending doesn’t mean something’s finished. It means something else is beginning, and it needs more space in your life to take up.
Portrait of an Unseen Woman
This wouldn’t be possible if not for Samantha at Rootstock Publishing. Thank you so much for trusting me with an ARC of Roberta Harold’s Portrait of an Unseen Woman. It took pieces of my eternally grieving heart and held them so gently, I don’t think I’ll ever be the same. I’ve never felt as seen as I did within the pages of this fantastic novel.
My love is cursed, she had concluded. It kills everything it touches.
Annie Shaw is a woman who has experienced loss after loss after loss. She lost her mother, her husband, her child, and won the consolation prize of eternal caregiver. Longing to escape the rigid expectations of nurturer after her sister and family leave her in Paris, she dives into the life of a Parisian in the Belle Epoque. Her adventure is that of a person trying to find the life hidden underneath everybody else’s shadow, breaking decades’ long habits and trading them in for boundaries—a spectacle I’m sure we all could relate to.
I didn’t know what to expect when I started reading. This had come in with another ARC in the mail (the blog for which will be out soon), and I picked it because something in me yearned for the same thing Annie had: a life without anybody else’s shadow in front of it.
It’s surreal for me on a personal level. Firstly, my late mother was named Annie (it’s where I get part of my first name: Ana). The past year and a half without her have been all about standing on my own two feet without her on the other end of the phone. Even as I write now, I almost feel the half of me that is hers bleeding through: writing on a laptop on my couch, a glass of wine next to me, with a book at my side. This was my view of her every night.
I used to swear not to be her, and I still mean some of it. But not so much anymore.
Secondly, I’m the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter. Growing up, I’d find myself in the kitchen counting how many wine bottles had disappeared from the number that had been there that morning. Then, I flew across the world, made a home of my own, and the only things I count are the number of cookies I’ve made that day.
Annie Shaw, Annie Naval, and I have a lot in common, and we were all going through the same thing. Our endings and beginnings haven’t quite synced, but the rhythm of our stories echoes just the same.
“I’m going to be quite unrecognizable,” Annie grinned. “I rejoice in the prospect.”
Annie Shaw’s road to living her own distinct life is impeded by her mother-in-law’s imposed presence in Paris. Mother Shaw intends to move in next door and have Annie her unwilling companion, leaving our protagonist to scheme with her friend about how to not let that happen. They scheme to make Mother Shaw return to America while letting Carlotta, Annie’s niece through marriage, stay in Paris so she can live her own life the way Annie never got to: unimpeded by obligation to the welfare of others.
I won’t spoil how the story ends because I think you should find out yourself, but it isn’t without both losses and wins for everyone involved: it simply depends on a matter of perspective.
Eventually, Annie and Mother Shaw do have a heart-to-heart within the novel, and both are able to come to terms with the other’s perspective. To Mother Shaw, Annie is unrecognizable from the girl she knew. To Annie, that difference isn’t a bad thing. I feel the same way about my mother and I.
I don’t know a lot about my mother’s life other than much was expected of her. She told me more about the way people looked at her, the rules imposed on her life, and the things she regretted. She spoke less about the things she loved. The things she loved, I had to observe. She loved my brother, my father, James Patterson novels, wine, HGTV, and Food Network. She loved her siblings, her parents, and the dogs we had. I’m sure, in a way, she loved me too, but I didn’t notice that for almost a quarter of a century.
More than she loved me sometimes, I think, she resented me. But there was one moment where we’d been synced up completely, where the past had been pushed aside for once moment of clarity: my NYU graduation.
It was the first time she ever told me she was proud of me. We went to a sushi restaurant near my apartment (which no longer exists, I’m pained to say), and she’d confided that she’d resented my outspokenness, but loved the person it shaped me to become: someone who knew what they wanted, and chased it down. Someone she wished she could be. She understood who I was, and in that moment, I understood how we were.
In Annie and Mother Shaw’s conversation, both have to come to terms with who they are to each other: women with the same last name neither of them were born with. Mother Shaw had come to Paris because she’d felt unloved in America, as uncared for as King Lear. She hadn’t imagined to unwittingly impede Annie’s journey with her presence; she was on her own exploration. Meanwhile, Annie had blamed Mother Shaw for her husband’s death, her rigidness paving the way to his demise. Where Mother Shaw saw an ally, Annie only saw a reminder of her grief.
“You needn’t always make everybody happy. It’s not what you set out to do.”
My mother died 18 months after my graduation. 18 months after that leads to now. Sometimes I see photos of myself before and after her death and I don’t recognize myself. There’s something in me that looks a little bit weathered now, and I think that kind of grief never really leaves.
If my mother thought I was outspoken then, she’d have a headache with who I am now. That being said, I understand her more now than I did then. We are both incredibly stubborn women with a penchant for getting ourselves in trouble. The last time I saw her, she wanted to start a business. Now I do it in her stead. I used to tell her to be careful and to make smart choices (not that she ever listened to me) and now people tell me the same thing (not that I ever listen to them). Sometimes, we daughters become the women we understood the least while balancing it with the women we want to be. Habits can follow us through our bloodline, and they’re not easy to break.
Annie Shaw and Mother—Sarah—Shaw have a different ending. They come to this place of understanding each other while also fundamentally being unable to. In the Belle Epoque, women’s roles were more defined than they are now. We are meant to be caregivers, pure until married and sacrificing our lives to fuel somebody else’s. Sarah never quite broke through that structure, unsurprisingly, while Annie endeavors to have a different ending. She supports the arts and encourages the young to have lives of their own made of choices they decide. Annie is unable to please everyone in the book despite her efforts, but you scarcely ever do anything of note without criticism. And that’s what Annie did: something important.
What mattered most was their soul’s work, and if it came to a choice between soul and heart, the heart must be allowed to break.
The life you want will cost you the life you have.
Annie Shaw couldn’t hold onto everything she had and still become who she needed to be. Neither could my mother, and neither could I.
I said goodbye to my mother through a video call I had on my now-husband’s bed. I told the most stubborn woman I ever knew that it was alright. It was alright to rest, even if there was still work to be done. That sometimes, the will for peace overrides the will to fight, even if the latter means to live. In the moment I gave her up, I knew I was giving up something of myself too: that in the vacuum she left behind, I would be forced to rise into something. Now, I have you and that is something new that I never would’ve thought of before. What exactly else will rise from this, I’m not sure, but my story’s still far from over.
Annie Shaw leaves us in a similar predicament. The story follows her life through this liminal space of decision: to keep what she has and continue living for other people, or to give it up to become herself. The novel ends just as she’s made that choice, and we don’t see all the fruits of her labor, but we do know that the rewards have been reaped.