Will Conley

The old scientific method was okay, but let’s face facts: It was naïve, paid literally no attention to popularity or profitability, and tended to breed conspiracy theorists. The new scientific method resolves all these inconveniences by adding twelve steps to the original five. Please update your textbooks as follows to reflect this market-based change. (Original steps are indicated in bold.)

1. Formulate a question.

2. Ask your Facebook friends if it’s okay with them if you ask that question.

3. Revise the question in light of popular opinion.

4. Pose the question to Facebook for approval.

5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until all controversy is eliminated.

6. Formulate a hypothesis.

7. Make a prediction.

8. Seek funding from your government, university, or interested private party.

9. Revise your question, hypothesis and prediction in line with funding requirements.

10. Test your hypothesis and measure it against your prediction.

11. Analyze the test results. Does it confirm or deny your prediction?

12. Redesign and rerun your test if it does not confirm your prediction.

13. Remove all inconclusive or conflicting test results from the record.

14. Present your favorable findings to your funding source(s).

15. Get more funding.

16. Get drunk to forget your conscience.

17. Keep an eye on Facebook, the news, and your friends and family for more social cues.

I have 897 people in my email contact list. I even know some of them.

Some of my contacts are friends; others are business colleagues or clients. Others are people who may have been important to me at some point for some reason but I’ll be damned if I can tell you why.

Some of my contacts aren’t people at all. They’re mailing list subscription addresses I keep around to prevent their important messages from going to spam so I can personally click “delete” thirty times every morning and throughout the day. Why automate when you can pretend you have some control over your life, right?

I even have some sworn enemies in my email contacts. They started out as friends, family, or neighbors, but maybe later I super-glued your incessantly barking dog to an oak tree even though you can’t prove it, and now I just keep your address around so I can relive my spitting rage every time I try fruitlessly to clean up my contact list before giving up in a fit of PTSD.

How It Got This Bad

I used to be quite the social maven back when the Internet was a toddler and Tripod was the best website building tool anyone knew of. I’m the guy who threw a party where you got wasted and made out with another person I barely know and the two of you ended up getting married and divorced to and from. You know, that party you don’t remember anything about and neither do I. That’s why you’re one of the 897 people on my contact list. Happy belated anniversary twelve times, by the way, and sorry it didn’t work out.

I used my huge network to market art shows, rock concerts, and book releases for an artist collective I used to contribute to. And how did I meet all those people and get them to come to events? By hobnobbing it like a politician all over town and gathering email addresses.

And then there was the decade between then and now, with untold other social circles accumulated from coast to American coast.

Now I have all these old contacts and I want them gone.

Baby, Take Me Back. I Was Wrong.

But maybe I don’t. This is where it gets dicey. Maybe some of those old contacts are genuine friends; it’s hard to tell the difference in these lonely times of mass media, Internet tubes, and cheese in a spray can. I don’t want to delete a long-lost contact just because they’re long and lost. Maybe I only met that random person once or twice six years ago, but who knows? They could be super awesome! We should definitely meet up for coffee and suffer horribly through our terrified smiles as we try to remember each other’s names thirty minutes into the conversation.

How do you decide who your real friends are? Is it a function of how good they make you feel? How much money they represent to you? How many genes you share with them? If they smell good?

What’s your tribe, man? And how do you clean up your contact list? Do you go through it one entry at a time and wrack your brain to remember who they are? Maybe divide them into “Definitely Know Them”, “Definitely Might Know Them”, “Probably Not”, “I Always Did Like the Name Angela”, and start eliminating from there?

Do you stress about burning bridges that will likely never be crossed anyway? I do.

Science to the Rescue?

I worry about these things. So I consult Science. For example, Science’s “Dunbar’s Number” tells me that my brain should theoretically only be able to make sense of 150 people in my social world. The rest can be discarded. Right?

But no. It’s not that stinking easy. With the advent of the Internet, social media, and LOLCats, the average personal network size has grown to 250, 634, or 1200, depending on which Scientist you ask. What’s that say about how meaningful our relationships actually are? And shouldn’t I automatically know who is important to me? No, because apparently I am merely a shallow and disconnected specimen in the Zuckerbergian Meat Freezer formerly known as Earth.

I don’t know. Just hit delete and see what happens, I tell myself.

But what if, my huge and impressive amygdala nags. What if you delete someone destined to become your wife? What if that person you so blithely erased from your contacts really is the King of Nigeria and does want you pay you $2.5 million to run over to the Western Union for a sec? What if you’re high on ditch weed and don’t know what you’re doing?

