It’s been more than six weeks since my mother died, and the heavy cream-colored note cards are still sitting, reproachfully, in their pink box. The list of flower bouquets, delivered meals, and donations to my son’s Montessori school in my mother’s name—numbered 1-35 (and that’s just my portion: there are five other siblings), is scrawled on a back page in a composition book.

Oh, I’ve written some here and there, written out the addresses in steady black cursive, somehow comforting, then stamped the envelopes and dropped them into the mailbox in my office’s marble lobby. I’ve then ticked the item off the list, and felt immediately overwhelmed by all the others I need to write.

It is not just laziness that has retarded my progress. Rather, I think, it is the sense that if I write the notes and cap the pen, my mother will truly be lost to me. She will have, for practical purposes, entered the realm of history—even if, as I do believe, she continues to live in the realm of eternity.

Whereas for now, her earthly life remains close to me. The stories that she told of herself; the black-and-white snapshots that were jumbled in the pasteboard dress box from McRae’s; the straight-skirted black velvet dress (with delicate zippered sleeves) that hung in the closet all my life, even though it had long been too small for her to wear: It is as though, in a lifetime of re-imagining them under her tutelage and narrative, I have lived them myself.

And thus, as different from her as I am, I feel oddly capable of, if not exactly explaining, then witnessing the experience of someone who was to many people largely inexplicable.

It is as though she is the one in whom I “live, and move, and have my being.” This feels like God’s work, or at least God’s sense of humor: If, as St. Athanasius said, “God became man so man could become gods,” then the boundaries between creature and creator are more porous than we imagine.

In my conception of her, God conceives of me.

She was born in 1925 in the hamlet of Eden, Mississippi (Ham-let, I sounded out the word, which she really used), on the Illinois Central train line down through the Delta.

Her father was a telegraph operator with an eighth-grade education. These were the days of the Panama Limited (“Panny-maw,” she pronounced), which went from Chicago all the way to New Orleans, and trains run all through her story like horses, giant beasts that could be fearsome and gentle as well.

She was supposed to have been a boy. That was what she always maintained, a second and middle child who was followed by still another girl, and even later, yet another, the change-of-life baby who’d become her adored little sister, my Aunt Billie. (It is she to whom I’m really directing these words, so that her memories can fill in my knowledge and its holes.)

And my mother took on her role with relish: On the wall of my grandmother’s dining room in Canton, Mississippi, in a grouping of pictures, was a black and white portrait of my mother at about six or seven years old, in a fancy tulle dress and a miserable expression. The dress was stiff and itchy, she told me, and she hated every minute of having to wear it.

Instead, she made her life a brief against everything that girls back then were supposed to be: In her recollections, she was always running along on sidewalks, playing in overgrown empty lots. She taught some neighborhood boys to play football, and one of them ended up being all-SEC. She asked for a BB gun one Christmas, and upon receiving it, proceeded to shoot out all the streetlights on her block. She wore her father’s waistcoat and walked around picking up cigarette butts and putting them in the pockets.

It was the Great Depression, what do you expect? And you’ve heard the joke: Folks in Mississippi were so poor they didn’t even realize there was a Depression going on. The railroad laid my grandfather off, but re-hired him on a contract basis, moving him anywhere he was needed up and down the line.

Some of our national mythologies about the period coincided in her own life. One evening, a stranger knocked on the door and said that he’d met my grandfather on the road, and my grandfather told him that when he was in Canton, he could stop by for a meal and a place to spend the night. My grandmother made and served the promised meal, then huddled all night with her daughters behind the closed bedroom door until the man departed the next morning.

Here’s another story she told me that gives me the chills, now that I’m a mother myself, in an age far more skittish: She must have been 11 or 12, and it was the middle of the night. My grandmother rustled her out of sleep to say that my grandfather had not come back on the train at the expected time and to go down to the depot to see what had happened.

It is as real as my own pale limbs in the shadows of the yard, as I bend over watering the plants at dusk: my almost-teenage mother setting off down the deserted sidewalks at the very bottom of the night, stillness all around. OK, so maybe things were safer then, but it was still after dark, a girl alone and unprotected.

She came home triumphantly to report: my grandfather had fallen asleep and missed the station, and was going to catch the next train back from Jackson. They had radioed ahead.

It was the first of many dark journeys I head about from her, and I hope you will sit with me while—again, soon—I narrate a few more.