By Tara Badstubner, author of “Every Room Remembers”
Mary, my petite grandmother, was cherry red lipstick on a cupid bow mouth, the flash of a silk slip under an ordinary wool skirt. She was the faux diamond broach that sparkled on a threadbare coat. A field of fireflies at the end of a blistering summer day. She was the woman who chased you around the house without her dentures in, her arms outstretched and, between her bouts of laughter, implored, kiss me, kiss me! She was bowls of ribbon candy and sparkly baubles on Christmas trees. She was all of that, and she was gone.
She left before things got better. She left when we were subsisting, best we could, having said goodbye to Mary’s beloved daughter, Ellen, just a few years before. Jobs were scarce, money even more so. Pushed out of our family home, we now migrated from rental to rental. We tried to make light of it. The old Taurus we now drove, an ugly red, we nicknamed The Tomato. Another car, the floor rusted through in spots so we could put our feet down at the stoplight and touch pavement, pretending we were Fred or Wilma Flintstone, and yell yabba-dabba-do before slowly creeping through the green light. These were the dings that just kept coming.
We said goodbye to her on a biting March day, the rain cutting at a slant, one of those days in Boston that make you reconsider all your life choices. Between the funeral service and the wake, our family piled into The Tomato and drove, eager to get away, but overcast gray followed us— the cement parking lots, the shuttered buildings and empty playgrounds. In a desperate reach, we retold all the funny memories we had of Mary, the silly, the nonsensical, the lighthearted. We began to laugh, belly laugh. The stories were familiar, nothing new, yet we laughed as if they had just happened, as if it was all fresh to us. I understand now how laughter is a physical expression of humor but also, at times, a saving grace, an act of defiance. To laugh in the face of heartbreak takes nerve, maybe even a healthy dose of crazy.
At one point, one of my siblings mentioned she was thirsty and asked for a soda. I remember my dad pulling over the car and all of us getting out into the rain, scanning the seams of the car seats, the floors, reaching under the mats, looking for change for a single drink. We couldn’t find enough coins to pull off one soda. This sent us into another peal of laughter. How awful it all was! Wasn’t it so funny! Could it possibly get any worse? Yes, yes, it could, we all agreed, as we stood in the rain.
After her daughter Ellen’s death, Mary came to stay with us for a few days. She slept in my room on the bottom floor while I took the trundle bed in my sister’s room. I came down one morning and walked past my room, the door slightly ajar, and saw Mary lying in the bed, still in her floral pajamas, a bedhead of brown curls. Her arms were outstretched above her, her fingers languidly running down one arm and then switching to the other; a private moment. She was talking out loud, quietly. I paused to listen, thinking maybe my mom, her surviving daughter, was in the room, but no. When I reached the kitchen I found my mom emptying the dishwasher. I expressed my concern for Mary, mentioning she was talking to herself. Oh, don’t worry, she said. She talks to Ellen every morning. It’s just something she does.
Is it just something I do when I think of Ellen and Mary? There is connection in ritual, I see it now. I will think of Ellen and Mary, miss them, sometimes feel them near me, and I will acknowledge my missing when I wake in the middle of the night, other times early in the morning, as I lay in bed, by raising my arms above my head and lightly running my fingers down my arms, just as I saw Mary do. After I wrote the first draft of this essay and read it to my mom, Ellen’s sister and Mary’s daughter, she reminded me that all the women in our family have this strange, observable quirk of first emerging from sleep by running fingers up and down their arms, as if a gradual, sensuous re-entry into their bodies from some far-off dream. It’s something we all do, she said, yet at some point it became a conscious gesture, a reaching, that I chose.
Ellen, my aunt, was the working woman’s version of Audrey Hepburn, taking jobs in retail and the beauty counters. She had a delicacy, with her dark hair, large almond eyes, and high cheekbones; always a faint trace of Trésor perfume lingering after she was gone. In her visage sometimes a fleeting glimpse of melancholy that remained private and closed off. She loved beautiful things and was a fan of all the old movies, but especially Roman Holiday. The three of them together, Mary and Ellen and my mother, made an exceptional trio of softness and beauty, humor and grit. There came a point when the trips to Ellen’s home in Boston stopped, the cancer having taken its exceptional toll, my mom and Mary the only ones allowed to visit. Ellen didn’t want to be remembered ravaged by cancer. When my mom returned one day from visiting her sister and told me the end was close, she suggested I write a letter to Ellen. I was eighteen, a senior in high school. How do you write a letter to the dying? How do you tell someone what they mean to you, that you’ll never forget them? How do you express your love?
I know there were drafts of that letter, but I do not remember what I wrote. Since that time, writing a letter to the dying, or the dead, has become a way for me to bridge the gulf, touching something that defies the finite. It says, I remember, I remember, I remember. There are few things more intrinsic to this living experience than remembrance. It feeds us daily from morning to night, as essential as water.
Our whole is a gradual accretion, a layer upon layer of lives that have touched ours. It’s become common to identify the scars from living, the pains we’ve endured and still remember. Whether remembered or not, we are made as much by the humor that erupts unselfconsciously in moments of darkness. A physical gesture that mirrors something you once saw. The writing of a letter to someone no longer present.
Years beyond my aunt and grandmother’s lives, I made another conscious choice to name my daughters, Ellie and Mara, who are uniquely themselves, but also carry the continuation of the spirit of those women, Ellen and Mary. As my girls shape their own stories, I remember the child I once was, sitting under the dining room table, the lace tablecloth hiding my presence, listening to Ellen, Mary, and my mother tell stories of their past, remembering over tea and pastries, and laughing. So much laughter.
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Tara Badstubner lives in Pennsylvania and is busy creating her next novel surrounded by her husband, children, grandbabies, and several silly dogs. “Every Room Remembers” is her debut novel, releasing September 2026 from Sibylline Press. A former Artist-In-Residence for Bookgardan, Tara can be found at tarabadstubner.com and on Instagram @tarabadstubner.
