My mother, Coleen Clark, was born 72 years ago today, September 18.

My mother has been dead for three years, and I am still cleaning up after her.

This time, it’s thumb drives. About thirty of them, wrapped in tinfoil, filled with saved web pages, letters, photographs, and the things she thought were important enough to preserve. I’ve been copying their contents, opening files, deciding what to keep. It is tedious work, and sometimes it hurts. Mostly, it is familiar. Something of hers needs dealing with. Here I am.

Her name was Coleen Clark. She would pack up our belongings in the middle of the night, claiming gangsters were after us. She would tell me God had told her we needed to move across the country, right then. I was a child. Her claims determined what happened to my life.

That was what her inability to manage her own life meant for me. The danger she claimed was real became an emergency I had to live through. Her certainty was enough to uproot us. She was the adult making those decisions, and I was the child who had to go along.

There are reminders of her abilities in the archive. She held responsible jobs. She sang. She wrote a book, I Fell For Paris, and made the trip she had wanted to take since childhood. Those accomplishments existed alongside the neglect. They didn’t give me a dependable parent.

In a letter from 2014, she wrote about feeling abandoned by her own parents. She described being young, poor, and unable to provide for herself, without support from the people she needed. I can feel compassion for the young woman in that letter and anger at the mother she became. Reading about her suffering also means reading about how much of it continued into my life.

I call her a narcissist because she never accepted responsibility for her own faults. Whatever went wrong, the blame belonged elsewhere. Her letters still tell that story: even my rejection of religion became a failing in me, with no accounting for her part in it. Other people were left to deal with the consequences. I am still dealing with mine.

What happened to faith

These drives are full of prophecy, spiritual warfare, coming catastrophes, and supposed revelations. Even her December 2014 Christmas letter turns from a small-town pageant to warnings about the country’s decline and the dangers ahead. Ordinary life could hardly get a paragraph to itself.

Her religious obsession ruined faith for me. “God told me” was the explanation for decisions that upended my childhood. It gave her claims an authority I had to live under. That is what I remember when people talk about trusting God’s plan.

I can’t simply separate religion from the person who taught it to me and start over as though nothing happened. She taught me about God while giving me reasons to distrust her judgment. Her belief in what she was saying never made the consequences less real.

Reading her letters now, I can see how she explained my unbelief to other people. In 2014 she asked for my “salvation, deliverance, and Baptism of the Holy Spirit.” In a 2022 letter to a pastor, she wrote that I had decided to “spurn the faith.” She blamed part of it on my relationship with my father.

She never accounted for her own part in it. I was a grown man with reasons for what I believed. In those letters, I was still a problem awaiting a religious solution. Even now, I find myself wanting to answer her, through an argument that never seemed to have room for my answer in the first place.

Her own words

Among the manuscripts on her drives is a December 2019 draft of I Fell For Paris. It is supposed to be a book about a trip to France. By the appendix, she is explaining secret time-travel research and revelations from God.

Writing about the gardens at Versailles, she says:

However, I had planned the visit to that exact location as an integral part of my European trip, since it was one of the few spots I knew of that could be an interdimensional portal.

She acknowledges that the odds of repeating the experience she had read about were small. But a possible portal had already become part of her travel plans. I recognize that distance between what she could establish and what she was prepared to organize her life around.

Later, she describes “Quantum Vacuum Fluctuation Energy” as:

what God had revealed to me in simpler form as a child, in a lightning-fast vision.

The claim of revelation is familiar. I had lived under the authority of things she said God had told her, with no way to check them and no control over what she did with them. Finding that same certainty in a travel memoir brings the childhood memories straight back.

When she encounters criticism of a book about secret research, she concludes:

That is why the mockery is an obvious attempt at disinformation.

Criticism becomes evidence of concealment. The possibility that she might be wrong disappears into another explanation. That refusal to reconsider was familiar too. She could explain away disagreement without ever addressing what the other person was saying.

I read these passages as her son. The woman writing about portals and revelations was the woman who claimed gangsters were after us. Her convictions reached well beyond the page. I had to live with decisions she made on the strength of them, and she never accepted responsibility for what that did to me.

The work that outlived her

She died. Nothing between us got settled. Whatever I do with the consequences of her neglect, I have to do it without her participation. The work of living with it is still mine.

Now there are also these drives. A photograph worth saving sits somewhere among thousands of pages I never wanted to read. Personal letters turn up beside another warning about the end of the world. I keep looking because I don’t want to lose something that matters. I resent how much looking that requires.

The archive brings me back into her world. I spend my time sorting what consumed her time, trying to find the pieces I want to carry forward. Some of it is valuable to me. Much of it is exhausting. Keeping a family photograph does not make the rest of the experience tender.

The files give her another chance to explain herself. They preserve the explanations she gave other people, the things she believed, the version of our family she put into letters. Reading them leaves me doing the same work again: separating what she said from what I experienced. Even the task of preserving a few things worth keeping pulls me back into dealing with her.

Going through her things has mostly reminded me how much of my attention she can still demand. My mother still feels like a burden I can’t shake. Calling this grief doesn’t describe all of it. I am tired of spending my time on her problems, and tired of making her understandable at the expense of being understood myself.

My mother died three years ago. I want more of my life to belong to me than this.

• Aaron