My family read the Grafton Alphabet series end to end.

I’d revisited the first few books a few times over the last thirty years, but most of them I’ve read a single time, generally the year of publication. We started giving them to each as hard-covers on Christmas, or for birthday presents. Audiobook versions percolated through the family, as boxes of rental audio cassettes, packs of CDs, purchased or borrowed from libraries. Sometime after my father died two years ago I started re-listening to the Sue Grafton mysteries on Audible, starting with A, and going on from there, with the goal of rereading the entire series. I was reading H when my mother died on the first day of 2021.

I’m pushing sixty, so it’s not like the loss of my parents is anything but an ordinary, foreseeable tragedy. But the deaths have hit me hard. I have enjoyed escaping into these books as I walk an hour or two or three a day.

Sue Grafton died in 2017 at age 77, getting ten years less life than my parents had, but having almost completed her alphabet. Z is for Zero, her family tells us, will never be written. Sue’s alphabet ends at Y. and that is oddly appropriate, I think. A Work of Art Is Never Finished, Merely Abandoned, as the saying goes.Still, Sue got a ton done, before vanishing into that other country where my parents now reside.

The series consists of the internal monolog of Kinsey Milhone, a twice divorced, former cop private detective living and working mostly in fictional California city she calls Santa Theresa, a place I thought was real for thirty years. Toward the end, Grafton throws in a few new viewpoint characters, non-recurring,  having perhaps gotten tired of the rendering the single voice for decades.

If you’re interested in Grafton and her life and work, the Wikipedia link here is a good place to start. This post isn’t really about her, or the mysteries, but about my family’s experience of them.

The books are about mortality, for me now, about what a life work should look like, about the length of time I got to spend with my parents, from my birth in 1963 until their deaths the last two years. The alphabet is a yard stick, stretching from the beginning of my college years to my late fifties.

The series begins as contemporary detective fiction set in the early 80s when it was written. She publishes a book a year in the series until M in 1996, as she turned 56 years old, and thereafter it takes he two years per book. She wasn’t able to quit her screenwriting until G is for Gumshoe, which gives you an idea of how hard it is to make a living writing novels, even in popular genres.

The series turns into a period piece relatively quickly, as time passes more slowly for Kinsey than it does for her readers. Y is for Yesterday book ends the series in more ways than one. It contains staged events (in other viewpoints) from 1979, with the action of the book’s present, 1989.

Grafton had no interest in writing about the internet or smartphone culture. Born in 1940, she was a decade younger than my parents; in this she was like my mother, a more extreme technohater. My mother earned a Phd, and wasn’t sure why one had to rewind a video tape. Her cellphone’s ring made her jump a foot in the air–she never learned to answer one. The batteries went dead and they ended up in a pile of newspaper.

So, the Kinsey Alphabet-minus-Z, written from 1982 to 2016, 44 years, span only 7 years of Kinsey’s life, taking us from her mid twenties to her early thirties.

Most non-YA protagonists are in this age range. Old enough to be doing something interesting, to be out of adolescence, but young enough to avoid having to get up three times a night to pee, or experience hot flashes. Each alphabet mystery spans a few days or weeks, with a month or two between books, working gigs Kinsey doesn’t consider worthy of sharing any details.

So Kinsey is falling into a singularity, time slowing, living six times slower than you and I.

And so, Kinsey remains, always, in her prime. On most days running three miles a day, except when she’s too beat up to get out of bed.

My father said, about the late sixties and early seventies, that that was his time, their time, my mother and him, and this struck me as sad, to feel like a creature out of time, on the sidelines, watching an increasingly bizarre game play itself out in their endless wash of twenty four hour news.

So Grafton drifted into her own past, as the years went by, and never had to learn new private detective stuff. Kinsey went to libraries and looked at microfilm and made calls from phone booths and listened to her answering machine and did all these things we now think of fondly.

