“Dying is a labor like birth,” Mary Cappello writes in Frost Will Come, a collection of “essays from the bardo” (5). In writing of her dear mother’s dying as active and toilsome, it’s easy to see this work interminably aligning with Cappello’s take on grief. “Grief throws us. We have to become adept at being flung” (74). Like grief, and like much writing worth reading, this book does not offer a simple trek. Cappello circles the complex pain and light surrounding her mother’s death, her mother’s life, and her own life in the aftermath of both. About a third of the way into the piecemealed memoir, Cappello writes, “My mother’s suffering filled me with deep sadness, a kind of psychic pain that doesn’t go away. Is it obvious that this book is my attempt to replace that sadness with astonishment?” (93). And the following pages walked me toward this question’s inevitable answer: yes, for what else is there to do with it?
Throughout these careful musings, Cappello enters into conversation with her mother, Rosemary, a remarkable and contemplative poet, as well as a slew of other literary voices, ranging from Barthes to Dickinson to Shakespeare. Cappello touches on the mundaneness of care and post-death bank dealings. She also offers a candid look at her mother’s final days, sharing explicit and brutal aspects from her time as caretaker, which recalled the memories of losing my own mother to illness—the merciless walk of death, which begins slowly and changes pace unpredictably until this ending somehow takes someone we love, impossibly, from our continued living.
It’s the moments of tension and contradiction between the writer Cappello and the person Cappello that allow the uncharted kinship between grief and living to begin to take shape. Cappello claims that we can never immortalize the mortal, despite writing fervently in an effort to do just that. When death comes, so much of what we thought we knew of life disappears. Though we have glimpses into letters from and poems by Cappello’s mother, she cannot be recreated. “When a mother dies…she can no longer be re-cognized: all seeing now is occurrence; recurrence is a thing of the past. You can no longer see her again” (34).
Cappello’s mother cannot be re-cognized, but through essays which constellate to build the rich character of Rosemary, we witness this past occurrence of someone who is positively human: a mother not defined by the pedestal or pitfalls of motherhood but instead defined by her own interests and rich inner world. Cappello is devoted to showing us her mother and her mother’s passing, and is unflinching in admitting Rosemary’s own incongruity:
“My mother was both obnoxious and wonderful, like everyone on the planet. Hard to take, especially for those who have no choice but to put up with us. Wonderful, to the extent that other people feel more alive for having known us . . . Beautifully mysterious, and transparent. Selfish, and boundlessly generous. Impossible, and indispensable” (45).
But in this desire to express her mother so wholly also lies the book’s most honest admittance—her mother’s death does not exist in a vacuum. It is no prop for the delicious prose which decorates each page. If the book is about her mother’s death, then her mother’s death is about the “I” itself. When writing about a nurse’s botched attempt at draining fluid from her ailing mother at home, Cappello writes, “I describe this experience as though it were happening to me and not my mother” (90). Isn’t this how it feels, though, to care for someone we so painfully love? In the process of losing someone, we are tortured by questions that Cappello so deftly articulates: “How much can consciousness withstand at the site of torture? How much can a body withstand at the shock to its system of unremitting pain?” (90).
This book does not seek to solve grief, an act so many other elegiac writers are guilty of, myself included. Instead, it offers death to us as something which cannot be explained but must be lived with. In the lucidity of strange quotes from her mother’s deathbed—“The fullest expression of the depth of my mother’s hunger came in a sentence that seemed to appear out of nowhere: ‘I want to be an apple and take a bite out of myself’’”—we are disarmed; there is no solution (145). As much as we may try and try to express death not as an ending, Cappello breaks the spell: “My mother doesn’t exist anymore; in the place where her body once was in all its lively, differential detail, lies a pile of ashes” (156).
That is not to say that hope has no place here. The opposite is true. In this liminality, I found Cappello’s perspective to align itself with an honest exhibition of grief—its annoyance, persistence, and obvious evidence of our having lived and loved. Among the many moments in which I felt so “seen” in my own grief, Capello writes the following: “When those few say the right thing, is what makes it right the fact that it’s the healing thing? The thing you need to hear? Is it the honest or true thing? I think it might be the thing that sees you and therefore affirms that you haven’t died along with your mother” (184). Cappello’s writing dances within the complications between “right” and “true,” “healing” and “honest,” which colored my reading of this book as a whole. In Frost Will Come, Cappello offers a space where both exist—a space for her own grief to mingle with that of a reader, a space where she can fashion the truth into what is undoubtedly right. This is a special book which I won’t soon forget.
