MOM'S ASHTRAY

“Its black letters spell the French version of my mother’s name.”

When my mother was in college she spent a year in France, and when that year was over she came home on an ocean liner, as people did back then. This ashtray came from the ship. Its black letters spell the French version of my mother’s name. For years I thought Suze was also the ship’s name, but it turns out to be the name of a liqueur.

As a kid, I stole money from my mother all the time—loose change, dollar bills—and she pretended not to notice, until the day I took a twenty from her wallet and lied about it. I imagine she understood it as a plea for attention in the mayhem of her failing health, but she still needed to set me straight. She sat me down and told me about the time she took a wooden whistle from her brother. They had ordered two from a catalog and her brother kept his pristine. When hers got tiny bite marks along the edge, she exchanged it for his without telling him. The moral of the story was that even a perfect whistle wasn't worth the guilt.

That was the mother I knew: honest to a fault and not covetous. She didn't even like to borrow things. So the lore my father fed us that she’d stolen the ashtray from the ship was hard to believe. But maybe she'd been more like me than she let on.

She’d lost her mother to cancer when she was young, too. She never spoke of it, but I know it happened fast. Perhaps this is why, in her final months, she insisted on tying up loose ends—maybe that was something her mother hadn't been able to do. Several weeks before she died, she asked my older sister to help her get to the Social Security office to make sure we'd receive survivor benefit checks. And she donated many boxes of books and clothes. She had real discomfort about leaving things behind.

After she died, my siblings and I argued over her remaining possessions. I kept a ring, some sweaters, a mini dress she’d made in college that I would eventually wear to shreds. I had my eye on the yellow ashtray too, which still sat in the center of the living room and to me symbolized a younger, slightly rebellious version of Mom. She had started smoking early and was hooked by the age of 16. This was the cautionary tale she told me when I was 11 and she caught me and a friend smoking in a closet. She didn't want me ending up like she had, unable to quit until she was pregnant with her first child, and then only after Dad agreed to pay her as an incentive.

I’ll never know if she really stole the ashtray. Maybe if I'd asked, she would have told me that a friend took it for her, seeing it as the perfect souvenir of a year abroad. Or that someone on the ship gave her permission to take it. But we talked less and less as she got sicker. As her energy slowly diminished, I grew fast in all directions, each of us pulled by opposing forces.

I didn't dare take the ashtray until my father remarried and my stepfamily moved in. I was 16 by the time I migrated it to my bedroom, where I'd smoke by an open window. If that counted as stealing, no one seemed to notice.

—Ann Faison

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Ann Faison is a writer, grief specialist and the creator of the podcast "Are We There Yet? Understanding Adolescent Grief." She lives in Pasadena with her husband and kids.