Unlike my father, a one time computer programmer gradually infuriated by ever new release of Windows. He once owned three computers at once, but by the time he’d died had only a few tablets without keyboards that he hated typing on. Our communication faded away during this time, without email, to the occasional phone call, very brief, as if that generation could never fully understand that long distance phone calls didn’t cost anything anymore.

So I fall into my past, my time with my family, because these are among the only books, certainly the only series, that all of us read. Not sure they both got to Y.

We read them, and spoke of them in no great detail, ever. “That was a pretty good one. H or G. I can’t remember.” But we lived in Kinsey’s head together. The first few paperbacks lived in the stacks of books that never made it into the bookshelves in our house on Westerly Terrace, in the post war boom suburb of my dying home town.

The books are rendered in sometimes excruciating detail, the camera almost always on. They are immersive. They become repetitive. A person doesn’t change all that much, usually, in only seven years. We see Kinsey as a complete human being, frozen in her era.

Living her best life, on her own terms, in her time, the 80s.

What forty and fifty something Kinsey might have become we can only imagine. But we got to live so long ourselves, my parents and I. We avoided being shot in dumpsters or buried by bulldozers, just like Kinsey.

I miss Grafton, even though her work is done and you can really ask much more from life, to find good work to do and to be able to do it. Seventy Seven seems less and less like old age to me, though.

I’ve written and published a stack of shorts and novellas and a few novels; Grafton was ten books into the Alphabet at my age, and just a few years into making her living as a novelist. I feel sometimes I have daydreamed my life away, as I re-read Grafton rather than leap into the literature of this moment.

I have my news addiction for that, as did my parents.

I miss Kinsey. Never knowing what her next story might have been. I dream about Z is for Zero. I have imagined a book where a romance arc sticks; she marries someone again, third times the charm–but dies saving him, heroically. The lover, male most likely, as we never get any sense that Kinsey is anything but heterosexual, gets sucked in to the game looking for her killer, and becomes a vigilante, and finally, a PI in the 90s, as the internet changed everything.

I imagine writing these books, this series, using numbers instead of letters. In fact, I wrote a novella about a writer trapped in a weird dystopia writing these books at gun point. (

I’m trying to remember the titles I gave them… One for the Money, Two Steps Ahead, Three’s a Crowd, Four by Four, Take Five, Deep Six, whatever. You get the idea. Seven Up.

My companion series never has to end. Because I hate endings. Even fulfilling ones.

I miss Grafton, and my parents, and my past, and the worlds that could have been.

So. Now it’s time to write. I will fade away completely, then, not be me, and not miss a thing.

Wish me luck.

The home health aide’s number lights up my phone and she says “you need to come now.”

For a moment I imagine that Mom has come around and is asking for me, even though I saw her a few hours ago, and she was unresponsive, and this seems unlikely.

Sometimes I am told they rally, and there’s one of those last conversations.

“There’s the Happy lamb hot Pot,” my Mom would say, as I drove her home as we hit Mass ave, back when she was eating dinner with us every night, before the plague.

“Do you think the lambs are really happy?”

“Not really, no.”

“Maybe we’ll eat there some day.”

She would sing out the landmarks as we drove past them, proud that she knew where she was and where she was going, even though she was 89, mostly drunk, and suffering from severe memory loss.

The drive to Mom’s assisted living is over in an eye blink and I’m clumping up the stairs and then I don’t want to go in, but if it’s that rallying thing then I should keep moving. I listen at the door. I hear muted TV news. No screams, like the day before yesterday, thank God. But no human voices.

The door is unlocked and the overhead light is far too bright and the aide stands in a cloth mask and bandana, looking up from her phone, and in the other room Mom’s mouth hangs open in the same way my father’s mouth hung open when he died eighteen months ago. There’s some drool on her chest and she doesn’t really look like my mother, but some age-made-up version of her. She aged twenty years in 30 hard days.

