Promise me you will tell them to call me when you die. Promise me that you’ll leave me something, a written something, in your own handwriting. Promise me that it will make its way to me somehow, and I’ll recognize your script that looks like soap bubbles. It can be a little scrap of paper, or a long note, I’ll accept anything. Promise me you will tell me that I meant something to you, that even though you pushed me out of your body, that you really didn’t want to leave me, not like you did. Promise me that you’ll write the word love. Promise me you’ll designate an object to me too, some physical thing. Promise me that I will have something to touch with my hand, to place on my table and look at every day, and think, she gave this to me. It could be as random as a chocolate Mars bar, that I will never unwrap, never eat, even as it becomes desiccated. But I will know that you wanted me to have something sweet, and it will be something that you once told me was your favorite, and I will have remembered and held it in my mind like a gift, a morsel of your childhood that you shared with me. Promise me that all this will be written in a letter to your estate lawyer so that it is indelible, that they, your later family, the family you made after me, will have to comply. It will be evidence that you cared. Promise me that this will not happen next week, or the next. Give me at least thirteen more months. I need these emails and text messages that have floated into my phone at random intervals, along with the lilting harp sound I have chosen to alert me. I need you to be my mother for at least a little bit. Promise me that. Don’t promise your family that I won’t come to your funeral. Promise me that my name will appear in your obituary. Promise me that when the pots of marigolds appear at the funeral home, it will be our secret alone. Remember when you visited me that one time, and we went into that shop with the dog made of marigolds and we took that picture together, and we were both so happy?
Susan Kiyo Ito is the author of the memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, published by the Ohio State University Press. It was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award, shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize for International Literature, and named a best book of 2023 by the Library Journal. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Hyphen, Literary Mama, Catapult, The Bellevue Literary Review, Agni, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook and Blue Mountain Center. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater. She is a member of the Writers Grotto in San Francisco. Visit her website and find her on Threads and Instagram.