故事節選:結束了的故事
My mother died on Christmas Day, at home, around three in the afternoon. In the first months afterward, I felt an intense desire to write down the story of her death, to tell it over and over to friends. I jotted down stray thoughts and memories in the middle of the night. Even during her last weeks, I found myself squirrelling away her words, all her distinctive expressions: “I love you to death” and “Is that our wind I hear?”
聖誕節那天大約是下午3點，我的母親在家中去世了。在隨後的第一個月，我有一種強烈的願望要寫下她去世的故事，一遍又一遍告訴我所有的朋友。我將午夜無眠時零散的思緒和記憶隨手記下。甚至是在她活着的最後一個星期裏，我尋找着我記得的她說過的，所有獨特的表達：“我愛你到死”和“那是我們聽過的風嗎？”
If I told the story of her death, I might understand it better, make sense of it—perhaps even change it. What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief. She had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer two and a half years earlier; I had known for months that she was going to die. But her death nonetheless seemed like the wrong outcome—an instant that could have gone differently, a story that could have unfolded otherwise. If I could find the right turning point in the narrative, then maybe, like Orpheus, I could bring the one I sought back from the dead. Aha: Here she is, walking behind me.
假如我講述了她死亡的故事，我可能更加熟悉它，理解它——甚至可能改變它，這一直讓我無法置信的事實。一個人明明存在於你所有的生命，突然有一天就消失了再不會回來。我更拒絕相信的是，她早在兩年半前已經被診斷出腸癌，而我，直到她快要死去的幾個月前才知道她的病情。但是她的死亡看起來像是一個錯誤的開始——或說是一段該特別的應該展開的故事情節。如果我能早點找到敘述關鍵的轉折點，那就可能，像奧菲士，能夠從死神手中尋回她。啊哈：她在這裏，就在我身後。
It was my mother who had long ago planted in me the habit of writing things down in order to understand them. When I was five, she gave me a red corduroy-covered notebook for Christmas. I sat in my floral nightgown turning the blank pages, puzzled.
把有用的東西寫下來是我的母親很久前爲了培養我的理解力形成的習慣。在我五歲聖誕節時，她給了我一個紅色的絨布封面的記事本，我穿着我像花朵一樣的睡裙翻開空白的頁面，感到困惑。“What do I do with it?” I wanted to know.
“You write down things that happened to you that day.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because maybe they’re interesting and you want to remember them.”
“What would I write?”
“Well, you’d write something like ‘Today I saw a woman with purple hair crossing Montague Street.’ ”
“我要它做什麼？”我想知道。
“你可以寫下你每天經歷的。”
“爲什麼我要這麼做？”
“也許他們都很有趣，而以後你會想要記得這些。”
“我該怎麼寫？”
“你可以這樣寫‘今天我看見一個紫色頭髮的女人穿過了蒙塔古街。’”
I still remember the way she said that sentence: Today I saw a woman with purple hair crossing Montague Street. It is one of those memories that I carry around, and always will, like the shard of a shell that falls out of a bag you took to the beach for a long summer.
我一直記得她說的那句話的形式：今天我看見一個一個紫色頭髮的女人穿過了蒙塔古街。這是我時刻並將一直攜帶，就像是掛在我的包上那一枚在某個漫長的夏天到海灘上拾到的貝殼。
I hadn’t seen a woman with purple hair crossing Montague Street, of course. But in that sentence was my mother’s sense that one might want to capture the extraordinary, her grasp of children’s love of the absurd, her striking physical presence—in my memory, she was leaning toward me, backlit, her black hair falling forward—and her intuition that my seriousness needed to be leavened with playfulness.
當然，我沒有真正看到過穿過蒙塔古街的紫發女人。那句話是我母親編出來引起我不同尋常注意的，她明白孩子們的好奇心一定不會忽視紫發女人這樣惹人注目的存在——在我的記憶中，她站在我的斜前方，揹着光，黑色的頭髮披在前面——她直覺我的當真需要由嬉鬧中慢慢來發酵養成。
My brothers and I spent an inordinate amount of time with our mother when we were children, not only because we went to school where she worked, as the head of the middle school, but because she loved being with kids. She was a bit of a child herself. She had married when she was seventeen, and in some ways never lost the teen-ager inside her. Over the summer, she would study the names of Northeastern birds in her Audubon books and, with utter focus, write a list of the ones she’d seen. She had a vivid sense of what makes children feel safe, and she believed in a child’s experience of the world. Students trusted her, even when they’d been sent to her office and she was asking them why in the world they had done whatever it was they had done.