I go to her. Her skin is still warm, damp with the exertion of her fight with death, her body perfectly still, and I lay my hand on her forehead, the way I comforted her while she was dying, and it feels the same, really, as if she was alive, but she’s inert. So still. So I try to hug her, an awkward leaning over the hospital bed thing,  and I say the stuff you say. Her eyes are closed. I kiss her between the eyebrows.

I stand up.

“She’s at peace, now, Jay. She’s at peace.”

“Yeah. I know. This had to happen. It’s good. It’s a good thing.””

I turn back to the body, lean in again and whisper  all the things as the aide retreats to the other room. I love you, Mom. You were a great mom. I will miss you. I am glad you aren’t in pain anymore. All the things you say. There aren’t that many.

I go and turn off the overhead lights and turn on the table lamps. MSNBC mutters continually in the background.

“I have called the hospice nurse.” The aide says. She doesn’t tell me to be strong, like she did a couple of times, to stop me from crying and upsetting my mother. When I had to tell Mom she was dying. Over and over again, because she couldn’t remember. I explained to her the cancer out of nowhere, the shadow on the lung, the blood clots, the surgery that failed to save her arm, her blackening necrotic fingertips.

Over and over again, in and around the morphine and ativan.

“They have to pronounce the death,” the aide says.

“I’ll call the funeral place. I picked one out.” Wait. What order do we do this in?

“Yes. Call them now. They will make you wait, so don’t worry, the nurse will get here before.”

I’ve already picked out a cremation place and I click on the link on my macbook but I have not filled out the pre-payment form. I meant to, but the fucking e-commerce was broken in the mobile app. Idiots. So this will cost us more. Well, me more. Who cares. But fuck.

I pace around the unit. I return to hug her again, wordlessly, eyes filling with hot tears. I walk over to the desk and pick up a photo of her holding up a glass of wine in a restaurant in Asheville, Christmas lights shining out of focus behind her. She always smiled best for my father. He took the shot.

“They should use that one,” the aide says. She means for the memorial table downstairs. I remember from my father that you get one week on the table.

Seeing her so alive and so happy in the photo hurts in a way it is impossible to describe. She will never be that way again. Never drink another glass of wine. She will be ash sometime soon. She is very still now.

I text my family. They knew when I left what was happening.

“Do you want me to go with you?” My wife asked as I put myself together to make this trip.

“No,” I said. No reason really. My wife wasn’t very close to my mother. My wife isn’t overly sentimental about death. She’s a rock, in the good and bad sense of that word.

My mother never got that close to my kids, or my brother’s. My parents chose to live 1000 miles away from us. My mom was nice to her grandkids, and they loved her in that way you love your grandparents, but she never talked to them for hundreds upon hundreds of hours. The way I talked with my mother.

“You were a great mom,” I told her, two days ago, when she could still speak.

“Why do you say that?” She asked. Details. I’m dying Darling, give me details.

“Because I could always talk to you. And you always listened. And I never thought I was boring you.” I bored my Dad.

“You were never boring, darling.. Never boring.” She pauses, groping for what to say next. “You were my favorite person to talk to.”

It’s been two years since I could say the same back to her without lying. Her broken memory made conversation a challenge for both of us. But it was one we met, every day, as I walked her around the building. Her mandatory exercise.

“Where are we going,” she would ask. “Just around the building,” I would say.

Like Pooh and piglet walking around that tree, alarmed at the ever increasing numbers of footprints.

“When I was one,” I would start.

“I had just begun,” she would answer.

The sun has set, I came too late, put the visit off, and it’s twilight and nobody in his right mind would be walking this old woman at this hour, in this cold, over the rutted asphalt and raised parking lot speed bumps, around the dark puddles.

But sometimes the sunset was so pretty, and she noticed it over and over again, and remarked on it. It was new to her every time.

That was fun, really. It made her happy over and over again.

“There is our blue dumpster.”

“Truly a beautiful sight to behold.” This was the blue dumpster that had replaced the red one with the Hillary for Prison sticker which we had covered with a Biden bumper sticker a few days before the election.

