You Still Look Her Up

It's eleven forty on a Tuesday and a woman who hasn't spoken to her mother in two years is on her profile, scrolling through pictures of a cookout she wasn't invited to. She feels bad about it right away, she puts the phone face down, and then she lies there working out what it means about her that she looked.

What it means is that she knew this woman her whole life, she knew what her kitchen smelled like and how she sounded on the phone when something was wrong, and none of that gets deleted because a daughter made a decision about her own safety. The decision was about what happened to her when she was around her mother. It was never a decision to stop wondering whether she's sick, whether the house sold, whether her niece got into the program she wanted, and both of those can be true at once without anybody being a hypocrite.

Most of us do some form of this and most of the forms are a little embarrassing. Some women set up a second account under a name nobody would recognize and follow a brother from it. Some never leave the family group chat, they mute it and then read it in batches at two in the morning. Some have an aunt who is ninety-one and knows everything that happens, and they call to ask about her hip and let her get to the news on her own. Some ask a sibling for updates while pretending not to want updates, and the sibling knows exactly what's going on and plays along, and neither of them ever says what the call is really for.

The relatives in the middle complicate it, because most of them want something for what they tell us. A grandmother will report on how your mother's doing and then work in a line about how she won't be around forever and wouldn't it be nice if everyone were in one room again. A brother will pass along the real news and also mention to her that you asked, and we know he will, and we let it happen anyway and then feel odd about it for three days. So we learn who reports back and who doesn't, we learn which relative answers a plain question plainly, and we go on doing that with our own families for years without telling anyone about it.

It runs the other way too. She looks at our profiles, we can usually tell, because something we never told anybody comes back through a cousin. So we edit before we post, we think about whether a picture of the new apartment gives away the neighborhood, we wonder whether she can tell from one photograph how we've been doing, and then we post it or we don't.

The looking feels like a betrayal because most of us were only ever taught one way for a relationship to end, which is that the person dies. Everybody knows how that one goes, there's a service, people bring food, there's a year of birthdays and anniversaries to get through, and then it's over. This has none of that. She's alive, she's forty minutes away, her number still works, and the whole situation could be undone this afternoon with one phone call, which is why it never finishes. Grief for someone who died runs out eventually. Grief for a woman who is at the grocery store right now and would pick up if we called starts over every time we think about her.

So looking her up isn't a reversal of anything, it's a check on whether the situation is still the situation. Part of us is hoping to find that she's changed, that she's in therapy, that it would go differently this time, and what's usually there is a woman posting what she always posted, having a nice time with people who don't know what we know. That's how most of these searches end. We go looking for proof that we were wrong and come back with proof that we weren't.

There's no need to make a rule about it. Promising never to look again breaks on a bad night, and then there's a broken promise on top of everything else. It works better to notice when it happens. Looking on the nights we already feel terrible, when we're tired and low, is a pattern to interrupt, and a plan for what to do at eleven forty will interrupt it better than a promise will. Looking once a month to confirm she's still alive is a woman keeping track of a family member she can't be around, and there's nothing there to be fixed.

Looking is not the same as going back. Going back means the calls start again, it means a day off work to take her to an appointment because nobody else will, it means sitting in her kitchen on a Sunday and being spoken to a particular way in front of people who won't say anything. None of that happened tonight. She looked at a picture of a cookout, she put the phone face down on the nightstand, and in the morning she got up and went to work.