Her wedding is at noon, but in the few hours that remain before the ceremony, Rachel Eliza Griffiths is more focused on bygone times—this explains the imaginary conversation she’s got going with her sharp-tongued, critical mother, who’s been dead now for almost 10 years—than she is on the future and its glittering possibilities.
“The hotel suite thrums with my past,” Griffiths, the author of several books of poetry and a novel, writes in her deeply felt memoir, The Flower Bearers. “Despite and beyond death, some mothers and daughters go back and forth this way. The elder tosses out a question that is less question than judgment. It may be posed as a question only to indicate that the daughter should have anticipated the other’s response. In this instance, the daughter—me—sometimes still needs her mother’s posthumous opinion even as she—I—protests that she is old enough to write and to live her own stories.” (Undoubtedly, many of the daughters reading this will relate.)