“When I was two,” I say.

“I was nearly new.”

I’m doing the easy part, the numbers.

“and when I was three–“

“I was hardly me…. where are we again?”

“Just walking around the building.”

“I live here?”

“Yes, when we turn the corner you’ll recognize where we are. You always do.”

“I know. I’m just old, that’s all.”

“You’re not that old, really. You should stop complaining.”

“But that’s what I’m best at. Complaining.”

“No, you’re not. You don’t complain much at all. Now, where were we?”

“What?”

“Four. When you were four.”

“Oh! I was not much more!”

I know the rest. “When I was five, I was just alive, but now I am six–“

“–And I’m clever as clever,” she says.

“So I think I’ll be six now–

“–For ever and ever.”

We say the last words together.

As she lay, struggling with the pain, I read to her from the Milne poetry books, When We Were Very Young, and the other one, Now we are six. But I couldn’t get through many of the poems because when you are dying you don’t have a lot of energy for such things, which is really too bad.

I skipped past this poem, that first day I was reading, and went back to it, the second day, the last day, I read, avoiding this, the best one really, because of the name… which was, which is, The End.

I don’t want it to be the end, even if it’s time.

But it is.

And now I’m in the other room writing this, and Natalie the Catily has left her post at my mother’s feet, her mission done, and she won’t let me type. She demands to be petted and the funeral man knocks and he’s in the hall pushing his shrouded gurney and the hospice nurse is sitting at the love seat doing the paperwork, after removing the morphine pump and catheter and the health aide, Francis, stands behind me, and we all wait, because there is more work to do, still, tonight.

Promises to keep, right? And miles to go before I sleep.

Goodbye, Mom. Good night.

Forever and ever.

Losing my father all-at-once, and my mother by degrees to dementia has been hellish.

My parents are in their mid-eighties so, you know, it’s just one of those things, but it seems like, no matter what the age, this is never just one of those things. Long expected deaths, or short sudden ones, like my father’s. It’s impossible to say which is worse, I guess, unless you’ve been around both.

Dear God, don’t let me have both. Though it looks like that is the direction we’re heading.

All this has produced a gap in fiction output. I know that Sheila Williams at Asimov’s will do her best to keep me in print should I get her stories worth publishing, but production schedules mean that I’ll have nothing in print in 2020 most likely, which is too bad, as 2020 is a seriously science-fictional year. At least, to people my age.

Story-telling, which compresses the creative act into a half day producing and performing a five minute bit, has become my substitute for the sustained mental effort of writing fiction. It resonates with the memoire work that I generated spontaneously as I processed all that paperwork.

And all that emotional stuff, too. Not that it’s fully processed. Or ever can be.

I wrote and illustrated a hundred pages about parents life in the 40s through the 60s. My mother’s illness meant all the paperwork, the nitty-gritty of coping with my father’s death, fell to me. And I felt an urgency to extract the stories that might soon be lost forever. Wanting to know my father, more, and better through her, and to escape the endless grinding estate work.

I am really really bad at paperwork. Well. I’m better at it now.

The memoire gathered a small but devoted readership in my FB feed. I may do something with it. Or maybe it’s therapy. I’ll give it some distance to figure that out.

There’s a lot of this dead parent content going around. It’s a generational thing; late boomers, early gen-x’ers parents are dropping like flies.

My parent’s, who had us a few years late by the standards at the time, were a generation known as the lost generation or, less popularly, The Lucky Few, a name they resented as they were born during the great depression.

” As it turned out, we really were very lucky,” as my Mom says.

A small cohort, they moved into job markets that welcomed them with open arms, and open wallets. Being white and educated, they benefited from post WW2 stuff, a GI bill, a booming housing market as the suburbs continued to sprawl, sucking middle class whites out of urban cores. Into that already fading suburban American dream, tracking the rise and fall of mall culture, the tail end of TV as king, phones as immobile objects, computers as props in SF movies or big business machines mailing you inscrutable bills.