我和哥哥孩童時期時有無數呆在母親身邊的日子，不僅僅是因爲我們在母親當校長的學校裏上學，更因爲她喜歡和我們這些孩子們呆在一起。她自己也有一點孩子氣。從她17歲結婚後，在某些方面來說她一直保留着她內心的童真。夏天結束的時候，她就研究她的奧特朋書籍裏東北鳥類的名稱並且全神貫注，還會列出她看到過的種類。她具有明顯的使孩子們感到安全的氣質，相信孩子眼中看到的世界。學生都信任她，即使他們因爲做了一些被她認爲不當做的事被送去她的辦公室，接受她的疑問。
She spent hours with my brothers and me, making gingerbread houses or sledding or cutting out paper snowflakes. She taught us all to make apple pie, and read “The Black Stallion” out loud to us at night—though she also had a habit of promising to read a book out loud and then giving up partway through. The boxes of memorabilia she kept for each of us were always disorganized. One of the things I found there after she died was a card I had made for her birthday when I was about six. It began:TO MOM
I LOVE YOU.
I LOVE THE STORIES
YOU MAKE WITH ME.
她花了很多時間和我和哥哥在一起，做薑餅屋，滑雪橇還有剪紙雪花。她教我們做蘋果派，還會在晚上大聲讀 “黑神駒”給我們聽——儘管她有在答應了要大聲讀完一整本書後總是半途放棄的習慣。這個她保存着關於我們的重大事件的盒子裏總是被翻的雜亂。她死後我找到其中一件東西，那是我六歲那年送給她的生日卡片。上面寫着：
致媽媽
我愛你
我愛你講述的
所有故事
On a hazy October morning, after months of chemotherapy, my mother and I drove down to New York-Presbyterian Hospital in the near-dark, listening to traffic reports like all the other commuters. The cancer had spread to her lungs and her liver. This wasn’t likely to be a story that ended well. But, in a last-ditch effort, we had enrolled her in an experimental treatment program. I thought, darkly, that the creeping cars around us were like souls wandering in Hades. My mother was quiet. I worried that she resented my fussing about what she was eating and whether my father had given her the right pain medication.
在一個霧濛濛的十月上午，結束多月的化療後，傍晚時我和母親開車去紐約長老教會醫院，一邊和所有搭乘公車的乘客一樣聽着交通報道。癌細胞當時已經擴散到了她的肺和肝，這不像是一個有好結局的故事。但是，在義無反顧的努力下，我們讓她參加了一個實驗性的治療項目。我思考着，暗沉沉的天色，周圍緩慢移動的車流就像地獄中游蕩着的幽靈包圍着我們。我的母親保持着安靜。我很擔心她會對我過分關心她的飲食而感到不滿，還擔心我的父親是否給她拿對了止痛藥。
I had often picked my mother up after her chemo treatments, but I had never seen one in progress. It is a brisk business. Needles and bags are efficiently hustled into place, as if it were not poison that is about to be put in the body. The nurses were funny and frank, though they’d just met my mother. As the drugs slid up the IV into her arm, we watched stolid barges plug up the Hudson like islands, the water silver in the haze. I read poems, and she asked me about poetry.
我經常接送她去進行化療，但我從沒有見過任何一個工作人員，這是使人感到輕鬆的一件事。針和藥水袋已經有效的固定好，好像只要沒有阻礙就將進入身體。護士們都很有趣坦白，儘管她們和我母親還是第一次見面。我們冷冷看着那藥水順着靜脈輸液針流入她的手臂，如同駁船像小島一樣堵住了哈德森河，模糊中似乎鍍上了銀色。我爲她朗讀詩，她向我詢問如何讀懂詩。
“I don’t really understand it,” she said. “I never have. Do you think you could teach me to read a poem?”
I said that I could.
“我不是很理解，”她說，“我從沒有讀過。你認爲你能教我讀懂一首詩嗎？”
我說我能。