Apparently the size of your amygdala, which is the center of fear and loathing in the brain, is correlated to the number of online contacts you have. So basically the more contacts you have, the more irrationally afraid of losing them you are, and/or vice versa. More contacts, growls the amygdala, taking over all of your higher brain functions. Must have more contacts. I figure the amygdala looks like something out of Akira at this point.

Inconclusion

I’ve just explained why my email contact list makes me feel like I have spiders and hot helium inside of my chest and skull. I haven’t even mentioned my social media profiles, phone contact lists or, ahem, the people I actually know outside of this technological jungle I chose to colonize.

What a mess. I can’t make any sense of it. Meanwhile I still have 897 email contacts. Do you feel my pain? Do you have any insights? Feel free to comment. Hell, email me about it. I hope we end up the best of friends.

– Will Conley is a writer and Web presence planner who specializes in making other people’s lives easier. Wish him luck on his own.

Sources and recommended reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

http://www.cogsci.bme.hu/~ktkuser/DOWNLOAD/PCS/ujanyagokpszichologiarol/personality.pdf

http://www.bodyspacesociety.eu/2010/12/29/numbers/

http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Technology-and-social-networks/Part-3/SNS-users.aspx

http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~ufruss/documents/Estimating.network.size.pdf

http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/mccormick_salganik_zheng10.pdf

http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v14/n2/abs/nn.2724.html

Another working excerpt from my forthcoming memoir about my mother:

I met my father when I was 20. He was 61. It was the year 2000.

My mother had abducted me from our home city in Upstate New York to the Twin Cities, Minnesota during a custody battle with my father in 1981. I was a baby.

Nineteen years later, a few months after my mother had moved back to New York to reconnect with her blood family, she mailed me a handwritten letter. The letter contained my dad’s phone number. It was Father’s Day.

What the hell. Why not. I picked up the phone. It was three in the morning. Whatever.

Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring.

“Hello,” said a 60-grit sandpaper baritone. “You’ve reached Transformations Enterprises and Pathways to Peace. We are not able to answer the phone right now, but if you’ll leave a short message after the sound of the beep, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Thank you for calling, and have a nice day.”

“Hi,” I said. “This is. My name is Will Conley.” In matter-of-fact tones I explained who I was, what my name was, who my mother was, and when and where I was born. “I apologize if this is the wrong number. But if it’s the right number, here’s my number. You can call me back if you like. Thank you for your time.”

Eight in the morning. I picked up the ringing phone.

The sandpaper baritone: “What is going on here?”

“Well,” I replied. I reiterated what I had told him on his answering machine. “My mother gave me your number. Not sure if it’s the right one.”

Pause.

“Well, Will. It looks like you found your old man.”

We struck up an email conversation in which we learned that we are very much alike despite having been apart all my life. I learned that his other son through a different wife had disappeared and hadn’t contacted my father in 15 years. I learned my dad was a former atheist but a current poet, writer, anger management specialist, and a spiritual man.

I flew a thousand miles to see him one month after our first stammering phone call. We hit it off. His wife accepted me and asked me if I would please call her Stepmom. I consented, for she is delightful.

A few days into the visit, I summoned my mother to visit us. She drove the three hours from central New York and came to dinner. She and my father, who hadn’t seen each other since before the day she took me away from him, took a walk to the lake, where lived a pair of monogamous white swans named Lily and Dale. My long-divorced mother and father returned to the house and announced to Jan and me that they had made amends.

Ten years later, when I was 30, I visited the garage my father lived in and wrote poetry in during the beatnik 1950s in Venice Beach, California. I called him on the spot and told him where I was standing. I wrote his name on the door latch in permanent marker.

This is the garage.

The story continues.

Note: This piece was updated Jan. 17, 2013.

I’ve lived in 19 cities over the course of 33 years thus far. In the United States, these include urban, suburban, and rural places in the Midwest, the Rust Belt, New England, the Southwest, and the Deep South. Internationally, I’ve lived in Paris, France and London, United Kingdom.

For some of these cities, I lived in multiple domiciles over time.

Why so many places, you ask? I was chasing love, poetry, money, family, ghosts, memories, sunshine, trouble, the unknown, natural beauty of many shapes and hues, and other experiences worth sacrificing for.

What did I get for all this globetrotting? Why, the world. I’ve integrated with numerous cultures and subcultures. I’ve learned about the ways in which people differ and the ways in which they coincide, and that the latter is far more often the case. I filled up my eyes with visions of geological grandeur and the cosmic chandelier up there. I got God, I got a piece of the Devil, I got a lousy t-shirt.