My parents were professors. I staggered through my college years… tuition free.

I have been, and continue to be, wildly lucky.

But death has a way of leveling the emotional playing field. I’m a wreck. I feel so much so strongly now. Maybe it’s the bipolar. I struggle now for balance, composure, perspective. I flash back on the death bed, again and again, and long for a chance to really clear the air. Instead of clutching a still warm body ugly-crying out the things I’d never gotten to.

My mother slips away before my eyes and I struggle to remember her as she was, proud and intelligent and independent. A professional, a professor, an intellectual, always one of my best friends, a fact I only admit to myself as she becomes my charge. My responsibility.

My friend is mostly gone, and when I talk to her, really talk, dig deep, half the time there’s confusion in her eyes. She’s lost the thread. She fades in an out, like a ratio station receding from your speeding car on the interstate. Fuzzed with static, then clear, then unintelligible.

The strong, loving, flawed ever-s0-slightly distant, and beautiful people they were are gone for good.

I’m left spewing cliches. Life is precious. Time is limited. Say things while you can, and if I didn’t really listen then you won’t either. I can’t help but repeat them though, now, for you, wise and gentle reader. This reader that somehow I feel closer to than ever.

I feel closer to everyone now.

You’re going to die. I’m going to die. Other than that, there’s literally nothing to be afraid of. And eventually, if you do the work, maybe, you’re not even afraid of that. But I’m happier, in this sadness, knowing the first thing. I’m going to live as if my life matters.

I’ll get back to the writing. Or something even more important, and it will be full of writing stuff no doubt.

But for now…

If your family isn’t a toxic presence you have wisely cut yourself away from, give Mom and Dad a call. Say what you need to say. Now.

It can all change in an instant.

And you’ll wish you had.

My father died on the eighth of august, a week before his 87th birthday. He had a good life and we had a good relationship. But.

My mother is fading, her memory going, and I’ve been living with her, packing to move her… somewhere else. Back north, to be close to her surviving family, which would be us, her two sons.

Winnowing down the belongings to an iconic few, going through old photos, old clippings, old drawings, financial records, my parent’s academic work. Throwing away the useless tech cruft that builds up around us, the old cell phones and land lines and USB cables and battery chargers and transformer bricks that go to nothing that you’re afraid to throw away, in case you suddenly need whatever the hell it is they used to provide power for.

The retirement community will absorb what we leave behind. Oh, they have experience doing that. It’s a donation. Or more like a lizard shedding its tail to escape a predator.

I am a very lucky fifty six year old, to have not lost anyone but grandparents who was important to me. So lucky. And I’m so torn open now, so empty and lost. I’m not sure why. I’m told it fades. But never goes away completely.

Good bye, Dad. The boy who read every book in the library. The man who took his young sons bowling, for a time. The science fiction fan who bestowed upon me the genre. A futurist, technologist, a curious soul, an early computer programmer. Bridge player, crossword puzzle do-er and life long nightly drinker who never missed a day of work and was seldom visibly drunk.

A passionate atheist. With a wicked sense of humor.

One of the Lucky Few, the name for his generation, the Korean War set who ended up teaching the baby boom. Tenured professor. A man who dearly  loved wearing a suit. Who rose above his working class roots. To be respectable, a man of substance. Husband and father.

My father. Who I never had enough of.

But what I had will have to do.

Not only is writing not rocket science, rocket science isn’t rocket science.

“Rocket science”  means something so hard that people of normal intelligence just can’t do it, no matter how long or hard they try. When we say something isn’t rocket science, we mean, yeah, almost anyone can do that.

Presumably, this means that major scientific accomplishments are out of reach of anyone but a genius. The problem is, looking at the IQs of Nobel prize winners, it turns out this isn’t true.

In one famous longitudinal study of IQ, this happened:

Two pupils who were tested but rejected for inclusion in the study because of low IQ scores grew up to be Nobel Prize winners in physics: William Shockley^[81][82] and Luis Walter Alvarez.^[83][84] …  Richard Feynman, who had an IQ of 125 went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics and became widely known as a genius…

And on and on.

