“When I called in the spring to say hello to your grandmother she told me you were coming soon. I wanted to see you.” My mother’s best friend, who I called Aunty to show closeness and respect, was sitting at the table sipping tea.

“I brought something for you. Come sit.” I put down a small plate of cookies I had arranged in the kitchen and sat with her. Whenever there was company, my grandmother and aunt would sit at the table entertaining, while I went back and forth to the kitchen, bringing out tea and food. If it was mid- afternoon, I’d bring slices of cake, biscuits, chocolates. We kept a supply of sweets for guests; it was unacceptable to receive someone in your home and not feed them.

“Yes Aunty.” I sat once everyone was served, with my apron still on, although that wasn’t ideal. I should have removed it, I would have for more formal guests, but anyone very close could be welcomed as we were.

“Your aunt said that you’ve been asking everyone about your mother, so I thought you might want to have these.” She handed me a brown parcel with the words “Listy Ewy” [Ewa’s Letters] on it.

 “Oh, thank you Aunty; what are these?” Yes the title was self-explanatory but I wanted to understand what exactly I’d find inside and how she came to have it.

“Your mother and I wrote to each other, as time allowed, when you first left Poland. I wish I had written more, said more, but you know…” she didn’t finish her thought.

“Are you sure? They were written to you; don’t you want to keep them?

“I’ve had them for many years. She’s there, in those letters, her words. Maybe they’ll help you find whatever it is you’re looking for?”

“But do you think she’d want me to see them?” I was holding the parcel, in part hoping she’s change her mind and take it back, in part hoping she wouldn’t. I realized I was being given something I was never meant to see.

“I think she’d be okay with it. You’re an adult now, you’re a mother, you’ll understand her words. I took out a few, just so you know; these are the ones I thought she’d be okay with you seeing.”

“Oh, what did you take out?” I was curious that she told me this; I would never have known the difference.

“The worst ones…” She said under her breath. My grandmother was busy chatting with my aunt, neither heard her whisper this.

“The worst ones?” I asked quietly.

“The ones about her relationship with your dad.” We exchanged a knowing look. She didn’t need to say more, although I probably didn’t know the worst of it, I knew enough.

“I think there could have been much in them that I didn’t see, I lived through it,” I said, “but I understand, she was confiding in you. It’s good she could tell someone.”

“She had a very hard life, your mom,” her voice broke. “She tried; she tried so hard, I know she did everything she could to make it better for all of you.”

“I know she did.” Sadness swept over me.

“But she didn’t have the strength in the end. Anyway, I won’t say more, you’ll see her words.”

That’s the way everyone always described the end of my mother’s life; that her strength gave out. Whatever they knew or didn’t know, it was no secret my mother was living one life behind closed doors and another in the world. To the world she smiled, to the world she brought kindness, she was loved and respected. An angelic, imperfect human being, she gave until she had nothing left to give.

“Thank you for this, for coming all this way.” My aunt had travelled from Germany with my mother’s letters; she said she couldn’t mail them. The risk of losing some of the only pages that contained my mother’s unfiltered thoughts, her version of the truth, her silent voice in all the chaos and the noise, was too high.

We spent the afternoon chatting, reminiscing; laughing at the things they had done together, best friends since high school.

My aunt knew my mother as a person, in a way I never knew her. Not just a younger woman, before we were born and before she was married, but a woman who had her own dreams. A woman, my aunt said, that continued to live within my mother even after her life was no longer her own. My aunt said inside my mother there had been a magnificent person she kept hidden from the world, maybe because there was no room for her in the world. There was room for the cook, the cleaner, the mother, the wife, the worker, but not for Ewa.

Ewa was the woman I wanted to know.

I went home to Canada at the end of that visit to Poland without opening the parcel of letters. This was it I thought; this might just be the closest I would ever get to her now. I’d have her words; that was a gift. But I felt so sad. There would be no conversation; I wouldn’t be able to ask her any questions of clarification; I wouldn’t be able to reassure her that all would be well.

Her thoughts were frozen in time; they were never intended for my eyes; but now I had them.

Months passed as I wrestled with whether or not I had any right to see these letters. I imagined her sitting at work, on her breaks, in the staff lounge at the long term care home where she was a nurse’s aide, writing out her tired thoughts. She wrote them to her best friend trusting they’d never be shared with another person.

But wasn’t this what I was searching for – the woman – all masks off, all the façade, all the posturing, the pretending that ‘it’s all okay’, stripped down to a few handwritten pages.

“What are you looking for?” my sister asked me when I told her I had mom’s letters. “What are you expecting to find?”

“I don’t know, I just want to know her, I want to know her on the inside.”

“Be careful, you might spend your whole life looking for her and never find what you’re after.”

It was true, she was right; I had already spent so much time, so much money chasing our mother’s ghost.

“How do you know who you are if you don’t know where you’ve come from?”

“I don’t know,” my sister answered. She wasn’t haunted by our mother’s death the way I was. Maybe it was because they had a few extra years together; maybe they had a chance to know each other in a way my mother and I never did. Each of us, each of the five of us, Ewa’s children, had a different relationship with our mother; different memories, different moments of sweetness, and different wounds.

My conversation with my mother wasn’t done. I wasn’t done needing her, I wasn’t done wanting her, I wasn’t ready to admit our journey together had ended.

She was alive somewhere, somewhere out there, even if she was scattered across the world alive in the memories of family, friends, strangers, I was going to find each piece and I was going to put them together.

I was going to find Ewa.