Closure

I often walk in my neighborhood late at night. I enjoy the solitude and it’s almost a guarantee I won’t run into some random person who disturbs it by simply appearing on the same street as me. We live just outside the city and, on a clear night it’s dark enough to see millions of stars sprayed across the inky sky.

As luck would have it, this night was overcast.

What do I think about on my walks? It depends. If I’ve had too much to drink, I usually rage walk. Pissed off that my husband still hasn’t fixed the overhead lamp he broke 10 months ago, or mentally berating my aunt who died a while back and left behind a hoarders’ nightmare for my brother and me to clean up (this despite being an outspoken etiquette critic who appeared to have it all together), or maybe my thoughts just marinate in outrage at the general state of the world and the former imbecile who occupied the White House’s role in it.

If I’ve had a little something to stronger than booze, I daydream (nightdream?) often coming up with utterly amazing inventions, business plans, or solutions to problems that I’ve completely forgotten what they were by the next day. One particularly brilliant plan that I developed solves California’s water shortage, combats climate change and rising sea levels, while providing all the cheap sea salt the world could ever need in one fell swoop. But that’s a story for another day.

On this night I was completely, stone cold, sober. There was not a star in the sky. And I was feeling sentimental. I was reflecting on my mother’s recent death. It had been about a year, and I would still go over the months, days, and hours leading to her death and experience all the stages of grief in a single day.

As I walked, I was really wrestling with two. Guilt and anger. Guilt that I hadn’t called her enough and would often get exasperated when my caller ID read “Mom and Dad”. Sometimes I wouldn’t answer the phone. It’s not that I didn’t love her, but she could be trying, sometimes critical, frequently demanding, almost always depressing.

Which leads me to the anger.

I was so angry that she didn’t take care of herself. She drank too much, she rarely left the house, or her chair for that matter, in the last 10 years. Every family event revolved around what she needed or wanted in relation to her failing health. She was always complaining about how bad she felt and whatever the current ailment was. And she did little to improve it. She would land in the hospital every few years with serious illnesses that mostly stemmed from her not addressing her medical issues. We all knew one day she wouldn’t come home from one of those events.

But of course, she was my mom. She did wonderful things for me. Some of my best childhood memories are of the weeklong camping trips we took as vacations. And who else’s mom buys them a horse for her twelfth birthday after years of begging?

When I was single, poor, and trying to work and go to college, she babysat my daughter sometimes for several days straight. She created beautiful and unique Halloween costumes for all my children and was known for her over the top Christmas gifts which truly made the holiday magical for me as a child and later for my own kids. (Although as an adult this was incredibly stressful for me because, as the years wore on, she was physically able to do less and less, and it all fell on my shoulders.) She was brilliant, and feisty, and had a wicked sense of humor.

But the long-term neglect of her health all came to a head in late 2020 when her kidneys failed. She ended up in a nursing home, presumably to recover. Even then I didn’t call her enough, although she didn’t call me either. Next other organs began to fail. Two months later the doctors began to talk about hospice. It’s weird how it all happened so fast even though it took two decades to play out. In the end, I spent a week in hotels with my dad 80 miles away from home while he visited her in the hospital. COVID prevented anyone else from visiting, until one day my dad said I could come up. I thanked the charge nurse for allowing me to see my mom and she responded, “when it’s end of life, we bend the rules a little." No one had told me yet that it was the end of her life. “What happened to hospice care?” I wondered. I thought we had more time.

When I entered her room, she was in bad shape, every breath was clearly torture. It was obvious to me that no one could live very long having to fight so hard just to breath. She barely acknowledged me, the only words she said to me in the two days I was there was “I know” after I had told her I loved her. She never looked at me. I wanted to say something meaningful, but I couldn’t get two words out around my clenched throat. I wanted to hear her say she loved me one last time. All she said over and over was “help me.” It was devastating. I knew I’d waited too long to have the talk I should have had with her a long time ago.

Later my brother came up. And dammit if she didn’t perk right up, look at him, smile and say “oh honey, you’re here. You look good!” while reaching for his hand. He always was her favorite. He stayed for a few hours and then left; he never saw her again. I came back the next day and watched her die.

I was thinking about all of this as I was walking, angry, guilty, and sad. I ran into a small group of deer that bolted when they saw me, and I smiled to myself because my mom loved it when she saw deer anywhere. She had a great love for wildlife, which is where I got it, I suppose. But despite the fact that I grew up in “the country” in a log house, we rarely saw much wildlife beyond about a billion squirrels and birds. Now that I live in a subdivision, we frequently have deer, coyotes, and even giant snapping turtles show up in our yard. One spring a doe gave birth to a fawn in our yard, it camped out on our front porch for a few days, my mom loved that picture.

Mom and I especially shared a love of owls. I have owl stuff all over my house that she gave to me over the years, pictures, figurines, a cookie jar. She bought my daughter a rainbow stuffed owl that is, to this day, her favorite stuffy. And wouldn’t you know it, as I walked along my streets on that cloudy night, thinking about my mom, I saw perched in a tree the snowy shape of a Barn Owl. I could even make out the shape of its head. I probably stood there for five minutes, reassured and warmed by the certainty that this was a sign from my mom. She’d come to say she loved me and I told her all the things I should have said that day in the hospital. I thanked her for the sacrifices she made to stand by me when I got knocked up in high school, for never missing an important event in my life, whether it was a track meet, the birth of my children, or graduating from law school, I apologized for how hard I was as a teenager and young woman (you heard me say I got knocked up in high school right?), and I told her I loved her. I knew she was proud of me.

Honestly, we said a whole lot more than that but I’m not putting it all down here. It’s just too much to say and I don’t have the words for it. The thing about talking to a person after they’re already dead is that you don’t have to put together actual sentences or force words out around a bowling ball in your throat. Our communication occurred on more of a metaphysical level. But I left there feeling immense satisfaction.

The comfort and warmth that I felt that night is still with me all these months later. I no longer struggle with my anger and guilt. The sadness is still there but I have reached that stage they call acceptance. This despite the fact that the next day when I drove past that tree and looked up into the branches what I saw was a crumpled white plastic bag where an owl should be.

I told you she had a wicked sense of humor.