When Genevieve Kingston was a child in elementary school, her classmates would draw pictures of their families with crayons. All the white children, including Kingston, used the orange crayon to draw the skin. “But my mom is really orange,” said a young Kingston, “so it’s realistic.”
She was right. When Kingston was three, her mother Kristina was diagnosed with advanced form of breast cancer. She tried every available treatment: medical and homeopathic. This included chemotherapy, but also drinking large amounts of carrot smoothies – which apparently could help. She consumed so much of the stuff 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. The family – Kingston, her mother, her father and her older brother – lived in Santa Rosa, California at the time, and both parents owned nutritional beverage companies.
Her mother quit her job and started another project. She decided to write a letter to both of her children for every birthday until they turned thirty. She also left letters for big life events: finishing school, passing a driving test, going to college, getting engaged, getting married, having a child.
Genevieve is four years old and has her mother Kristina, whose messages have kept her alive for more than twenty years
The project took a lot of time. Kingston remembers the dining room being converted into a card factory. The table was covered with scissors and glue, wrapping paper and ribbons. In addition to the cards, Kristina left gifts and cassette tapes on which she had recorded herself reading the letters out loud. When she was finished, she placed the contents into two cardboard boxes, one for each child, which she then hand-painted.
Kingston was about seven years old when her mother started writing the cards. “I had a real impatience and was jealous of all the time she put into it,” she says, now a 35-year-old playwright, speaking via Zoom from her Manhattan apartment.
‘People in our extended family also found it a bit strange and worried that this was not the right way to spend the precious time that was left – because it was a complicated undertaking. But I think my mother was incredibly prescient.
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 box that I haven’t read. She could always see that bigger picture.”
In 2001, ten days before Kingston and her mother’s joint birthday in February, Kristina died at the age of 48. She had lived four years longer than all doctors expected.
Kristina had wanted to be buried in the cemetery at the end of their street, which was in the same neighborhood where she grew up. At first she was told it was full, but luckily her oncologist had a family plot with an open space for him; he gave it up for Kristina.
Ten years later, Kingston met the doctor at a memorial service. “Did I ever tell you,” he said, “how your mother asked me for the plot?” Kingston said no. “Well,” the doctor explained, “she said she wanted to be buried in that cemetery because she played there as a girl, and she remembered peeing behind the headstones. How could I say no to that?’ (That phrase, “Did I ever tell you?”, is now the title of Kingston’s memoir – which tells her mother’s story and is being published this month.)
Kingston remembers the early agony of waiting to open her mother’s letters. ‘I needed them so badly. It was almost like holding your breath for a year, waiting for the next one. The letters really felt like a lifeline.’
Kristina had anticipated 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, her father took his own life. He didn’t leave a note. “I didn’t see it coming,” she says. There was a ‘stark contrast’ between the way 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 was doing his best and doing his utmost to stay with us. And if he’s not there, it’s because he couldn’t be there.’
Some of the beautifully written and wrapped notes and gifts from Genevieve’s mother (who called her Gwenny)
When Kingston was 22, her father took his own life. He didn’t leave a note. “I didn’t see it coming,” she says. There was a “stark contrast” between the way 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 was doing his best and doing his utmost to stay with us. And if he’s not there, it’s because he couldn’t be there.’
In her early twenties, Kingston began to find opening her mother’s letters a sad process.
‘It was almost as if we no longer knew each other. She didn’t know what had happened to me and who I had become. And I thought, ‘How could she possibly predict what I would need?’ But as Kingston grew up and got closer to the age Kristina was when she was diagnosed, I almost started to see things 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 wave of gratitude and awe at the courage and conviction it took to carry out this incredible plan.”
After Kingston turned thirty, she had opened all of her mother’s birthday cards and now had only three letters left: one for her engagement, one for her wedding, one for her first child. In all his years of reading the notes, Kingston had never opened one before. But she was in a relationship for three years and didn’t think she believed in marriage. The engagement letter was thick; full of promise and Kristina’s advice. Kingston opened it.
Throughout the 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, partners cherish each other’s souls with the utmost tenderness and respect
Kristina added, “A true marriage is a marriage of what is most sacred in both of you. In a true marriage, partners cherish each other’s souls with the utmost tenderness and respect… One must have ease in both giving and receiving, a capacity for forgiveness both for oneself and for the other, a personal sense of balance that is not dependent on the balance of the other, a kind of loving detachment.’
Today, Kingston – who is still with her partner – is left with the marriage and baby letters. They are kept in the same hand-painted cardboard box, which sits on a bookcase in her apartment. Since Kingston doesn’t know whether she will get married or have children, is she thinking about when she will open these last two notes?
“You know,” she says, “somehow I got what I needed out of the box. I have the reassurance that I am loved, cared for, thought of, and that my connection to [my mother] is solid.
So I love that there’s a little bit left in the box, and I look forward to reading those letters someday. Either because I chose that path in life, or because I decided it’s time. But I don’t worry about it anymore when I open them. I’m just grateful to have them.”
Genevieve’s memoir Have I ever told you? is published by Quercus, £20. To order a copy for £17 until 2 June, visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.