This narrative is a work of disconnect and connect during the morning of September 20, 2018. Around 10:04 a.m. my sister, Abby, told me that my mother had died that morning and was found by our brother, Andy. My narrative chronicles that morning from 10:04 a.m. through 10:35 a.m., and then summarizes most of the rest of the day. I ground this autoethnography in relational ethics, detailing how I grapple with writing about Dolly, my mother, my siblings, and others. I also detail how Dolly’s death affects my narrative inheritance. Using emotional recall, I use the terms “disconnect” and “connect” to demonstrate the modality of telling the news and how I slowly disconnected from reality, through the use of cellphones, trance-like states, changing scenery, and television watching, so that I could connect to the news and to others. I conclude with offering a mother-daughter canon.
University of California Press