Dialog with the Dead - Umberto Tosi

A surreal memoir in Catamaran

I get melancholy on Halloween. I love its makebelieve and mockery of darkness and death. In my parental days I loved taking the kids trick-or-treating, earnest in their costumes, carried on by my grandchildren and great grandchildren today, carried when my eldest daughter Alicia Sammons builds an alter and does herself up for La Dia de Los Muertos, November 2. 

At the same time, I relive sad memories of the real thing - my mother dying in a San Francisco hospital the morning before Halloween some thirty years ago. 

I remember taking a granddaughter and my youngest daughter, both age 7, trick-or-treating, giggling in their costumes the following evening as if nothing had happened, as my mother - a perpetual prankster - would have insisted. 

The experience culminated months of watching my mother slip away. It cut deep. She had raised me in fiercely loving, but inconsistent ways. She hadn't been perfect, but done her damn best. Nevertheless, I couldn't avoid collateral damage from her mental swings and tribulations, especially with abusive men. 

Ma & my daughters,
Kara, Cristina, Alicia c. 1975

I was grown up, married with a child myself before she found herself and bloomed in the second half of her 80-year life. She proved Carl Jung's adage that "life doesn't really begin until age forty. It's just rehearsal before that."

She lived independently, she became a manager for the San Francisco Opera - a dream job for her. And she turned into my own daughters' fairy grandmother, their beloved nonna, the lynchpin of our blended family. 

It might have been cathartic to have journaled or otherwise creatively processed the the rush of feelings and memories  that ensued from her death, or talk more about it all, or at least see a shrink. 

But I'm a master of avoidance. As a boy I believed that real men suck it up and never cry. After a decent period of ceremonal grieving, I didn't ponder or write about those bittersweet days. That is until this summer,  when by chance I wrote a memoirist piece, recently published in the Fall, 2025 issue of Catamaran Literary Reader. 

I may not have even done this without inspiration from an esteemed, associate from my California days, Julia Keen, who has known losses of her own. 

She's one of those long-ago friends one reconnects with from far away online. We were talking about writing and death - related subjects if you think about it. I think I mentioned Negotiating With the Dead, my favorite book by a writer on writing. 

In this lucid handbook, Atwood explores supernatural aspects of writing along with the everyday craft and the disorienting roles writers end up playing. 

Atwood's wry, postmodern perspective reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges' surreal short story, Borges and I . There is no writing without a word with death, no matter how tacit -- consultation with those beyond, never on our own terms. 

My Granddaughter Fiona & Daughter
Alicia do Dia de los Muertos

We're all on the clock. As Atwood puts it: "...once you've got clocks, you've got death and dead people, because time, as we know, runs on, and then it runs out, and dead people are situated outside of time, whereas living people are still immersed in it.” 

The dead don't tend to appear with brass and thunder. 

Julia continued. "You won't see your dead loved one again. You won't even be able to talk on the phone. It's a little thing that hits you hard."

Julia took this to a literary level. "What if the dead person was able to phone you again, often. At first it would be beautiful. But what if the phone calls dragged on and all the things that used to irritate you about that person began to surface."

"I love the irony," I responded. "I suppose I would tolerate the irritants just like in normal life."

"It's a short story," Julia suggested. "Let's each of us write one and compare."

I loved the idea - a creative distraction from all my other ideas and commitments. We made a pact.

My dead mother phoned soon as I struggled to set ideas to paper. Unresolved issues came forth.

The story quickly drifted into magic realism with my mother's ghost calling daily on the old red plastic button phone she used to have in her appartment hallway. She teased and assailed me about things I needed to do, and my guilty procrastination in gathering family and scattering her ashes at an alpine lake in the high Sierra Nevada mountains. 

You get the picture. A tragicomic memorial that one of my favorite literary magazines did me the honor of publishing. 

I recalled Bessie Smith's Mean Blue Spirits dreaming-she-was-dead lyric:

"Fairies and dragons Spitting out blue flames Fairies and dragons Spitting out blue flames Showing their teeth For they was glad I came..."

Strange blue spirits grinned over my clueless shoulders.

Another story I didn't see coming arrived from the great beyond. Thanks to family, friends, unknown and loved ones living and dead. 

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Umberto Tosi's novels include his highly praised, Frank Ritz, Hollywood noir detective mysteries The Phantom Eye, and Oddly Dead, his story collection, Sometimes Ridiculous, plus books Ophelia Rising, High Treason, Sports Psyching and Our Own Kind. His short stories have been published in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. His nonfiction essays and articles have been published widely in print and online. He began his career at the Los Angeles Times as a staff writer and an editor for its prize-winning, Sunday magazine, West. He went on to become  editor of San Francisco Magazine. and managing editor of Francis Coppola's City of San Francisco. He joined Authors Electric in May 2015 and has contributed to Another Flash in the Pen and One More Flash in the Pen. He has four adult daughters. He resides in Chicago.