When I was younger, IQ squatted at the center of this venn diagram of scientific inquiry, racist eugenics, and misguided educational pedagogy.

Thirty years later, IQ remains stuck there.

So let’s not shout at each other about those things. Instead, let’s talk about how folks like Feynman, with his 95% percentile (1 in 20) IQ could do stuff that only a handful of humans since the dawn of time have done (made major contributions to our deepest understandings of reality as described by physics; helped build the Atom bomb, etc.)

The one in 20 mind doing the one in a billion thing. How does that happen?

Well. It takes time.

 

Humans live a long time; we’re neotenous apes, which means we are animals that carry aspects of childhood into our adult lives. This is why we are, or can be, lifelong learners. If you measure mammalian lives in heartbeats, humans get more than we deserve.

What this means is, if you have an average mind, but sustained focus, interest, will, or maybe just enjoyment of a thing, you probably have the time to get somewhere. If you don’t give up.

So you’re not a genius… you may have to settle for being a successful writer.

Or worse… just the one Nobel Prize.

Why is today a great time to be a writer?

Because every time is a great time to be a writer. Let me explain. I’m not being an asshole. (Well, more than usual.)

It’s not a great time because of indy-pub (or self-publishing as it known to traditional publishers, who wish people would just call them publishers, like in the old days). It’s not a great time because of e-readers or social media sharing or the Golden age of television or kickstarter or Patreon.

It’s not a great time because fascism is on the rise in America and across the globe and this painful political awakening and resistance is sharpening the senses.

It’s great because you get to write, and as good as now is, better times lie ahead, because you will get better at this.  Terrible times ahead, too, of course. But God you have to grab onto the good ones.

This paraphrases what Jack Dann told Cadwell Turnbull and myself at the Asimov’s table at Readercon 2019. (I think he was speaking mostly to Cadwell, whose first novel, the Lesson, I’d brought with me to be signed. The book evoked in Jack and the other successful novelists at the table memories of their first novels, and advice, real, heartfelt, ironic, mocking, self-deprecating sometimes pointed and blackly depressing echoed with the laughter and genuine good feeling.

It would be rude to quote it directly without permission, this wonderful moment of camaraderie and shared purpose, which I was glad to witness. (I haven’t sold a novel yet, but my publications had earned me a seat at the table.)

I tried to shut up and listen and enjoy the moment, too. I succeeded pretty well, as such things go for me. Feel like I’ve arrived. Though I will never arrive. No one ever arrives. And you have arrived the moment you write your first word. That’s about as good as it gets and it doesn’t have to get any better. But it will and it does. I hear. Think. Hope.

Calming and refuting the horrible voices inside me that say, “So where’s your novel? What’s wrong with you? You have proved you can do this now, what the fuck is the hold up, son? You’re sitting here poking at short stories and novellas and doing entry level graphic design for cash, having abandoned the corporate career, which is fine, for a goddamn twenty something. Thirty something. Forty something?

Fifty something?

But as the lunch winded down around dinner time Jack’s relentless clear eyed encouragement mixed with a funny, brutal honestly on the writing life was infectious, joyous. Jack was reeling from the hideous jet lag of his unbroken flight from Australia. Where is doing very well!

He has done great work and made great friends in this life.

And so will you. Maybe. If go and write now and take your piece of this writing life which is accessible to us all in bits and bites and sometimes huge delicious meals, and sometimes this becomes our lives, at any age, for some unknown number of years, because everything you have and gain will crash and burn, Jack told us. And you’ll keep writing, or stop, but you don’t have to. You never have to stop. And if you do stop you can start again, in a month, a year, five, or eighteen.

That’s me. The eighteen.

But you’re writing now, writing all the time, in your head, living your life, the voice I cultivate now whispers.

Make the most of it.