“Even these may forget, but I will not forget you…”

Some ten years ago, I was an Irish dance mom. Our girls had the wigs, the dresses, the spray tans; we traveled all over the Midwest for competitions. I used to tell them that if I ever had dementia, they could just play me “Kilkenny Races” and I’d be back. That music lives deep in my bones.

So, you can imagine my delight when I opened Sally Thomas’s new collection to find that “The Blackbird” of the title story refers to a traditional Irish set dance I’ve seen performed many times. As the young narrator Emlyn tells us, when the British came, Irish women performed “The Blackbird” defiantly behind the half-doors of their cottages, their arms pinned to their sides so no one could tell they were dancing.

With its quiet homage to a mother dying of cancer, “The Blackbird” inaugurates a sensitive exploration of loss and grief. Ranging fearlessly across divorce and remarriage, dementia and caregiving, pregnancy and termination, birth and bereavement, these stories pose ultimate questions: how do we live with our loss? What do we do now?

Four linked stories about the Mallory family appear out of sequence, showing up like old friends whom we haven’t seen for a while. In “Doing Without,” a son in the middle of law school drives away after Christmas and is never seen again. One winter night, his parents, Cash and Caroline, are awakened by a sound like footsteps on the drive. In her longing, Caroline builds up what is surely the scrabbling of dead leaves into the shape of her son coming back. She and Cash live in a remote place; the young women in Cash’s law firm used to wonder what Caroline did with herself all day. Her main occupation, she tells us, was loving her children. “She had taken pleasure, even pride, in the thought, in its very secretness, like a baby growing inside her, unknown to anyone but her.”

This image of the unborn child becomes a benediction years later in “The Beach House,” as Caroline makes one last visit to the home her grandfather built on the Gulf coast. Thomas evokes the beach so beautifully here that I practically lived on it myself; much of the story’s emotional weight lies in the carefully chosen details of weather and sea. In a dream, Caroline sees “her son John, a child, curled inside [a] dolphin’s body like the fetus in a cut-away diagram of the womb.” And in the morning, the dolphins appear.

Suddenly the Sound was full of them, waves made flesh. Everywhere they leapt and dove, surfaced and vanished. … Or maybe, looking so hard, you saw them because you wanted to see them, not because they were there.

This last phrase echoes Caroline’s earlier longing to conjure her son in the driveway. Such key scenes signal one another across the pages of the book, even when the stories are not explicitly linked.

In “A Fire in the Hills,” which won the 2020 J. F. Powers Award for Fiction at Dappled Things, Lavinia, a psychologist, teaches victims of abuse and polygamy to love and forgive their past selves. Lavinia is recovering from her own trauma involving her former lover, Bernard, now a well-known orchestra conductor. “If I rummage around in the past,” Lavinia says, “there’s much to bring up that seems, on the face of it, inconsequential. What do I do with these shards of detail?”

Lavinia’s solution is to construct an alternate self—someone to bear all the painful experiences that she cannot quite cast off. Like the ex-husband in Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies, Bernard once situated his imposing grand piano in the dining room of their shared apartment; and like Bea Nightingale in Ozick’s novel, Lavinia seems liberated once the piano—and with it, Bernard—is gone. “This was the real me,” Lavinia insists, describing her clandestine visit after having fled the apartment, “the true, strong, smart me, striding along the cracked sidewalk with my parka unzipped.” But before Lavinia emerges from her recollections, she must descend fully into her darkness: “I am [still] this woman who has not yet left her boyfriend. She has not evaporated; I know this now; she will not evaporate.” Elsewhere, in regard to a patient she loves who will one day stop coming to see her, Lavinia says, “[p]eople are like plastic, which never totally biodegrades. Once you’ve used each other up, there’s nothing for it but the landfill, but it’s all still there, the people, the past.”

Among the stories in the collection, “Not Less Than Everything” shows most clearly how a person of faith makes reparation for the past by offering her sufferings to God. Like Caroline Mallory, Reid mourns a lost son; and now, she centers her daily activity on the Mass:

The day was sharp and brilliant, and even the grief I carry always with me seemed a part of that brightness. Like my faith, it was something to do: go to work, go to Mass, go to the grave, make the Stations of my own personal Cross around the town.

