By Nancy Burke
As I prepare for the launch of my first short story collection (‘Death Cleaning and Other Units of Measure‘, May 1, 2024) I am doing some Death Cleaning of my own. What’s death cleaning? It’s the cleaning out of ‘stuff’ accumulated over a lifetime so our children or spouse don’t have to do it after we’re gone. I know my three daughters don’t want my collection of cookbooks or pottery. My books will likely be donated to a used book sale. My furniture will go to a swap site. I hope my girls keep the hope chest my grandmother bequeathed to me when I got my first apartment in my 20’s and that someone will receive joy from my ‘stuff’ as I did.
So, what am I death cleaning? Like Howard in my story ‘Death Cleaning‘, I am clearing out mental clutter, emotional baggage, dubious relationships, and false expectations. I am making things right with the people I love, forgiving others and myself and redirecting my energy to significant things. I should add, I am not sick, am not planning on leaving this world just yet. My list is personal, as is everyone’s.
I put my writing front and center around 1995, which is the year my father died. Before his death he told me, “Of all my seven children, you look most like what I remember of my mother.” Mary Dunnigan, his mother, died at the age of 26 when my father was only seven years old. We have only a single photograph of her, black and white, grainy and damaged.
I hold my father’s words close to my heart and fantasize that maybe there are parts of me that are elements of her, reborn for a second chance here on earth. I’m not sure I believe in reincarnation, but a psychic once told me in one of my past lives I was a man in England. “He was a writer,” she said. I’m not sure I believe in psychics either. I feel Mary in me sometimes, I talk to her as though I’m letting her see what it is like to watch your children grow up, and as I step through every stage she missed, I give those to her as tiny spiritual gifts.
A student of mine recently researched the subject of death; the transition of the soul’s energy and spirit to either heaven or hell. Your spirit of mind and soul, she wrote, at the time of your demise, will determine where your essence will go in your afterlife – to a peaceful and joyous place or to a dour, and soul sucking realm. So, did Mary end up in a good place if she is actually a part of me? Sometimes I think so, other times, I’m not so sure. Life is messy. I try to keep my world pristine, but I’m not always successful. The stories in ‘Death Cleaning and Other Units of Measure’ reflect this.
So, while my short story collection contains an opportunity to consider how we will conduct our own Death Cleaning, it also makes reference to life among other humans while we are making our way along our path, and the internal units of measure against which we decide who is worthy or not of our love, our kindness and forgiveness. What we clean out, and what we keep.
A New Yorker article recently asked whether we stay the same person throughout our lives or do we change as we go through the stages from childhood to senior years. Is the essence of who we are consistent?
I am a writer. My natural habitat is a quiet room with a sunny window, my laptop and a cup of tea, or a hiking trail through a forest, or reading, or baking bread or chopping up vegetables for a homemade soup. As an extremely shy child, I remember the difficulty my mother had getting me to attend kindergarten. I did not want to leave my home. I managed to get on to first grade at Catholic school. In second grade I ran home after the morning bell. I hid in the corner of my front porch, only to be discovered when Mom raised the shade on a window and caught me.
Other days, I cried in class claiming a stomachache. Mom took me home, but I had to return the next day and every day after that. Eventually, I could focus on learning, most of the time I was in a trance induced by a need hide in safety inside myself. In those days, the nuns would have us write a paper at our desks. I sat, pen in hand, frozen with fear. What am I supposed to put on this paper? No thoughts. No ideas. I turned in blank pages. In my folder for parent night was a single list story about the animals I might see at a zoo.
So, am I still the same person I was back then? Eventually, I forced myself to speak to people and finally gave myself the courage to write. A group of girls in sixth grade befriended me. Two years later, at public high school I forced myself outside of my safe shell to join activities and make new friends.
I have evolved after a wobbling start, excruciating self-consciousness, and a learned understanding that the world is a welcoming place. Friends today refuse to accept the introvert I confess I was as a child. It isn’t only my social behavior that has changed. My physical impression on others has also mysteriously changed, but I am not referring to aging, but to the strange phenomenon of being approached by strangers who remark on my resemblance to famous people. My grandmother is not the only one I resemble, apparently.
In the 1990’s, I was a young mom of three with a short haircut and the beginnings of blond/gray mixing with my brown. A stranger approached my then husband and asked, “Do you know your wife looks exactly like Princess Diana?” There were countless moments when I’d see strangers staring at me, looking away as I returned their gaze with a bit of self-conscious puzzlement.
There were some women in the PTA who insisted I was the school’s resident royal. And, once, on an extra gig at a commercial shoot, the assistant director said, “You look like her; you even have that sidelong gaze of Diana’s.” Some friends agreed; some didn’t see it at all.
In the 2000’s, at my daughter’s auditions for acting conservatory, all the young actor wannabes thought I was Joan Cusack. They’d all seen School of Rock. I imagine they all thought my daughter was following a famous mother’s footsteps. Store clerks sometimes took long looks at my credit card and stared back at me. They often started with, “Have you seen School of Rock?”
