Modern Love, Revised and Updated: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption

by Daniel Jones

ON THE AFTERNOON MY MOTHER died, she left work early. Her day as a computer programmer at Chase Manhattan Bank had skidded to an abrupt stop courtesy of a systemwide computer failure, and all the employees got the afternoon off. It was late December. My sixteenth birthday. Gray, snowless, cold enough to make the lawn crunch underfoot, but close enough to Christmas to make a few uncrowded hours seem like a gift. Or in my mother’s case, a curse. Rather than enjoying some last-minute shopping or hitting the couch, she methodically cleared her desk, drove the Honda home, fired up a pot of Turkish coffee, and hanged herself in our garage. Twenty years later my father insists that she wouldn’t have died that day if the systems hadn’t gone down. He might be right. Work gave my mother a structure that sealed the madness inside, if only for small chunks of time. Idleness brought trouble.