The journalist in me got the story. Whatever it takes, right?

But what price did I pay for all this? I got broke and broken and reassembled, I got lonely and exultant. I’ve both toughened and become more vulnerable. The price I paid was often the same as the reward I reaped; in the end, the difference between those seeming opposites was always one of attitude.

I moved back to Minneapolis, stomping ground of my glory days of youth, last summer with the stated intention to “stay here as long as it takes to watch a hardwood tree grow up from sapling to large enough for children to climb on.” I prefer not to speak of time in linear terms, but in relation to the motions of nature.

I’m also experienced enough to know that just because I have plans doesn’t mean something won’t come along to change them. I’m perfectly content where I am, but the roads and skies and fabled train tracks might one day call my name again. The chorus of their voices can be very bewitching.

Brought to you by TheWrongDictionary.com and The Wrong Dictionary on Facebook. The Wrong Dictionary is a growing fake glossary of tomfoolery,  inspired by works in a similar vein by Ambrose Bierce, Gustave Flaubert, and Voltaire. It is one of my two satirical projects-in-progress.

As I rummage through the ephemera my mother left behind (journals, art, receipts, psychiatric prescriptions, etc.) I remember a prayer we used to recite before dinner:

Thank you for the world so sweet,
Thank you for the food we eat,
Thank you for the birds that sing,
Thank you God for everything.

My mother didn’t make that up. “World So Sweet” is a folk prayer, i.e., the original author is unknown. You can speak it or sing it. My mother and I spoke it.

I find it a comfort to know I was the beneficiary of and participant in such an author-less oral tradition as a children’s mealtime prayer. No one was due any royalties for our reciting it; it was not Brought to You by Our Valued Sponsors. “World So Sweet” was just a swinging rhythm, a hypnotic rhyme, a picturesque moment to appreciate the life we received through some infinitely improbable twist of cosmically local organic chemistry, and a moment of peace before delving into the government cheese made simply gourmet through my mother’s mysterious kitchen chemistry. Meat loaf. Pasta. Even our Friday night doughnut, halved and slowly savored by candlelight, got the “World So Sweet” treatment.

I’m not a religious man by any measure, but as I sit here six months after my mother’s death recalling one of the prayers she raised me with, I wonder that she may have bequeathed to me richer spiritual underpinnings than I realize.

The rummaging continues.

*Written Jan. 5, 2013, originally posted to Facebook, and re-posted to Ted Atoka’s The Write Words. I’m re-posting the piece here on The Writer+ Blog because it contains a hint of my background as it pertains to rhythm and rhyme, and because it is a hint about the memoir I’m writing about my mother.

“Will, you like to talk about Philosophy, Literature, and Social Media. You are introverted and spiritual. You post statuses to Facebook most often in the morning using Facebook.com.”

So says Social Me, an excellent online tool that reads your entire Facebook history, applies a few mysterious algorithms, and spits out a comprehensive report about your Facebooking habits, cognitive leanings, personality traits, people you interact with, and loads of other interesting revelations. As a writer, I especially liked the way it compares certain facts about my writing style with the general population. Allegedly I use:

• more words per sentence than 85% of people.
• more commas than 89% of people.
• fewer exclamation marks than 89% of people.
• more dashes in my writing than 85% of people.
• more quotation marks in my writing than 93% of people.
• longer words than 93% of people.
• words with more syllables than 94% of people.
• fewer concrete words than 87% of people.

One questionable “fact” included in that section is that I am “more insightful than 94% of people.” How is that even remotely a measurable datum? Isn’t that purely subjective? I bet you tell that to all the guys, Social Me.

Social Me isn’t perfect — the basic assumptions it relies on are all completely subjective — but it’s approximately infinity thousand times better than all other social media profile analysis tools I’ve played with. Scroll down to view a screenshot of my Social Me; click the image to view it full-size. Or see it in all its on-site glory at Zeebly.

To see your own Social Me, go here and click the big blue button to authorize access to your Facebook account. Wait a minute or two (or five, depending on how much data your Facebook account has) and enjoy the results. Privacy note: The site won’t share your Social Me results unless you explicitly click the “Share” button in a later step.

The more you use Facebook and the longer you’ve used it, the more accurate Social Me is. I agreed with most of the assertions it made about me. Then again, whoever conceived Social Me is obviously an intelligent human being, because everything was worded in a flattering way so as not to make people cry and hate the product. Likely a thoughtful psychology buff is behind the project; it was probably inspired by the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment. Social Me can fairly be considered a prototypical update of that famous test, but for the digital age.