Reid once took in her son’s high school girlfriend when both young people were using drugs; and in her compassion, she continues to house and employ the girl long after her own son Lennox is gone. Reid offers her daily sufferings “for the Holy Souls in Purgatory, among whom I imagine my own soul will one day number. In this way I hope to work out my salvation.” When a man who may or may not be Lennox’s father appears at his grave, Reid will say only this: “I was granted a child. I accepted him as a gift. And these were the terms.”

Thomas takes her biggest risks in “The Happy Place,” the novella that ends the collection. Amelia, Caroline’s daughter and the sister of the missing John, struggles with problems of her own making. She insists that divorce and co-parenting are like a full-time job, and when her mother dies after a long period of dementia, she is dismayed to learn that no one ever disposed of the beach house. With her second husband Kurt and twelve-year-old daughter Mallory, Amelia goes down to the Gulf coast for one last visit, intending to sell the property.

But a week at the beach gives Amelia the opportunity to assess her life and her choices. Has she divorced her first husband “because of something fundamentally wrong in herself, some bottomless well of selfishness, some obdurate refusal to be satisfied?” And as for Mallory,

[s]he had broken her by divorcing her father. Or, worse, she had broken her in the very act of conceiving her with that father…. Now she had broken her further by bringing in this new father, saying, Here, let this guy buy your tampons, little girl.

Kurt is teaching Mallory about fishing when Amelia’s ex-husband calls asking to speak with her. But as Amelia walks along the seawall to hand the phone to Mallory, she falls into the water, losing the phone and inadvertently summoning her ex-husband to join their family idyll. There is something menacing in the man’s refusal to let Amelia clear up their misunderstanding about the dropped call. She fears that he might one day seek sole custody.

Amelia’s fundamental question in “The Happy Place”–has she loved enough?—is perhaps the most troubling of any in the collection. Earlier, during her own last visit to the beach, Amelia’s mother, Caroline, describes caring for her husband Cash in his final illness.

Dying, she thought, had been another kind of lovemaking, more intimate than physical intimacy, though you didn’t lose yourself in the same way. Instead you felt yourself becoming more present, more weighed down in your body, as the other person ebbed away, until at last it was only you in the room, breathing the air that was left to you.

Similarly, Amelia’s husband Kurt cared for his first wife Julie when she was dying of cancer. And while Kurt and Julie went three years without intimacy during her illness,

what he had learned was that holding someone while she vomited was a form of lovemaking. Brushing the last of her hair from her shining scalp: lovemaking. Changing her catheter bag: lovemaking. Holding her hand as she ebbed away at the end: lovemaking. … Amelia thought that on balance, if she were looking for the most primal form of self-giving, she might well choose the catheter bag.

But the trouble, perhaps, is that Amelia imagines herself receiving such care, never giving it. Maybe this is what’s finally broken about her. “It was a primal wound, the loss of a mother,” Amelia says; and for her, this loss comes at a distance and after her mother’s long spell of dementia. Due to the exigencies of her life, Amelia effectively hands off her mother to a caregiver, LaKisha; and in an odd reversal, it is Amelia who consoles LaKisha at Caroline’s funeral. “They had made a transaction, Amelia thought. She had sold LaKisha some human grief, and what had LaKisha paid her for it? Sole rights, again, to her own mother?”

But perhaps Amelia could have chosen to forget herself as she has been forgotten and to serve lovingly, cheerfully, as LaKisha has done. Instead, she tries to insist that her mother remember her: “A. Mee. Lee. A. Say my name.” This is a hopeless position, both for Amelia and for Caroline; if dementia should happen to me, I know perfectly well that not even the best rendition of “Kilkenny Races” could bring me back. But how much better it is for us now, as daughters and sons, to abandon ourselves to caring for the person who remains, in whatever state they may be. As we read in Isaiah 49:15, “even these may forget, but I will not forget you.”

But if Amelia objects to LaKisha’s primacy at the end of her mother’s life, she understands that “at death, the memory of that person who had had no memory would be folded up, handed back to the family to keep.” Like many of us, Amelia has been caught up in a mad, secret dance behind the closed door of her heart; and in the end, she is left with a paradox of forgetting and remembering.

Perhaps Lavinia says it best at the end of “A Fire in the Hills:” “Lay the examined past away. It never changes, and will keep.”

The Blackbird and Other Stories
by Sally Thomas
Wiseblood Books, 2024
Paperback, 269 pages