Saying Good-Bye To Mom
The departed communicate as best they can, especially when they’re new at it.
The spirit-world around this world of sense Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere Wafts through these earthly mists and vapours dense A vital breath of more ethereal air.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Haunted Houses
My sister called on the morning of Mother’s Day, 2010.
“Hey,” I said. “How did everything go yesterday?”
She stumbled on her words. “Something happened to mom in her sleep, and she didn’t wake up. She died.”
It was quick and to the point, a surgical strike to the heart of the matter, because how else do you break news like that? Our mother was seventy-two, not young but not old either, not these days. As far as we knew, she was healthy.
She’d asked for a Mother’s Day party, something she’d never done, and they’d held it the night before. I think it made her really happy but I don’t know because I didn’t go. We were selling our house and didn’t have time to drive the two hundred kilometers from Toronto to London, Ontario. We’d go the following weekend.
I’m still heartbroken by that choice. She would have understood though; she was a kind woman.
The next twenty-four hours were surreal, and not just because of the shock and grief of losing that most visceral of relationships without warning.
Not knowing what else to do, my wife Chris and I got in the car and drove down to London, where we sat with my siblings and my stepfather in helpless silence. I looked up at the landing on the stairs and remembered Mom standing there, happy and proud, watching the family gathered in the living room for a celebration.
Chris and I had booked a hotel, and we eventually went back there to sleep. We woke up around three am and— almost without speaking — checked out and drove home. To this day, I don’t know why.
A ways down the highway, we came to a detour and were diverted onto a deserted country road. It felt symbolic, a parallel journey down a dark path at night, driving east into the sunrise.
When the people we love leave us, we look for signs that they’re ok. That the essence of them survives, somewhere, and can communicate with us if we just listen for it. Is this real, or just grief and hope and imagination?
I’ve always believed that when someone passes, there’s a brief, liminal time where we can still find and feel each other.
A couple of nights later, before the funeral, I woke up and smelled cigarette smoke in the bedroom. No one in our house smoked, but my mom had a tough time quitting. Even in her seventies, she would sometimes slip out for a quick puff after a meal.
I nudged Chris. “Hey. Do you smell anything?”
She rolled over, groggy. “I was just dreaming someone was smoking.”
As we were getting ready on the morning of the funeral, the vacuum cleaner turned on by itself, scaring the shit out of the dogs. My mom wasn’t a notable housekeeper, but I guess spirits communicate as best they can, especially when they’re new at it.
The funeral was a funeral. Old friends, greyer and slower now, but making the trip because she was well-loved. Tributes and tears, and laughter, because that’s how she taught us how to deal with sad times. There was an open casket but it held only an empty shell, a waxwork figure. All the parts of her that mattered had left.
Still, I felt like she was nearby. Soon after, I had a dream that she was standing outside the back door of our house, and I was looking at her through the window. She was young again, the way she looked when I was a kid, with raven black hair and ice-blue eyes. She was smiling.
“Hey,” I said through the window. “I love you!”
She said, “I love you, too,” and turned around to walk away.
“Then why are you going?” I dream-shouted.
She looked back and grinned. “I have to start again!”
I don’t know what that meant. Maybe she was talking to me from beyond, or maybe my brain was manufacturing a comforting story for itself.
Here’s the epilogue, the last story, where my mother reached out to us one more time.
A year or so later, Chris and I visited a medium who claimed to speak with spirits of the dead. She only knew us by first name, and insisted that we not give her any clues as to who we wanted to contact, or even agree or disagree with what she was saying.
She soon identified an older woman coming forward to talk to me — my mom, she said? She could have guessed, of course. I was at an age to have lost my mother, and people don’t go to mediums unless they’re hoping to communicate with someone.
Still, the messages she passed along were accurate and specific — the number of kids and grandkids, that my mom had remarried and lived in a house with my stepfather, details of a creative project I’d finished just before she died.
She said she was proud of me for mending fences with my stepfather, with whom I’d had a fraught relationship in my youth. That she’d stood on the landing overlooking the living room, and seen us together talking about history and politics, and it made her happy. This last brought me to tears.
Some people will think I’m gullible or deluded. That I see what I want to see, and believe the unlikely and the outrageous because it gives me consolation.
And maybe those people are right. But in the end, what can we trust but our own experience; what we see, hear, and feel? Let it be true enough. I love you, Mom.