As someone who bounces a lot of ideas off my Facebook and Twitter friends (or assaults their peace of mind therein), I liked getting the bird’s-eye view of everything I’ve done there since April 2007. That’s almost six years of status updates, photos, links, and of course cats. Plenty of cats. And drama.

Give your Social Me a shot! Post the link to your report in the comments here and/or share it on my Facebook timeline. If we’re not already friends there, friend up with me and drop me a message saying how you know me, e.g., you found me here on The Writer+ Blog.

(Click the image below to view the full-size screenshot in a new tab.)

All human verbal language is mental programming. When you type, write, or speak, you are causing your audience to make a copy of the message in their own minds. Some minds are more open than others to linguistic programming; others have more Byzantine spam blockers, anti-virus scanners, and password-protected firewalls. But those very security measures too are mere languages, just slightly more sophisticated. If you speak those languages and understand their contours, you can navigate or bypass them, write new programs, and rewrite existing programs.

Many of the programs we write in each other’s minds are useful and help us in our lives. Some programs are detrimental to the overall performance of the mind, or coax us to do things we otherwise might not. Others are benign or neutral. We are programming each other at all times. We all influence the direction of each other’s very will, the objects of our desire, and even the power switch on our volition. When we use language to transfer concepts, those concepts can turn to action, and thus we help to determine the fate of the human world and, by extension, the rest of the natural world.

And just what is a concept? How big is it? What color is it? The answer is concepts have no size, no color, in fact no physical attributes whatsoever. Even the printed word is merely a placeholder for concepts, which still we cannot see with our eyes or touch with our hands. From this nothingness, from this conceptual world that exists only in our minds and moves in our languages, we produce a somethingness in the physical world, the measurable world where agony and triumph and the dirt of daily doings occur. Thus language is not just programming, but alchemy. It is the dead mud from which the living, breathing, skin-slick swamp frog spontaneously generates. Language is medieval science proven correct.

Language is an inexhaustible resource. That is, you have access to an infinite amount of language and thus can influence the world infinitely by controlling the minds of others through language. One thing you can do with language is awaken the mind to itself, to show itself where it twists and turns, where its weaknesses lie, how it can be turned against itself. You can arm your audience with the self-knowledge necessary to protect itself, grow gracefully, and take such shape as can advance the spirit and the body towards a better living reality.

Is this frightening, the idea that we can control each other through language, or that we are being controlled through it all the time? Is it disconcerting to admit that language has such power and that we utilize it whether we want to or not? Not after you’ve admitted it to be true. If like X-Men‘s Wolverine you were gifted with a titanium skeleton and retractable knives in your hands, would you want to know it? Of course you would. And wouldn’t you want to use it to do good? Most of us would say yes.

So let’s set aside for the moment the idea of pure free will. We are all programmed zombies to some extent. Let’s try to be aware of it, and let’s try to learn as much as possible about language. Let’s see how free we can make our wills, by understanding and even celebrating the ways in which our will is not free at all, but subject to the predilections of others’ use of language. Read much. Write some. Think. Cultivate inner silence, so that we can hear the true nature of the words when they do arrive.

Language is power over others and self. I wish you good luck in your quest to master it.

My mother, bon vivant and grammarian. She reveled in beauty and words — the sound of them, their subtle meanings. She had a larger working vocabulary than most people I knew while growing up, and her enunciation was informed by her long-ago training as an opera singer. When she spoke, the words came out of her mouth clear, distinct, richly formed. “Ain’t” was not allowed in our house. My mother made a point of making me aware of the English language, treated it as something precious, a treasure trove of intellectual and emotional expression. Her journals, many now lost or at least missing, are filled with poetic musings, diary entries, shopping lists, reviews of radio shows, consternation about her personal relationships, and whatever else might have come to her mind each morning, a cigarette in her left hand, a pen in her right, and a cup of coffee cooling on the dining room table. Her example led me to start journaling by the time I was 10.

Books. My mother’s book collection included a complete World Book Encyclopedia from the 1970s, which she probably acquired free of charge somewhere. Also Plath, Solzhenitsyn, Dillard, Auel, hundreds of others. In school, we were encouraged to read more than what was required by the curriculum. I took advantage of the Bookworm program and made it a badge of honor to read more books than anyone else. The Anoka County Library, which I frequented many weekends during childhood, was substantially stocked, for a suburban book depository.

