On the Death of My Mother - October 15th, 2026

 

When I was eight, I brought home a piece of “seatwork.” If you’re not from the US, seatwork is homework you do in class while the teacher has a smoke break.

My seatwork was a piece of paper divided in half. On the left side it said “What does your father do?” On the right, “What does your mother do?”

On the left side, I wrote “My father is full professor of English at Illinois State University in Bloomington. He went to school at Cornell and Michigan. He is the world’s foremost authority on diary literature.”

On the right side of the paper, I wrote “My mother cooks and cleans.”

You can imagine her reaction.

I learned more about my mother over the last few decades. Here is what I would put on the right side of the page today.

Jill Doner Kagle was a social worker. It was an exhausting job. When she came home after work, she sat on the couch to watch The Man from UNCLE with my father. She was asleep before the titles ended. It evoked a kind of Pavlovian response: for the rest of her life, she’d fall asleep when she heard the theme song. This exhaustion (coupled with the time someone threatened her with a gun) led her to leave social work for higher education.

Jill Doner Kagle was a full professor of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her students described her classes as difficult but rewarding. One time, she was in a meeting with her dean who asked why only three of her four classes made the Excellence in Teaching list.

You can imagine her reaction; shortly afterwards she was the dean.

It was a stressful job. When she visited the doctor about recurring headaches, the doctor said “I looked at your chart and thought Could it be HER JOB?”

I asked her why she made the career move, and she said there weren’t any good candidates. She took the post only until they found someone better qualified. She was dean for seven years.

Jill Doner Kagle never lied. We know this, because she told us herself. Her article Are We Lying to Ourselves About Deception says we shouldn’t see lying as an abnormal breaking of trust, but as a common way of establishing personal boundaries. If you want to know more, it’s in the journal “Social Service Review” and costs $17. Her biography ends with the sentence “She never lies.”

I highly recommend you check her bio out yourself. You will have to pay another $17.

And yes, Jill Doner Kagle cooked. She studied Julia Child because my brother and I thought my father’s cooking was tantamount to child abuse.

And yes, Jill Doner Kagle cleaned. She kept the cleanest home I have ever seen. She said it was because the kids at summer camp blamed her when their cabin was messy.

Jill Doner Kagle loved her children. When people asked my parents which child was their favorite, my father would say “Whichever one I’m with.” My mother would say “Whichever one I’m not with.” It was a good way of making sure she didn’t get asked that question again.

The truth was she loved both of us equally (even though one of us was clearly better). The truth was her love was enough for ten children. The truth was we were the most important things in her life.

She would do anything for us, no matter how difficult or costly or painful it was. She paid for expensive schools, babysat our children, took our families on vacation, did our housekeeping and would always be there when we needed her. She was our greatest cheerleader and defender and woe to anyone who hurt us because holy fuck Jill Doner Kagle could hold a grudge.

Jill Doner Kagle is my mother.

My mother is gone.

On the Death of My Father - January 2, 2024

There will be no more car magazines.

Of course, there will be. In some form. But nobody will erase the car pictures and redraw them. We’ll never know what a Cybertruck would look like with a rumble seat and fins. We’ll never see a Volkswagen Beetle SUV or an electric Studebaker minivan.

There will be no more children’s books.

Of course there will be, but they won’t be like the ones he wrote for his grandchildren. There will be no more William Walden Wilde or Roy N Renta. Merlin Minos Mot cast his last spell. Piffle Poffle baked his last waffle. And N.E. Wair is nowhere.

There will be no more English professors. No more Moby Dick or Hester Prynne or Walden Pond. Young Goodman Brown resides in Hell. Billy Budd hangs from the gallows. All the world’s diaries are on fire.

Let them burn.

Never again will someone give me feedback on my writing. Not like him. Yes, they will point out flaws I missed; they will encourage me with praise and sadden me with disappointment.

But he could upend everything with a few words. When I sent him a draft, I’d set aside two weeks because I knew any negative feedback would make me stop writing that long.

When he was in the hospital last, he’d asked me to read him my novel. I hate that novel. Four years. Fuck that thing. But he asked, so I read it to him as he moved in and out of his delirium. I thought he’d fallen asleep. I wouldn’t have blamed him. But he turned to me and whispered one word.

“Better.”

He said “better,” and it really was.

No one else could do that. No one else ever will again.

I’m sorry. This should be a time when we celebrate his life rather than bemoan his loss. I should talk about the Packard and parades. How he’d plan family trips with 800 nearly-identical options you’d have to choose from. Then there’s the questionable food choices: flako and postum, schav and gefilte fish, cheap caviar and expensive coffee.

And pretzels. So many pretzels.

I should talk about how Simon called him Feefadder because he couldn’t pronounce “grandfather” and how it stuck. Once, a waiter in a loud restaurant couldn’t get his attention until we got him to yell FEEFADDER!

But all I can think about is how the world is broken. Yes, the sun will rise tomorrow, despite what Trump says. The Earth will continue to turn. But it won’t do it the same. It won’t do it right.

Because there are no more Feefadders.

Parents will still name their kids Steven. And they’ll still name their kids Earl. God forbid. And judging from his grandchildren, there will be more than enough Kagles.

Who knows? Maybe there will even be another Steven Earl Kagle some day.

But he won’t be a Feefadder.

He might be a grandfather or a grampa. He could be a Pop Pop or Opa or Zaide. But try as he might he’ll never quite fill the Feefadder-sized hole in the universe.

There will be no more Feefadders, and everything is worse because of it.