I am on book tour, and my mother is dying

Both of these things are existing at the same time.

I am on book tour, and my mother is dying.

I am smiling and schmoozing, and my mother is in the hospital with my brother and sister and tita.

I am signing books and snapping selfies, and my mother is being diagnosed with a myocardial infarction. I am googling “myocardial infarction,” confirming what my long ago wannabe-doctor self once knew, that it’s a fancy word for heart attack. I am asking if I need to come home. My siblings are assuring me I do not. That this myocardial infarction was relatively un-deathly, not much worse than any of the other cardiac events our mom has had in recent months and refused to properly deal with.

I am not posting about this on Instagram or the old bird app now owned by the other billionaire. I am reserving those spaces for the selfies and smiles, for the continual kind words from readers and critics, for the stories about my story that I will awkwardly link to below. I’m not sure why I’m writing about this now, other than it’s one of only three things occupying my brain: kids; book; my-mother-is-dying — not always in that order.

Photo by Rajesh Rajput on Unsplash

I’m also not sure what more to say about this at the moment. We are all dying. I know. Plenty of famous people (Stephen King, Winston Churchill(’s character in The Crown), Detective Dana Scully from the X-Files) seem to enjoy pointing this out. I am, perhaps, afraid that by the time I do have more to say, the “dying” part of this business will have concluded, and my mother will no longer be like the rest of us. She will be dead.

Or, perhaps even more selfishly, I’m worried that I may, one day soon, have to let folks down. Say no to a book-club event. Decline a reading. Pass on a literary panel. And the let-down folks will say, “Oh no, we had no idea your mom was sick,” and I will say “I didn’t post much about it,” and then send them the link to this Substack. I am, perhaps, writing this as proof.

My dying mother is currently asleep on my couch. She is snoring. Usually this would annoy me. Today it tells me that she is, like the rest of us, alive.

Those awkward links:

• Seira Wilson chose “The Mango Tree” as an editor’s pick over at Amazon, noting “Put this one to the top of your reading pile if you want a book with all the feels.”

• G.G. Andrew at BookBub included “The Mango Tree” alongside some eye-popping titles on a list of 12 Memoirs from People Who Rose Above Impossible Circumstances

• Nancy Stetson wrote this generous and open-hearted piece on me and the book in Florida Weekly

• Lacey Lyons penned this fantastic and in-depth Q&A after one of the loveliest conversations I’ve had in a long time for the Southern Review of Books