I would nod and say, “Yes. And no, I didn’t play the role of the principal.” “You look just like her.”
I have marveled at how I could change from a Princess Diana lookalike in my thirties to a Joan Cusack doppelganger in my fifties. A few years ago, on a dinner date, I couldn’t help but notice our waitress fawning over us with remarkably attentive service. Afterwards, the owner and waitress approached my date while I hit the restroom.
“Guess who they think you are?” he asked. “The waitress was certain you were Joan Cusack,” he said. “Are you holding out on me?”
“I wish,” I said. Now, post-pandemic, with my hair short and white, I notice different kinds of stares. Some, I imagine, conjure Princess Diana if she’d been allowed to age. My daughter says it is my mannerisms, not so much my features, that still conjure Joan Cusack for so many.
So, do we stay the same or do we change as we make our way through life? Has my visage morphed from a sad, frightened little girl to Twiggy, the British model of the 1960’s (yes, that too) to Diana, the most photographed woman in the world, to Joan Cusack of Hollywood fame? I just see me and remember my father’s words.
In class, one of my students recently asked, “Did you ever see the show Golden Girls?”
I turned a half smiling face toward her and just said, “Oh, no, really? Which one?”
“No,” she said. “You don’t look old, but you remind me of her.” I considered deducting points from her final grade. I do look older!
“I feel like I’ve met you,” said a women at a recent event. “Or, you look like someone famous. Come on. Who do people tell you you look like?”
I stuttered, “Well, earlier I would get Princess Diana, some people think Joan Cusack, and lately, from my students, Bea Arthur.” Silently thinking about my dad’s mom who, of course, wasn’t famous.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes to all three!”
My answer to the New Yorker article question? I am not the same person I was as a child, not entirely. I have morphed into someone entirely different from that little frightened girl and I’ve done so several times. My stories confirm this for me. Deep down, however, the original me remains.
The Diana comparison was surely due to my height, thinness and haircut and perhaps the shy me falling away to reveal something authentic and unafraid. Perhaps, like Diana, I was coming into my own, flourishing as a loving and devoted young mom. As for Joan Cusack? Reflecting back on my life when that comparison began, I see myself, in earnest attempts to be heard, to push back against dissonance. I was becoming aware that I was just fine and could stop trying so hard.
Perhaps now, at age 68, I give the impression of strength and self-assertion Bea Arthur exhibited in “Golden Girls”. If so, my physical self is manifesting something hard earned.
At a book discussion of my earlier novel, ‘Only the Women are Burning’, someone pointed out that I did not physically describe my protagonist. I said, “What she looked like was not important. What she accomplished was the point. I want my readers to find elements of themselves in my characters. A physical description might interfere with that.”
In my sunny writing room there is nobody comparing me to famous people. The stories in ‘Death Cleaning and Other Units of Measure’ allow me to see how much my inner and outer worlds show up, not in my physical self, but on the page and how I’ve changed through time.
Maybe, in the quiet, some elements of the grandmother I never knew, her yearning for stronger connection to the ones she loved while she was briefly alive, are in the stories. I like to think so. I like to think my readers will find someone they know on the pages of this story collection.
Nancy Burke is the author of ‘Only the Women are Burning’, ‘If I Could Paint the Moon Black’, ‘From the Abuelas’ Window’ and a new short story collection, ‘Death Cleaning and Other Units of Measure’, from Apprentice House Press, May, 1 2024. Her short stories have appeared in Pilgrim: A Journal of Catholic Experience, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review. At the Pool was a finalist for the J.F. Powers Award for Short Fiction at Dappled Things Literary Journal. Her screenplay adaptation of ‘Only the Women are Burning’ won a Finalist recognition from the 2023 Boston Screenplay Competition. She is at work on a musical adaptation of ‘From the Abuelas’ Window’. She teaches writing at Montclair State University and New Jersey Institute of Technology and lives in Little Falls, NJ.
About the Book: Preoccupation with family permeates ‘Death Cleaning and Other Units of Measure’, and with a sharp eye, Burke calls out behavior, however well intentioned, that wreaks havoc on relationships, including sibling rivalry, mother/daughter conflicts, broken rules, self-protective untruths, and the consequences of non- conformity. The characters she brings to the page are sometimes unaware of their precarious units of measure, the yardsticks they use to size up themselves, their spouses, their children and others. At other times they are aware and unapologetic for measuring others against their internalized values. Burke addresses infertility and other women’s issues, pre-occupations of our life partners, marital conflict, aging and moving on, as well as a life altering adolescent crisis. Beneath all of this, Burke reminds us and encourages us to forgive the flawed expressions of love we all may find familiar. You will laugh, cry, and find yourself looking within after experiencing these stories.
