Imperfect Stories, Right on Time

My mother loved stories – long or short, hers or yours, finished or half-baked.

For as long as I can recall, her stories were an adventure of sorts. You never quite knew where they were going to slide off some unseen edge. She might arrive mid-story and forget the end, something about the middle, or occasionally why she had started telling the tale in the first place. Undaunted or stubborn — or possibly both — she’d regroup and wrap things up with a trademark, “Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

In a way, she lived and died by stories. After a routine medical procedure went awry in October, she landed in the hospital. She moved in and out of the ICU, between stepped up and stepped down care, with one complication after another, for five interminable weeks. Interminable until they were terminable, that is.

Over those weeks, we had weird-sized patches of time to fill in drab hospital rooms. Time between procedures, test results, nurses, beeps, and the unknown. So we told stories. Stories that could slide into all those different-sized spaces. She told some, and we told others. Back and forth in the uneasy cadence of a family trying to find their way as a trauma unfolded.

In the hours leading up to her death, my mom could no longer speak, so the storytelling fell to me and my siblings. Patched into death by conference call, my sister and I tag-teamed to tell some some tale into what felt like an abyss. We found the bottom when my brother interrupted to say she was gone. Our off-key rendition of her favorite road-trip song hung unfinished.

In the blur that is grief, I found myself a week later stepping up to a podium in a church whose air was sticky with incense to tell people about my mother’s love of stories. Her eulogy took me to the burial. And the burial to the house that is now-my-dad’s and not-my-mom-and-dad’s. Which is how I ended up at a kitchen counter with my siblings and a tangle of my grandmother’s jewelry. Necklaces knotted, watches frozen in time, lapel pins with no lapels.

None of us knew why this mishmash of items was tucked away in drawer, nor why my father insisted the drawer be relieved of its burden on that particular day. And none of us had much appetite for either decision-making or jewelry. So we stood there, staring at the tangle. We can leave it until another day, one of us half-suggested and half-asked. But all dad asked us to do was sort this tangle and the closet, another reminded.

A little while later, or possibly hours, we stumbled our way through rationales for who should take what. You take these two necklaces because they’re small enough for the girls to wear now, to my brother. You take the watch inscribed to Grandmère, to my sister whose daughter carries her name.

On we went until only two pieces remained and my sister fretted that I hadn’t taken anything yet. Well, I’ll take these, I said and scooped up a couple of well-worn watches.

The next morning, I tucked the two watches into a carryon bag along with an Irish sweater, a pair of gloves, and a Scottish hat from my mom’s closet, and boarded a flight to Colorado.

In the days that followed, my wife applied her grief towards a self-guided, crash-course on 20th century watches, determined to figure out why the two I carried home were tucked away with the tangle in the first place. She easily identified one as an everyday-woman’s watch sold in its day at any-old department store, and likely tucked away for just that reason — because it had been my grandmother’s everyday-watch. 

Uncovering the other watch’s identity proved more of a challenge. Susan suspected that the watch in question wasn’t actually my grandmother’s. It had a more masculine style than women, especially my grandmother, would have worn decades ago. Could it have been your grandfather’s, she asked? Could be, I said, turning memories over in my mind as if I could check his wrist. Meanwhile, Susan kept at her internet sleuthing, turning up bits of information that she’d report-out during a new dinnertime routine. 

One evening, she explained that the watch was made by Mido, a Swiss company known for innovation and quality in the first half of the 20th century. In a nod to that quality, the watch was keeping good time with a little bit of winding. The winding tickled a vague childhood memory of cautions not to overwind watches as I explored dresser-tops and drawers at my grandparent’s house.

Another evening, Susan reported that the watch was certainly from Mido’s men’s line. We agreed that made it my grandfather’s and not my grandmother’s. She went on to explain details of watch casings and movements, though still hadn’t found another watch face that was quite like the one at which we now stared daily. But she was getting closer, with her latest theory that the watch was produced in the 1930s or early 40s. 

A few days later, and far earlier than dinnertime, Susan texted: I found it! She’d discovered that Mido sold a limited edition men’s watch for the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair, one that matched the watch from the tangle.

Walking through the door that evening, Susan brimmed with excitement, ready to talk about the watch, the World’s Fair, and a vintage watch repair shop. She bubbled with bits of history about the Fair and it’s futurama theme, which was fitting, she added, for a watch that was at the pinnacle of technology. Antimagnetic, shock- and water-resistant, it was a so-called Dr. Osler’s watch, named for the physician credited with founding the first modern medical training program at Johns Hopkins. In that era, watches that kept time with enough precision for doctors to use in patient exams bore his name.

Was there a story, she wondered out loud, about your grandparents and the World’s Fair? A story that would explain why my grandmother, and then mother, would have tucked the watch away for so many years?

In answer, I burst into tears.

Because there was a story. My grandparents, who met in Brooklyn and eventually moved to Long Island, did indeed have some story about the NY World’s Fair in Queens — one that I could not remember. In fact, this story-I-couldn’t-remember had been on my mind when I visited the fairgrounds during a long weekend in the Big Apple in 2017. At the time, I promised myself that I would ask my mom about it. But I never did.

I can’t remember the story and my mom isn’t here to ask, I squeaked between tears.

For days, my brain stayed stubbornly stuck in a groove of grief about the story-I-couldn’t-remember, the one I could no longer ask my mom to tell. The early morning quiet amplified the voice in my head that lectured me for not listening more closely to her tales, for not writing them down, for not remembering. Because now it was too late. 

Until one morning, I heard a new voice in the quiet. One that gently chided me that my mother had raised me better than this: Stories do not need a beginning, middle, and an end. After all, hers rarely had all three, making those that did seem almost excessive. Was missing a part or two of a story really cause for suffering? Well, certainly not if stories weren’t so much about what happened as they were about connecting.

Looking back on the stories she told during those weeks in the hospital, she seemed to be giving us one last chance to learn this lesson. With tales that pieced together loose threads from some distant past – antics with friends from college, students she taught, tribulations of raising three headstrong children — she was showing us that stories connect us over time. They transcend place and circumstance. They bridge separation.

Even the imperfect ones.

And so I find myself with a story that doesn’t quite have a beginning, middle, or an end. It’s the story of a watch from the World’s Fair that my grandfather, a then-substitute teacher, somehow acquired more than 80 years ago. A timepiece that made its way with him from Brooklyn, where he was born and married my grandmother, to Long Island, where he raised my mom and died after a battle with cancer. A watch that escaped an estate sale and downsizing to accompany my grandmother to New Jersey and later to an assisted living facility in Tennessee. The one that my mother tucked away in a drawer when she moved to Florida during a global pandemic, which was found in a tangle upon her unexpected death. One of a pair, scooped off a kitchen counter, that prompted me to sift through stories of my grandparents, bringing them closer to my heart. Right on time, it turns out, when I needed their memory to keep me company as I grieve the loss of my mom.

Susan took her sleuthing and the watch to a vintage watch shop, where it will get a new spring and crystal. I plan to wear the watch until I tuck it away, perhaps with a copy of these musings, to gift to my sister’s oldest child someday. From what I have learned of this watch so far, I’m guessing it will find the perfect time to make its way to them. Perhaps at a moment when they need a reminder that imperfect stories are the only ones we have, and that’s ok because it’s always been the connection that matters anyway.

But for now, it’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Just like my mom taught me.

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To read more stories, including some about research and building a better world together, follow my blog and check out Every 90 Seconds: Our Common Cause Ending Violence against Women. My mom liked the book, and would have told you a story about how you’d like it also. Available now from Oxford University Press or:

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