I summon you!
Some thoughts on missing my mom (who is dead) and myself
Recently, I rediscovered a Spoon song I used to listen to a lot in college, ”I Summon You.” I put it on my biking playlist and now I listen to it on my little portable speaker while I run (bike) my errands. The other day, on the way home from Trader Joe’s, it came on and I unexpectedly burst into tears.
I really was not to my knowledge feeling sad. I thought, “Wow, this song really brings something up for me!”
I think some of it is the song itself, which (shoutout Spoon) makes no sense lyrically, but has some themes of romantic longing and missing someone from your past. I’m single and my mom is dead so I can always get down with themes of this nature.
It’s also a nostalgic song (cassettes mentioned!) that brings up nostalgia for me personally, so that’s a surreal layered thing. It makes me remember the names of buildings on my college campus I never think about — I guess you could say it summons them! Here are some: Reynold’s Club. Cobb. Max Palevsky.
I don’t think any of that is really why the song makes me cry, though. Upon reflection, I think I cried because the song gives me language for something mysterious that just happened recently, during a period of really intense sadness that felt unprecedented in my life.
It’s weird to even say that, because as discussed mere paragraphs ago, my mom is dead! She died in 2011. But when she died, I was 22 and I honestly kind of white-knuckled through it. The thing I remember thinking then was that I had to keep going to work. I was not going to lose my job because my mom was dead. I would write my daily quota of Groupons!
So I did. I wrote soooo many Groupons, literally thousands. And in that time, day-to-day, I didn’t feel as sad as you might think. I felt, iirc, unfocused and numb — I was kind of like, “I have my whole life to feel sad about this” (true). I primarily wanted to act normal, go through the motions, and occasionally tap out of a party early if my ears started ringing.
Feelings about my mom’s death come back periodically, though — I think they always will — and now I feel them more directly as sadness, or I guess grief. (Grief is a subset of sadness, I am learning from feelingswheel.com.) They usually come back when something difficult happens, and I wish I could talk to my mom about it, and then I’m like, “Wow I really miss her!” They also sometimes return when something great happens, or I see a very stylish British living room (IYKYK), and I wish I could tell her because she’d be thrilled.
Sometimes it’s a mix of both, where I’m really in the shit with some guy or whatever and I know that if I told her about it, we would both REALLY laugh. Talking to her would transform the situation into something silly and new. But she’s not here, I’m sad, and that specific flavor of LOL and reframing is lost. I can usually find a little something with my friends or my dad, but it’s not the same.
In Q4 2025 (yes I measure my life in fiscal quarters, because I’m a corporation), I was in this last situation — I was fresh out of some sort of thing with some guy, and I knew there were comic elements to the situation, but I wasn’t laughing. I was sad, and then I was sad and missing my mom, and then it was snowballing and this blanket of inertia fell over my life. I would sit down on the couch and spend 30 minutes trying to get back up and microwave a burrito (from Trader Joe’s, callback).
All kinds of transitions became really hard and slow: between sleeping and waking up, between work tasks, between exercises at the gym. I kept wanting to sit down on my weight bench at the gym and just… stay there, Bartleby style. I didn’t even want to go home.
Needless to say, I wasn’t enjoying things the way I used to, as a questionnaire you too may have taken would put it.
I definitely remembered enjoying things. I recalled myself having a whole energetic personality, where I joked around with the baristas at Dunkin and the bagel shop, and played with my cat, and went for walks, and felt really engaged and excited to learn new things at work. I could focus and I liked to try new things. I had a lot of ideas!
Where did that lady go? I thought. I miss her.
The only thing I found energizing during this time, weirdly, was reading my old writing. I was reading old diaries, Substacks, anything I could find. Why was I doing this? I didn’t know exactly, and it struck me as sort of unseemly, self-obsessed behavior. But I was also like, you know what, it’s a rare thing that feels good right now, and it’s not hurting anyone, so why not.
I read a ton. I remembered long-forgotten work incidents from many jobs ago, acquaintances 90% buried by the sands of time, my MFA colleagues’ thesis collections. I reread recent history, too — I kept a detailed journal while I was seeing the guy I was no longer seeing, thank goodness. He often tested the hypothesis that I had a bad memory, and that if he waited long enough I’d forget hurtful stuff he did. It never worked out for him, and my journal was a key reason why.
I knew the purpose it was serving in real time, too. I said it in an entry from last September (reread many times), that started:
I sort of don’t want to write about this, but I need to document it so I remember. I HAVE TO REMEMBER HOW BAD IT WAS. FUTURE MAE, DON’T MINIMIZE THIS. PROTECT US!
I think maybe I thought this was funny when I was writing it, or that it would become funny? It’s a little melodramatic. But it’s still mostly sad to me. I remember the feeling that someone needed to get mad on my behalf, but that I was too weak to do it myself. I couldn’t hold on to the indignation. I couldn’t hold on to much at all; my hands were always hurting and curling up into little stress claws around this time. Sometimes I would Google around for finger stretches, like it was a purely physical ailment, but as Future Mae, let me tell you: It wasn’t.
It took a while to feel like Future Mae, distinct from and protector of Previous Mae. I did a lot of rereading and went back to therapy and just… felt really bad for a few months. Slowly, verrrrrry slowly, my old energy and old personality came back. I actually got this weird huge surge of energy right at the end of the year — like all my energy for 3 months arrived in one day — but it didn’t stay or stabilize right away. It’s still a little in and out.
When I hear “I Summon You” now, it definitely reminds me of this rereading era (which has passed; I get bored now rereading old journals). I think part of what I was doing back then was summoning my old, energetic self back, ingesting her thoughts into my brain like that would graft her back into me. It worked, to some extent, and I’m so glad!
When I wrote that desperate little note to Future Mae, I was also summoning myself — a new kind of self with a more protective, parental approach to her own well-being. And that worked, too! My mom’s still not here, but a new echo of her is here. You could say I summoned her.
.
.
.
Here she is, with me :)
Reader question
Have any of your parents died? Do you ever summon dead people, or new versions of yourself?
Linxxx
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