Radio. My mother and I listened to a lot of Minnesota Public Radio. The voices of the news and commentary were erudite, the subject matter worthy of an impressionable young mind curious about the world. Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, strange and hilarious. Herb Carneal’s Twins game announcing; the language of baseball is full of delightful sounds and rhythms and delicious turns of phrase.

Word play with friends. Throughout my whole life, the English language has been a source of fun and hilarity for me and my friends. Words weren’t just a way to make plans or spread ideas; they were shimmering artifacts unto themselves. We played with words to discover puns, rhymes, dirty jokes, other curiosities. We mined our minds for hidden gems, sown long ago in the ancient soil of collective memory, waiting to be dug up by two ten-year-old boys high on RC Cola in the middle of the night, or a gaggle of twenty-somethings sipping two-for-ones and playing Exquisite Corpse on bar napkins. Idle play was building in our minds vast new networks of neurons devoted to the joy of language. Such recreation continues to this day.

Love letters. This is where my penchant for the lyrical got its exercise. From fifth grade onwards, I have written and received millions of words inspired by young love, infatuation, hormones, wildly confused devotion, and earth-shattering fits of passion. When distance was too great a pain to bear, I tried to build a bridge out of words. Language became an instantaneous transport unit like on Star Trek. Under such pressure to connect, to smash the distance, I reached for words and phrases that I hoped would measure up to the experience of actually being with the love of my life, whomever she might have been that month. Love (or something akin to it) pushed my mind beyond its limits, created broader limits, and shattered those.

Everything else. When the world smacks you in the face with its mass media and its nature and its people, or relieves your existential pain by a backyard bonfire in the summertime with warm friends, it sets fire to a fuse within you. You follow that burning fuse to its logical conclusion: an explosion of words.

What are your influences?

My mother died yesterday morning, June 18, 2012 at 8:10 a.m. The world was unworthy of her. Please read this tribute I wrote yesterday evening, and please feel free to share, re-post, or copy-paste this tribute elsewhere if you are so moved. I want everyone to know what kind of a woman my mother was. I want everyone to know she existed. I want everyone to know what she was up against.

In Memoriam, Ann Conley, Jan. 14, 1942 – Jun. 18, 2012

My mother was raised at knifepoint — or might as well have been. My mother’s mother once chased my mother through the house with a butcher knife. My mother hid under a neighbor’s porch until her mother’s psychotic episode passed.

My mother also saw her father “bloody the walls with” her mother.

The rest of my mother’s 70 years as a physically manifested human were an epic war against the demons that forever and ever laughed in her beautiful child face.

She wasted little time. At age 18 my mother escaped from Upstate New York to New York City and held secreterial jobs throughout the 1960s, back when they were still called secreteries. My mother’s favorite companies to work for were advertising agencies.

She drank a lot. Married a lot. Four husbands, all told. Had a son and a daughter in Connecticut with her first husband. She didn’t believe herself fit to raise them, so she abandoned that family when her son was 12 and her daughter was 8. That ate at her forever.

Later my mother married an engineer — brilliant by all accounts — and they drank and rode motorcycles together.

In 1976 my mother had a vision. She saw the ghosts of her dead relatives, including her mother and grandmother, as well as Jesus and maybe the Virgin Mary. I’m not sure about the details. The ghosts asked my mother whether she wanted to live or die. My mother chose life, and never had the desire to touch alcohol again.

She moved to Michigan and joined A.A., which became her religion and her family. There she found her purpose: helping drunks get sober and stay sober, or, barring that, giving them her time and support and physically sheltering them from harm. A.A. gave her a sense of belonging, the feeling that she was needed, and a made-in-America theology that she could accept. It also gave her her third husband, and that man became my father in 1980.

My mother and father moved to Upstate New York. The two of them loved madly and argued terribly. In 1981 my mother kidnapped me to Minnesota and disappeared under an assumed name. Her stated reason was always that she was afraid of my father, although even she admitted he had never harmed her in any way. As far as the little girl inside her knew, everyone my mother ever met had a butcher knife for her, and wanted to bloody the walls with her.

Starting with a junker of a car, one hundred dollars, and an ornamental feeding spoon, my mother cobbled together a vast Minnesotan support system for the two of us over the years. She navigated the social services for single mothers, established A.A. connections, and eventually cultivated friend circles throughout the Twin Cities metro area.

