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My mother has been much on my mind.
I passed the nineth anniversary of her death earlier this month. It’s strange how she is more with me now that she is gone and how much our relationship has softened.
In the year before she died, my mother began calling me “her angel.”
“I don’t know what I would do without you,” she said.
I resisted at first. I could not accept that the woman who had never looked out for me, never really mothered me was now being sweet. I brushed off her kindness. I wasn’t about to give Mom a pass for fifty years of neglect.
But then something shifted.
It was early winter then. I decided to stop fighting—my mother, her caregivers, the insurance company that pulled her in and out of hospice dozens of times. I surrendered to to it all.
Most days I simply called to check on Mom and I brought her food once a week: whatever she asked for—cupcakes or GoodTimes or KFC.
On one of those visits in the weeks before she died, out of the blue, she said, “I wish I could go back and do it all over because you deserved better.”
There it was. The thing I always wanted from her.
Mom died just a few weeks later, in early January.
I sat with her, along with my sister, Nancy, through most of the day as Mom lay sweating her her bed, her breath labored.
I held her hand. I fed her her last meal: three sips of Pepsi.
The day waned. “I’ll stay if you want me to,” I said over and over.
But I knew she was waiting for me to leave.
An hour after I got home, the nurse on duty called to tell me Mom had passed.
In the days before she died, I began to ask my staunchly atheist mom to work a little magic for me from the beyond. I twirled my finger at her as I said it.
"Ok," she said, twirling her finger back.
Three months after she died, I had a piece accepted by the NYTimes, an agent called to ask if I had representation, and eight months after that, I sold Rough Beauty for more money that I'd made in a decade.
That was my mom. I am sure of it.
When she was alive, our relationship was fraught. But whenever I think of her now, I feel her delight. I’ve had one memorable dream about her since she passed. In it, she was showing me how she could create things with her mind. She thought and then a beautiful object appeared. She had childlike happiness and delight I’d never seen.
I am contented to know that my mother and I can love each other now in a way we could not when she was alive.
And this makes me happy.
I buried some her ashes beneath the big ponderosa pine, the tree that is the oldest on our property, out back. Covering her ashes at the base of the tree is the pedestaled head of a Buddha, which belonged, ironically, to my mother. Nearby, there is a large rock, upon which I lay offerings: spirit food on Day of the Dead, pomegranates at the beginning of winter, sage in the summer, and the body of birds that I sometimes find on the deck.
The land there holds more than my mother’s ashes, more than offerings, it holds memory. And story.
I go there to read or write or daydream in the summertime. Sometimes the bear will come through and kick over the Buddha head and I will remember to think of my mother.
She is there, in the garden, watching over me in a way she could not while I was alive.
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Big love,
Karen
Living Wild Prompt: Living Memory
Memory is a story is a living body is a piece of sheer silk swirling in the breeze. So much of what our lives and the stories we tell about ourselves is rooted in memory. We have memories that haunt us, thrill us, elude us. Diving into memory is like exploring an old house or stepping on a well beaten path to crawl around in the underbrush. But if we learn to access it, we can make our memories work for us. And they will sing!
Here I revisit one Living Wild Prompt and offer another—both focused on memory.
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