When Genevieve Kingston was a child in elementary school, her classmates drew pictures of their families with crayons. All the white children, including Kingston, used the orange crayon to draw skin. “But my mother really is orange,” said a young Kingston, “so she’s a realist.”
She was right. When Kingston was three years old, her mother Kristina was diagnosed with an advanced form of breast cancer. She tried all available treatments: medical and homeopathic. This included chemotherapy but also drinking large amounts of carrot smoothies, which apparently could help. She consumed so much of the substance that her hands and face turned orange.
Four years later, Kristina was told the cancer was incurable. With “aggressive treatment,” doctors thought she could live another year. Her family (Kingston, her mother, her father, and her older brother) lived in Santa Rosa, California, at the time, and both parents ran a nutritional drink company.
His mother stopped working and started another project. She decided to write a letter for each of her two children’s birthdays until they turned 30. She would also leave letters for big life events: finishing school, passing a driving test, going to college, getting engaged, getting married, having a child.
Four-year-old Genevieve with her mother Kristina, whose messages have kept her spirit alive for more than 20 years.
The project required a lot of time. Kingston remembers that the dining room became a card factory. The table was covered in scissors and glue, wrapping paper and ribbons. Along with the cards, Kristina left gifts and cassette tapes on which she had recorded herself reading the letters aloud. When she finished, she put the contents into two cardboard chests, one for each child, which she then hand-painted.
Kingston was about seven years old when his mother started writing the cards. “She was very impatient and jealous of all the time she put in,” says she, now a 35-year-old playwright, speaking over Zoom from her Manhattan apartment.
‘People in our family also thought it was a bit strange and were worried that this was not the right way to spend the precious time left, because it was a complicated task. But I think my mother was incredibly farsighted.
I mean, it’s been 23 years since I lost her and I’m having new conversations with her, because there are still letters in the mailbox that I haven’t read. She could always see the bigger picture.’
In 2001, ten days before Kingston and her mother’s shared February birthday, Kristina died at the age of 48. She had lived four years longer than doctors expected.
Kristina wanted to be buried in the cemetery at the end of her street, which was in the same area where she had grown up. She was first told it was full, but fortunately, her oncologist had a familiar plot of land with an open space for him; he left him for Kristina.
Ten years later, Kingston ran into the doctor at a funeral. “Did I ever tell you,” she said, “that your mother asked me for the argument?” Kingston said no. “Well,” the doctor explained, “she said she wanted to be buried in that cemetery because as a child she played there and she remembered urinating behind her tombstones. How could she say no to that? (That phrase, ‘did I ever tell you?’, is now the title of Kingston’s memoir, which tells the story of her mother and is published this month.)
Kingston remembers the early agony of waiting to open her mother’s letters. ‘I needed them a lot. It was almost like holding your breath for an entire year waiting for the next one. I really found the letters to be a lifesaver.”
Kristina had planned and prepared for almost every milestone; When Kingston started her period, she opened a four-page letter from her mother advising her what to do. But on some occasions (events her mother could not have predicted) there was nothing.
When Kingston was 22 years old, his father took his own life. He didn’t leave any note. “I didn’t see it coming,” she says. There was a “stark contrast” between how her parents died: “Both in terms of a long death and a sudden death, but also this preparation (from her mother) and this silence (from her father).” .
Still, ‘From the beginning I had the feeling that, like my mother, he did his best and strove to stay with us. And if he is not here it is because he could not be.
Some of the beautifully written and wrapped notes and gifts from Genevieve’s mother (who called her Gwenny)
When Kingston was 22 years old, his father took his own life. He didn’t leave any note. “I didn’t see it coming,” she says. There was a “stark contrast” between how her parents died: “Both in terms of a long death and a sudden death, but also this preparation (from her mother) and this silence (from her father).” . Still, ‘From the beginning I had the feeling that, like my mother, he did the best he could and did his best to stay with us. And if he is not here it is because he could not be.
In her early 20s, Kingston began to find opening her mother’s letters a sad process.
“It was almost as if we didn’t know each other anymore. She didn’t know all these things that had happened to me and who I had become. And I thought, “How could she predict what she would need?” But as Kingston grew older and approached the age Kristina was when she was diagnosed, I began to see things almost from her perspective. I thought about what it must have been like for her to put these letters together and what it must have cost her.
“I felt a surge of gratitude and awe at the courage and conviction it took to execute this incredible plan.”
After Kingston turned 30, she had opened all of her mother’s birthday cards and now only had three letters left: one for her engagement, one for her wedding, and one for her first child. In all the years she had been reading the notes, Kingston had never opened one early. But she was in a three-year relationship and she didn’t think she believed in marriage. The engagement letter was thick; full of promises and Kristina’s advice. Kingston opened it.
In several pages, her mother revealed that her own marriage, to Kingston’s father, had been unhappy but that they had stayed together for the children.
In a true marriage, spouses embrace each other with the utmost tenderness and respect.
Kristina added: ‘A true marriage is the marriage of what is most sacred in both. In a true marriage, the spouses embrace each other with the greatest tenderness and respect… One must have ease in both giving and receiving, capacity for forgiveness for oneself and for the other, a personal sense of balance that is not dependent of the balance of the other, a kind of loving detachment.’
Today, Kingston, who is still with his partner, has the marriage and baby letters left. They are kept inside the same hand-painted cardboard chest, which is on a shelf in her apartment. Since Kingston doesn’t know if she will get married or have children, does she think about when she might open these last two notes?
‘You know,’ he says, ‘one way or another, I got what I needed from the chest. I am confident that I am and have been loved, cared for and thought of, and that my connection with (my mother) is strong.
So I love that a little bit is left in the box and I hope to read those letters one day. Either because I have chosen that path of life or because I decided that it was time. But I no longer care when I open them. I’m just grateful to have them.’
memories of Genoveva Did I ever tell you? is published by Quercus, £20. To order a copy for £17 until June 2, visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.