That A.A. club was my family and my church. Angels helping angels rise up from rock bottom. I attended A.A. meetings with my mother until I was 11, old enough to stay home by myself. My mother’s various boyfriends — half of whom were of the hippie persuasion, the other half military and law enforcement — all served as male role models for me. I believe she chose each one based on what she thought I needed at the time, rather than what she wanted.

Realizing she needed to expand her social horizons, and wanting to help the world as much as she could, my mother ran for local office on an environmental platform of saving some trees from being cut down. She was active in the parent organizations in the schools. She designed the t-shirt mascot (Tigers) for one of my two middle schools. Her drawing style was graceful. Delicate. Angelic. I never saw a more darkly expressive roll of toilet paper than when she drew one in black chalk for an art class she took in 1992.

The arts were not optional in our household. They were a mandatory part of daily life, just like breathing. We freely sang and whistled along to classical music, classic rock, and classic country. Legend has it her opera singing was the best in the state back when she was in high school. She could also play piano, which I saw her do on a number of occasions, whenever we would together happen upon a piano.

She took me to choir practice and band practice. She once spent all her savings on a euphonium (a kind of smallish tuba) for me so I could pursue my own musical path.

We laughed ourselves to the floor over Bill Cosby tapes, which we would play over and over on a vintage stereo system.

When I was 6, she woke me up before dawn and led me down the hallway to stand on the balcony and watch aurora borealis, the northern lights. They flashed all the colors of the rainbow. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she whispered. The awe in her voice made me realize I was witnessing a special kind of magic: the kind that anyone can watch but not everyone deems important.

For my mother, love was about helping each other to see such wondrous things. But love was also guardianship and blind, reckless self-sacrifice. Once, a couple of older boys were ganging up on me on the basketball blacktop across the street from one of the apartment buildings she raised me in. Mom saw this from our kitchen window on the third floor and strolled out to the scene, lazily swinging my aluminum baseball bat in one hand and grinning maniacally. She took one boy by the ear, placed the bat gently but firmly against his skull, and intoned into his ear softly and clearly through clenched teeth, “I’m not afraid to go to jail for my son.”

Sometimes the battle and the beauty fused into one thing. In 1996, my mother and I went to see a performance of Man of La Mancha with Robert Goulet as the title role at the Ordway in St. Paul. The final scene featured Don Quixote on his death bed, accosted mercilessly by knights in blinding platinum armor, all bearing giant gilded mirrors instead of shields, advancing on the old man, white lights screaming off the surfaces everywhere and showing Don Quixote his weaknesses and the futility of his valiance.

I broke down crying ten minutes after my mother and I left the theater. I didn’t know why I was crying. I would find out later.

I saw my mother spontaneously relive and act out her childhood violence on at least two occasions, once in 1988 and once in 1997. She threw her body against walls and cried out in pain and begged whoever was doing it to stop it. I was powerless to help; I could only watch. She referred to these episodes as flashbacks or “remembrances”.

We always loved each other very much — she was all I really had, and I was all she really had — but we often argued just as fiercely as she and my father had argued so many years earlier. I had yet to meet that father.

When I turned 18, my mother moved back to Upstate New York to try to reconnect with her family. On Father’s Day in the year 2000, I received a letter from my mother, included in which was my father’s current phone number, which unbeknownst to me she had kept track of for the entirety of the previous two decades. She suggested that I might like to give my father a call. And so I did. He and I really hit it off. When I first visited him that summer in 2000, my mother drove to join me at the house where he and my step-mother lived. My father and mother made ammends.

My mother had some success in her effort to reconnect with her own family, but her mind and body were already deteriorating. Don’t ask what was wrong, exactly; I gave up trying to keep track of it all a long time ago. Administrative records in my possession show a woman desperately seeking solutions to the monsters that wanted to claw her to pieces from the inside out. She waged full-scale conflagration on them, trying every drug known to psychiatry, and every physical therapy that might have helped her failing body to recover or at least plateau.

My mother stayed active in A.A., continuing to find some solace in helping others, at least as far as they wanted to be helped, which was, more often than not, very little. And yet she continued as long as she was physically and mentally able to do so. And she kept up her belief in a higher power.

She spent her final months in a nursing home here in New Hampshire. This morning, the torture device that was her mind and body could no longer hold her. The beautiful, innocent, precious, perfect little girl that had held onto life by her fingernails for seventy years finally slipped free.

The tenacious woman that saved the lives of countless people through her A.A. work has completed her mission impossible. The mother who infused my heart with an aurora borealis has finally risen up and flown away.

Fly, Mom. This world was never worthy of you. Fly.

(Written by Will Conley and originally posted publicly on Facebook.)