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 The
first serious story I ever attempted to write was an account of my mother's
death -- she died in a horseback-riding accident on a road in rural Vermont,
in 1962, when I was fourteen. At the time I tried to write the story, four or
five years after the event, I was nearly suicidal with guilt, convinced not
only that I had created the circumstances that had led to her death, but that
I had also failed to save her when she needed me. I could write no more than
a few paragraphs before I ground to a halt, feeling helpless and mute. Eventually,
I became a writer and journalist; I have often thought that it was precisely
so that I might someday tell this story.
A few years ago,
I had an impulse to show my young daughter the lake in Vermont where I had spent
summers as a child, near where my mother died. Watching my daughter scramble
over the same boulders that I once had, and squealing with delight in the same
icy lakewater, I felt an eerie sense of having reentered my own childhood. I
also felt surrounded by my mother's ghostly presence, as if she had been waiting
all those years for me to rediscover her there.
I began to ask
myself, Who, really, was this woman I had known only as my mother? What was
she carrying with her, in her heart, at the time of her death? I knew,
vaguely, that she had been in deep pain on that fateful day. But why?
 My
mother's few surviving friends were dying off, and I knew that if I was ever
to learn what they knew about her, I must do it quickly. I embarked on an investigation
that led me to former classmates, one-time Communists, Japanese-Americans whom
she had helped to leave U.S. internment camps during World War II, and Native
Americans whom she had worked with as a civil rights activist in the 1950s,
on reservations from Florida to the Dakotas. I searched through archives, old
newspaper collections, dusty volumes of police records. In time, I discovered
parts of her life that I had never known of before and that left me with a sometimes
disturbing sensation that I had hardly known my mother at all. My investigation
would eventually lead me back to Vermont, to the road where she died.
It took me 35 years
to be able to write My
Mother's Ghost. I am a private person by nature, and it was a challenge
-- often a painful one -- to write about experiences that I had kept secret
for decades. I only gradually understood that I could not write about her death
without facing its lingering reverberations in my own life. This book is thus
inescapably as much about me as it is about my mother, as much about her meaning
-- and the meaning of her death -- in the history of my own life as it is about
her place in the history of her times.
 The
Past Is A Foreign Country, a stunningly original book by David Lowenthal,
helped me begin to think of the past as a place where I could travel, and from
which I might recover the lost landscape of my mother's life. In Mary Gordon's
superb memoir The
Shadow Man, which chronicles her search for the reality behind her memories
of her father, I found a kindred consciousness, and tacit encouragement that
I was on the right track in my own exploration of my mother's less dark, but
no less mysterious life. James Elroy's ultimately fruitless quest for the truth
about his mother's murder, in My
Dark Places, reminded me how difficult it is to know the truth of anything
that happened in the past. More recently, I have enjoyed with a deep sense of
affinity Andre Aciman's collection of essays, False
Papers, the most expressive evocation that I have ever read of the luxurious
seductiveness of nostalgia.
 Fergus
M. Bordewich's previous books include: Killing
the White Man's Indian, which deconstructs the layers of myth that shape
the way that Americans see Indians; Cathay: A Journey in Search of Old China,
a literary travel book about the Western dream of "Old China," and what survives
of it today; and a children's book, Peach Blossom Spring, which is based
on an ancient Chinese tale. He was also general editor of Children of the
Dragon, an anthology of eyewitness accounts of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre.
 As
a journalist, Bordewich's articles on civil wars in Algeria and Burma, Islamic
fundamentalism, the Iranian revolution, the plight of the Iraqi Kurds, various
human rights issues, and other subjects have appeared in numerous national publications,
among them The New York Times, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Conde
Nast Traveler, and Reader's Digest. He is a native of New York City,
and has lived in China and Greece. He now makes his home in New York's Hudson
Valley.
My
Mother's Ghost
Read
the first chapter of My Mother's
Ghost
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