Glynnis MacNicol - 10 July

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2018 by Glynnis MacNicol

Some names and characteristics have been changed. The Tinder dates described are composites.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition July 2018

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or .

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Interior design by Carly Loman

JACKET DESIGN BY ALISON FORNER

(PHOTOGRAPH PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: MacNicol, Glynnis, 1974 author.

Title: No one tells you this : a memoir / Glynnis MacNicol.

Description: New York : Simon & Schuster [2018]

Identifiers: LCCN 2018000331| ISBN 9781501163135 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501163142 (trade paper : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501163159 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: MacNicol, Glynnis, 1974 | Single womenNew York (State)New YorkBiography. | Canadian AmericansNew York (State)New YorkBiography. | Man-woman relationshipsNew York (State)New York. | CaregiversFamily relationshipsCanada Toronto. | Middle-aged womenFamily relationships. | Mother and child. | Self-realization in women. | Women authors, American21st century Biography. | Women authors, American21st centuryFamily relationships.

Classification: LCC HQ800.4.U6 M33 2018 | DDC 306.7dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000331

ISBN 978-1-5011-6313-5

ISBN 978-1-5011-6315-9 (ebook)

For my mother and my sister

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Zora Neale Hurston

Youre lonely? Get a cat. They live thirteen years. Then you get another one, and another one after that. Then youre done.

Katherine Olson to her daughter Peggy, Mad Men

For someone who has always been bad at math, I have a weird fixation on numbers.

Take my mothers death. Officially my mother died on March 20. A Monday. This is the date on her death certificate, and the date on her gravestone. This is also what the staff at the nursing home north of Toronto, where my mother had lived for the past twenty-six months, told my father when they called him at seven that morning. My mother, they said, had died overnight.

I wanted more details, though. Overnight felt too nebulous. When my sister, Alexis, and I arrived the next day to retrieve the last of my mothers possessions, it was the first thing I inquired about. Who exactly had found her? I asked the nursing attendant manning the staff desk that oversaw my mothers wing, hoping this would lead to the specifics I was searching for.

The nurse was an older blond woman and she seemed puzzled by my question. When a person is that ill, she said, we send someone in to see them every hour. Behind her on the wall, in the frame reserved for pictures of recently deceased residents, was a picture of my mother. I N LOVING MEMORY read the gold-plated plaque nailed to the bottom of the frame. It was a terrible picture, taken recently. My mothers face was thin and frail, the confusion that had eaten up her mind apparent in the angry, taut expression. It made her look like a stranger. My mother, always so careful with her appearance, would have been horrified by the photo. She wasnt even wearing lipstick.

I turned back to the nurse. I understood her confusion; there was exactly nothing mysterious about my mothers death. She had been sick for a long time; the previous Wednesday a specialist had told us she probably had six months, give or take.

Still, I tried again. I concentrated on sounding calmId long ago learned this was the best way to deal with medical staffas if I was just making casual conversation. But the truth was that since the previous morning, when my father and then, minutes later, my sister had called to tell me the news, Id been preoccupied with this small bit of information: I wanted to know the exact minute my mother had died. And barring that, I wanted a time stamp on the last instance theyd seen her alive. I had obsessively time-stamped my journals as a child, carefully watching the second hand on my Mickey Mouse alarm clock, and then furiously scribbling down the numbers before it ticked on, as if this detail would give more authenticity to my record. I wanted to be able to do the same for my accounting of the end of my mothers life. It felt like a loose thread in an otherwise perfectly woven tapestry I was trying to reattach correctly.

I hadnt yet shed a single tear. I had a vague sense they were on the horizon, but the tsunami of emotions brought on by her loss wouldnt reach me for a while yet. In the meantime, I set about constructing a narrative around my mothers death that made sense, a path I could funnel everything down when grief arrived and tried to wreak havoc on me. So many of the decisions Id made in my life had been the result of stories Id read, or heard, or was trying to emulatethere was a safety there, I knew. I also knew there was an irrefutability to numbers that I could rely on to nail everything else down.

The number I was looking for that day was nineteen. The 19th was Maddys birthday. Maddy, my oldest friend in New York, the person who had for nearly two decades stood in so many times as my unconditional support system, my emergency contact. That my mother would depart the world on the same date Maddy had entered it seemed to me a perfect conclusion to the story I was creating for myself about her death. It made sense. I deeply wanted proof from the nursing home staff that it was possible overnight meant my mother could have died before midnight and simply hadnt been found until the 20th. This was my first foray into the house of mirrors that I later came to recognize as the early days of grief, and I was confident I was being entirely rational.

But no one knew. As far as the world was concerned, my mother had died, alone in her room. Peacefully in her sleep, as they say. After a lengthy battle with Parkinsons and forty-nine years of marriage to my father.