The Unicorn in the Garden: Fifty-Four Dollars of Memory

Sunday, May 11, 7:38 p.m., text message from Aunt Becky:

"Hi. And happy fur Mother’s Day. I went up to New York City yesterday for a performance. I found a couple of things for you that reminded me of your mother. I also got a $35 henna tattoo."

Me:

"It’s so thoughtful of you to send me something that reminds you of my mom. I’m sure you feel it too—Mother’s Day gets a little weird after your mom’s gone."

Her:

"Yep, it’s weird. And so is Father’s Day when they’re gone—and not having kids to be their mom or have a father person."

She says “fur Mother’s Day” because we’re both childless adult orphans, my aunt and I. But we have cats. The last two Kleins—even if, through marriage, we now have different last names. We orbit each other—tentative, awkward—desperate to connect, and scared to be rejected.

Her trip to the Met on Mother’s Day felt significant. I’ve never been—to the Met or to New York. Certainly not on Mother’s Day.

When her package of mother-relics arrived, I opened it slowly, uncertain of what grief might feel like in bubble wrap. Inside: a mouse pad, an enamel pin, and a greeting card with delicate quilling. Each featured The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, one of the Unicorn Tapestries. The price tags were still on, which meant I knew exactly what it cost her to remember my mother and share those memories with me: fifty-four dollars.

I sent a quick thank-you text. She replied, “It was ironic that I was at The Cloisters on Mother’s Day.”

I had to Google The Cloisters... and then, just to be sure, “ironic.” I texted back, “It was!”—even though I wasn’t convinced it really was. The museum was open, and she was there by choice. Seeing medieval art on Mother’s Day didn’t seem any more ironic than me watching Beavis and Butt-Head that same morning.

Still, something about it struck an angelic chord. Maybe it was the effort. Maybe it was the gesture. Maybe it was simply that someone remembered.

And the things she sent—they felt like my mother. But not the version I knew as an adult. They brought back the woman I vaguely remember as a child. Maybe even the one my aunt knew better: before the bitterness, before the disappointment. A mother who still collected unicorns. Who still believed in magic. A woman who vanished long before she actually died.

That version of my mother is someone I’ve come to grieve in pieces. Unlike Aunt Becky, I have no such relics to offer her—nothing of her mother’s, or even of her. My own mother made sure of that. She spent decades keeping both my aunt and grandmother out of our lives. I was left with only a few cryptic explanations, scattered like breadcrumbs by a wounded, vengeful woman to a trusting, hungry child. They didn’t make sense then. They still don’t.

And yet, I still find myself trying to make sense of it. Maybe family is just complicated. Maybe, as an only child, I’ll never fully grasp the tangled roots of sibling rivalry. My successful aunt—a towering figure—against my struggling single mom.

Or maybe it was more personal: the college boyfriend my mom slept with. The husband she cheered when he got another woman—not my aunt—pregnant. The petty, private feuds that bloomed into lifelong rifts.

I’ll never know the full truth, and maybe that’s the inheritance: an unsolvable puzzle. Still, for all the silence and suspicion, this same aunt—estranged, distant—might have known my mother better than I ever could.

What I do know is this: my mother never went to the Met. Never visited The Cloisters. Never saw the Unicorn Tapestries. Not on Mother’s Day. Not on any day. And she didn’t have $54 to spend in any gift shop. She was not like Aunt Becky.

So what becomes of the unrealized dreams of the dead? Do they linger in the spaces they leave behind?

No. They live in the mess of the living who remain.

They become a mouse pad on my desk.

An enamel pin on my corkboard.

A card too beautiful to send.

A package sent across a silent rift,

a thank-you to an aunt
my mother vowed never to speak to again.

Maybe that’s ironic.

Or maybe it’s just one of grief’s stranger tricks: the only way left to commune with my mother is through the person she tried so hard to erase.

Her legacy lives in me, but only if I tear down what she built to keep others out. And perhaps—though I barely dare say it—I’m starting to admire Aunt Becky. She’s reaching out—in the quiet, in the after—when my mother never did.

Perhaps, someday, I will be at The Cloisters on Mother's Day.
Wouldn't that be ironic?