The Front Row Seat

What's there through the not there.

When I walked into Powell’s Books for one of the first events of my book tour, I knew exactly where my mom would sit.

Front row, center aisle, with no fewer than five copies of my book on her lap. She’d have been torn between buying out the entire stock in downtown Portland – and making sure there were plenty of copies available so other people could read her daughter’s words. She might have investigated the cost of billboards in Oregon. She definitely would have arrived so early that a bookseller would ask, “Ma’am, you know this event doesn’t start for another two hours?”

Her Facebook page would be flooded with updates. A maximally zoomed-in photo of the iconic Powell’s sign with “Emily Halnon” stamped in bold black letters. A collection of mother-daughter selfies, her arm squeezing my shoulders, fingers wrapped so tight around my book that no crowbar could pry them loose. The posts would be brimming with exclamation marks. The phrase “Emily’s book,” repeated more times than “amen” on a Sunday.

My mom was the most voracious reader I’ve ever known. The year she retired, she read 160 books. Even through college, she read every day for fun. A fact that boggled my mind while I trudged through 700-page texts on the politics of middle-north-upside-down Dakota and couldn’t handle a single word more than those assigned to me.

To see her daughter publish a book would have rocketed her right over the fullest moon.

When it was time for me to take my place, I walked up to the table with two water glasses perched on its ledge.

I looked at the audience as I slid into my chair and saw an older woman sitting in the front row. She appeared to be roughly my mom’s age, which I guess will be 66 forever. What my mother, and her life, would look like through the rest of her 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s is something we lost with her.

This woman’s cloudy grey hair was cut short, much like my mom’s until she lost it to cancer. Her hands were folded over a copy of To the Gorge, delicate fingers wrapped around the spine. Her eyes met mine with quiet anticipation.

A voice pulled my gaze away.

“Emily, I’m so excited to talk about this book.”

My friend, Peter, a Portland-based runner and writer, sat across the table from me and turned to ask the first question.

I knew Peter would be the perfect conversation partner for the night. Our stories are different, of course, but we’ve both felt the unmooring nature of maternal loss, and have often turned to running as a way to process our hardest feelings.

“Who’s bringing the Kleenex?” he texted me a few days earlier.

At that point, I’d reread my book approximately 327 times. I never knew just how much I’d have to scour my own words until I got to the final stage of proofing, when seemingly every day, my editor would email me for “one more read.”

I’d spent weeks recording podcasts and radio interviews, and speaking with media outlets and book stores. On the morning of the Powell’s event, I’d finished narrating the audiobook in a recording studio on the outskirts of Portland.

By the week of my book’s release, I could often talk through the death of my mother, and the grief I’d carried for four years, without flinching. During an interview that morning, a reporter had cried while my eyes stayed bone dry.

But looking at the front row of Powell’s, and seeing the hole where my mom should be, was quicksand that yanked me back into the rawest grief.

The space was packed, with people standing in the back. But I did not see a full room. I saw the vacant seat.

Grief can be sneaky. There are times when I expect a tidal wave and find a dry spring. And moments when it blindsides me. When my partner’s mom asks a simple: “What is your favorite Christmas cookie?” and I see my mom pressing her thumb into soft peanut butter dough, with Bing Crosby crooning in the background, and suddenly, there are tears rolling onto my pizza.

And sometimes, it’s predictably impossible. Like when I have to confront the things that my mother will never know – and that I’ll never know with a mother. The big milestones and life changes since her death. New homes, dogs, jobs, ages.

And, the publication of my first book.

As we approached the end of our hour, Peter turned to the audience and invited people to ask questions.

The woman in the front row was one of the first to lift her hand. It was a timid raising of her arm, more nervous kid with an earnest question than child looking to flaunt their knowledge.

“Thank you both for your beautiful talk,” she started. She tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear.

“I’m dying,” she said.

My breath caught in my throat. Quicksand rushed beneath me.

“How can I make sure that my children know how much I love them?”

She paused. No one in the room was breathing. Every creaky chair and floorboard had gone silent.

“How can I protect them from hurting when I’m gone?”

I didn’t trust myself to speak without my voice cracking into a fault line that would swallow the entire bookstore.

When my mother first called to tell me she had cancer, she got my voicemail. She didn’t try me again for days. Before she did, she texted to make sure my dog, Brutus, was close by.

She’d lost her mother to cancer at 19, and knew how the news of her diagnosis would hit. At her mother’s funeral, she draped her body over the coffin, begging her mom to come back, her wails filling every nook of the church.

It was easy to imagine her going to a book event in Vermont and asking an author how to protect her children from that pain.

I looked at this woman and tried to find the right words.

I don’t know what my mother would have looked like at 77 or 89. I don’t know how many books she would have read in 2024 or whether she’d still be celebrating birthdays by jumping out of a plane or biking her age in miles.

But I know on the eve of my first book, she would have been sitting in the front row, building a leaning tower of books on her lap.

“I have a feeling, your children will always feel just how much you love them,” I said.

I wasn’t sure how to tell her that there’s no way to stop the immense pain that comes with that kind of love. It’s supposed to hurt.

I looked at the seat next to hers. I was reaching and reaching and reaching for a mom that wasn’t there, grasping for anything that would let me feel her. The vivid image of her in the front row. The ache for my mom, beating with my heart.

My book, To the Gorge, marked its first birthday this week. I was going to write a post reflecting on book things and this story came out, instead. I’ll probably still write something of that nature, but sometimes you’ve gotta write what wants to be written. And this week, these were the words that wanted to find their way to the page. Thank you for reading them.