What’s going on in “Disappearing”

First, my apologies. Disappearing, a story of a woman who is paralyzed by the disappearance/death of her parents, is hard to swallow. The piece is a string of bad events, bad choices, and bad news. There’s not really any redemption here, except for the barest of hints at the end when Roz weeps for herself, which could suggest a kernel of change is coming, now that Roz seems to have hit rock bottom and must face her grief.

If you’ve read the story, Friday Dinner, you may recognize Roz as the children’s mother who seems too depressed to care for them adequately. Disappearing is my attempt to humanize Roz and show where she comes from. Yes, she may grow into a mother who ultimately neglects her kids, but knowing her backstory helps explain her limitations. Despite her failings, I believe she’s doing the best she can, given her childhood experiences. (For more on this, check out my post, “The Most Important Premise of All.”)

Roz is driven solely by emotion. Sometimes, she’s aware of her poor choices—pursuing the paramedic while knowing her uncontrolled neediness will ultimately deplete and drive him away—but she can’t help herself. Her feelings are too intense, and they overrun her rational thinking.

At the root of her poor choices lies a narrative of abandonment.

Roz initially believes her parents took their own lives, though we later learn through Gida that Roz’s father is supposedly alive—it’s even hinted that he may be responsible for the mother’s apparent death. What is real is never clear to the reader, and perhaps the truth is less important than Roz’s experience of her parents: if she imagines them abandoning her with their suicide, we have to assume this abandonment has been Roz’s ongoing experience with them.

Roz’s abandonment narrative then plays out with her Aunt Gida. Unfortunately, Gida is a remote and cool woman, and this only confirms Roz’s narrative that the people who are supposed to care for her ultimately abandon her.

She tests Gida with her drinking—a curious identification with her father—and when Gida leaves, Roz’s rage erupts, and she burns Gida’s scrapbooks. Here, we have to wonder if, in burning the books, Roz is finally expressing her fury over her parents’ rejection.

Roz is now responsible for her caregiver’s (Gida’s) abandonment, reflecting how, as a child, she likely felt responsible for her parents’ abandonment, a common childhood narrative that is based on a common childhood misperception.

A “truce” is called; Roz has pushed things dangerously far with Gida, and only by strictly reigning in her anger can Roz hope to preserve Gida as a caregiver.

The piece then jumps ahead in time, and we see Roz moving from one bad-choice relationship to another. She finds herself with a married man, hoping he’ll leave his wife, but knowing he won’t. Clearly, she needs to listen to what her head is telling her: there’s no hope for this relationship. But she shouldn’t ignore her feelings either. Instead, she needs to assess her feelings to decide whether they make sense.

Here, her feelings are telling her that with love comes abandonment and loss, that she should always be afraid and cling to what she has before it’s gone.

This doesn’t make sense, especially when she meets the paramedic, but if she can’t open the communication between her head and heart—if she doesn’t allow her head to weigh in on her heart’s misperceptions—then she’s liable to let her heart influence her decisions. Which is exactly what happens.

Things seem to spiral out of control as Roz seems determined to hit rock bottom. And perhaps she does.

She becomes pregnant. Will she repeat her childhood experiences with her own child?

With her miscarriage, as she weeps, we have to wonder who she’s weeping for: herself, her child, her parents, or all the above. In the end, her poor choices have been driven by her fear of loss which, ironically, have only created further losses.