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There are a few minor scattered thoughts remaining for me to clear from my ‘bowling lane’ before I can continue moving through the first edit of my mother’s writings.

The first thought that just came into my mind has to do with this overall process I am engaged in, that of completing my forensic autobiography of my severely abusive infant-childhood.

As a part of this process I began to consider the separated, missed up mess of my mother’s writings that I ‘inherited’ after her 2002 death.  The thought just came to me as a right brain image, really, that when we speak of the collection of all of a person’s writing – be they alive or be they dead – we often speak of this collection as being “the body of their work.”

Perhaps not unlike a verbal archaeologist I have sorted out, organized, ordered and transcribed all of my mother’s words that were left in my hands as they were written on pieces, scraps and shreds of paper.  Now that I have completed the transcription into typed digital format of the ‘body’ of my mother’s writings I understand that:

(1) not only were there holes originally left in this chronicle because letters were never written about certain events in the first place, such as her severe child abuse, and

(2) there are holes in the account because a few important events were communicated via telephone conversation rather than through the written word, and

(3) there are holes in the chronicle because over time my mother chose to destroy parts of letters and entire letters – which of course was her right — and

(4) there are also holes that exist in this body of her work because not ALL of her letters, diaries, journals and notes survived these past 50 years.

In effect, if I look at this ‘body of my mother’s written work’ from an archeological perspective, I can consider the missing pieces to be like bones missing from some ancient body’s skeleton.  The pieces of writing that do exist from her ‘body of work’ are the skeletal fragments that remain.

From this body I am leaving out in the main version of the collection of her work, ‘the body of her work’, any analysis or interpretation.  What will remain is simply what DOES remain of her chronicle of this section of her life.

Two additional words just came to me in relation to this train of thought:  POSTULATE and CONJECTURE.  Neither of these words (in my thinking) are covered by the words or process of ‘analysis’ or ‘interpretation’.

When I searched Webster’s online dictionary for POSTULATE I encountered connections within the word that surprised me:

POSTULATE

Etymology: Latin postulatus, past participle of postulare; akin to Latin poscere to ask, Old High German forscōn to search, Sanskrit pṛcchati he asks — more at pray

Date: 1593

1 : demand, claim
2 a : to assume or claim as true, existent, or necessary : depend upon or start from the postulate of b : to assume as a postulate or axiom (as in logic or mathematics)

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Perhaps if I had a higher intelligence, or perhaps if I could pursue this entire process of working with the ‘remains’ of ‘the body’ of my severely abusive mother OBJECTIVELY I would have already formed one or more POSTUALTES regarding what happened to my mother and what happened to me (and to her other offspring).

Yet, specifically, it appears that POSTULATE is very much about the asking, the searching – and the praying.  Yes, the essence of my own work is happening because I am making a demand, I am staking my own claim for the truth like my parents staked claim to 160 acres of their Alaskan mountain homestead.

But I try very hard not to ‘assume’ anything that might in the end distract me from finding the ‘mother lode’ of truth, as if I am digging into the mountain of what is known and what can be found both within my own living BODY of memory and experience, and within the ‘body’ of my mother’s written words.

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In effect, while I have pieced together the skeleton of the existing ‘body’ of my mother’s written words, I am now pursing the next stage of making sure all the parts of my mother’s writings are as coherent as they need to be without altering the ‘body’ itself.  This might be like dusting off the pieces, or scraping off the barnacles if the ‘body’ fragments had been found underneath the sea.

Then the next stage of this process will be to perform an autopsy on this ‘body of my mother’s writings’.  Although perhaps a rather grim and gruesome image, performing an autopsy of any kind on one’s deceased mother, how else could I add to the body of knowledge I am accumulating in my forensic autobiographical work?

Like any other re-searcher of the past, I will be looking for patterns that appear in visible details that I can POINT to.  Yet no matter how specific, careful and accurate I attempt to be, eventually I will have to TRULY move into a stage that involves CONJECTURE.  Now, if this isn’t interesting:

CONJECTURE

Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French or Latin; Middle French, from Latin conjectura, from conjectus, past participle of conicere, literally, to throw together, from com- + jacere to throw — more at jet

Date: 14th century

1 obsolete a : interpretation of omens b : supposition
2 a : inference from defective or presumptive evidence b : a conclusion deduced by surmise or guesswork c : a proposition (as in mathematics) before it has been proved or disproved

I am not interested at the moment in exploring the connection of CONJECTURE to JET.  There are 18 separate entries for the word, including the references to mining an intense jet-black coal used for making jewelry.

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What this word CONJECTURE makes me think about as a projection into the future when I am ready to move onto another stage of my work, is that eventually I might have to take a ‘leap of faith’ and trust myself to ‘throw together’ my final conclusions as I come to them.  Yes, in the end, this forensic autobiographical work I am doing is destined to end in guesswork!

And yet the word GUESS is not a discouraging one:

1 : to form an opinion of from little or no evidence
2 : believe, suppose
3 : to arrive at a correct conclusion about by conjecture, chance, or intuition

I am carefully searching for what ‘evidence’ I CAN find.  From there I would be most pleased if I could ‘arrive at a correct conclusion’ about what happened to my mother that made her become a predatory mother, an extremely violent, aggressive and dangerous mother toward me – without regret, empathy or conscience – along with what happened to her to create such suffering and misery inside of herself.

To me, this process I am engaged in has merit and value because I believe that anything we can find out about what creates a ‘dis-ease’ has potential to help us find ways to prevent it, inoculate against it, curtail its ‘spread’, lessen suffering and perhaps even to cure it.

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