I wrote this piece about my mother's death in May 2007. It doesn't have anything in particular to do with Christmas or with my birthday, but today is my birthday, and tonight Laura and I decorated our Christmas tree, and I guess it's fair to say that everything is always about my mother, in some way or another - often poignantly, but not always.
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Let’s get this part over with right up front: my mother was killed in a car crash in August of 1988. It was a harsh way for her to leave the world. Her body was crushed. Her sister, who was in the car with her, survived and remained conscious throughout the aftermath. Imagine.
My mother drove a Honda Civic. This was in the days before air bags were standard. (I don’t think about how it might have turned out if her car had had air bags.) She was hit by a much larger vehicle; it might have been a Ford Explorer. It was something big enough to throw a Honda Civic right off the road.
The state trooper knew the driver of the big car: he had cited that man for reckless driving in the past. As I remember it now, the story went that this trooper had said to him on some previous occasion, “You’ll kill somebody one day if you keep on driving like that.” But he still had his license and insurance.
As these things go, my two brothers and I ended up being represented by a PI attorney in a lawsuit against the driver’s insurance company. The attorney was a nice man, even a classy man, not the ambulance-chaser type I associate with that type of legal practice. He said that he had never seen such an open-and-shut case with such clear evidence of fault. He did what lawyers do, very competently I am sure, and as a result my brothers and I received sums of money in exchange for our mother’s death.
It was a strange thing to receive payment in exchange for feeling like an enormous hole had been ripped through me.
My then-husband and I went to see an investment broker because we knew nothing about what to do with this money. We did not tell her exactly where the money came from—we must have said that it came from my family, something vague like that. She remarked how lucky we were to have received this money. I liked her, and I didn’t like her any less because she said that. She just didn’t know. She is still my broker, and I still like her.
Several years later my father (who had been divorced from my mother long before her death in a guilty, uncomfortable, unresolvable, and protracted process that no one was ever able to feel good about) made some casual remark about this money—perhaps it was a comment about being able to afford to buy a house—which prompted me to say, “I would give back every penny right this minute if it would bring her back.” He looked at me, horrified, because of course he knew that. I’m sorry, Dad, I knew that you knew that. I know you would bring her back yourself if you could. You would have done anything to bring her back.
My dad was the one who told me she was dead. I was traveling in Europe at the time, and he had a terrible time finding me. First a telegram went astray, and then one night in a London guesthouse I got a message to call home. At the age of 27 I was still unacquainted with the inevitable signs of tragedy, and I did not realize what this message surely had to mean. My dad had a hard time making me understand. My brothers were backpacking together in the Cascade mountains and they didn’t find out until they came off the trail and my uncle picked them up. He had to tell them himself.
My father and his brother, it makes me weep now to think of them and what they went through in those awful days. Maybe they were not the greatest communicators who ever lived, but they loved us, and they knew enough of life and enough of my mother and of us to comprehend what we had lost. I think now that they, along with my aunt who was in the accident, my other aunt who was my father’s brother’s wife, and my grandmother who had lost her daughter, must have absorbed huge amounts of our grief and carried it for us, because we knew nothing about this kind of losing. It took us years to process this loss. We are still processing this loss. Our mother and the loss of her are layered into who we are in every way, at every level of our being. I cannot go a day without thinking of her. I have never been good at remembering her birthday or the anniversary of her death, but I am good at remembering her every day. Now, as I am starting to approach the age at which she died, I see her sometimes when I look in the mirror.
I do not really know why I am writing this essay about my mother now. I started it two days ago, on Mother’s Day, after I went on a bike ride. As I rode home I was thinking of my mother, and then I wrote a posting to my bike club listserv about the ride, and I added a paragraph about how I had been thinking of my mother. I have been writing to this listserv fairly often, even through the winter even though I don’t ride much in the winter, because there is a man in the group who interests me and I like the idea that he reads my postings. I didn’t think my mother would mind that these things coincided—my thinking of her on mother’s day, and my eagerness to come up with something good for the listserv that this man might read and enjoy. So here is the paragraph:
"It was chillier than I expected, and more overcast, and as I rode home, properly clothed, with Kleenex in my pocket for my runny nose, I reflected on how fortunate I was in my choice of a mother. She and my dad took us camping and hiking and canoeing throughout the Southeast during my childhood. I am now certain that my mother was the original inventor of the idea of layered clothing. She had that down long before the sporting goods companies ever thought of it. She also kept a Kleenex in every pocket of every article of clothing she owned. She was way way ahead of her time in carrying water bottles, and she never went anywhere without a snack in her purse or her daypack. She could pee behind a bush, change her clothes in the car, make instant coffee with a little electric gizmo that she stuck into a mug of water, and drink her beer from the bottle (or the can). In short, she knew how to be ready to go with what she needed. She died in 1988, and I still miss her, but oh how lucky I was, and I think I even knew it before I lost her."
