Saturday, January 8th, 2022

Dear Elvis,

Happy Birthday, my beautiful friend.

Because that is what you are, in a nutshell, beautiful.

Elvis, I am reading again. Not just texts and FB posts. Books, good ones. After the Xmas rush, I stole into Coles (Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada) and bought Newfoundland’s, Donna Morrissey’s, Pluck. It’s a memoir. And I love it. I am at the part where her mom is having surgery, a mastectomy, and she has to leave her mom at the surgery doors. I remember experiencing the same thing with my mother. I walked with her as far as I could for her second breast removal- a precaution she had said. Anything for more time. And I remember sitting and hooking a spaceship for my nephew, Thomas, until the nurse came to tell me that she was in recovery, Somehow I had forgotten that until I read that part of Morrissey’s narrative this morning.

I had to stop reading.

I had forgotten because my mind has been full of other memories. Other loss, other grief. Morrissey, she relates the anxiety she was filled with at the time, the mechanical movements, Oddly enough, as I remember that time, today, I see it as Mom’s way of preparing me for what lay ahead.

Mothers and daughters, they know. They just know.

I have another set of books waiting in the wings. They are a two set biography of you- that soft writing about you that I have been looking for- where you are revealed as human. I would anticipate that there will be much about your relationship with your mom inside its pages, particularly the first volume. I think you were very close.

Peace.

Your friend,

Melissa