What's In a Name? Musings on Losing a Mother

When I saw the blue-black ghost bird of your death rise up, its shallow wings translucent in the morning light, I was relieved that you were done being in two places at once. Had I been brave enough to ask him my question, I imagine he would have leveled his pinpoint-pupiled gaze on me, and conveyed with a silence wide enough to cover both our knowing: this ride’s not for you, earth-girl. But by then, the world had begun to chirp around us, and you lay there like a wax model, your hair long and black and shinier than it should have been.

Back when I could call your name, it was such an unseen luxury. It was the way we use water in a rich country, the long showers, wash-rinse-repeat. Of all the riches in my life, this one meant the least. It didn’t matter how careless I was, because there was always another chance to use it; it was just another word, probably the first word. But now, a word like a fallen robin’s egg. Robin-less, but still a flawless shade of longing, a life-breaking blue.

Being you-less is a blue that holds too much promise, the hope without hope, the whispered return to us. We are marked. There you are, at our sides, making us flinch at casual remarks while trying to keep our faces still. The weight of your absence lifts a little each year but also grows heavier, the unsaid words and the bargaining words piling up like husks of uprooted weeds left for bagging. 

A name is a prayer that you make because you believe it will be answered, a reaching out, the way you always tried to hold our hands when a flight took off. We pretended it was babyish and tried to shrug you off. Now, I imagine your hands as they would have been, soft with almond-shaped nails, stirring up the air with those flamboyant gestures of yours. A crack partway down your middle finger from who knows what old injury.

I wasn’t there the day you greeted your mortality. It was something you’d seen glimpses of in the rear-view mirror for three years, a shadow in your peripheral vision. New spots on the x-ray, accusing you of not trying hard enough, too capable in the face of death, too polite. Would it have helped to rail at the fates, plead your case? You never abandoned God, even after being treated like the only person in a group of close friends not invited to a wedding.

My brother was there that day, always half out the door in those days, tumbling down stairs two at a time with one arm in a coat sleeve. You crept out meekly, edging up to him, waiting for him to ask you if you were okay. You paused, hesitated, turned back. He glanced back and saw two lines spill down your face at exactly the same time, like railroad tracks, he said later. Poetry to re-craft the casual misery of that moment. I think that day was when we stepped out of the shells of our former selves, except that we didn’t understand, not really, what it would be like to have the twin cores pulled out of our bodies with all the ruthlessness of ordinary life.

I wasn’t there, but my mind created a false memory of how you looked in that moment, flat-chested and square shouldered, black hair parted in the middle and hanging straight to your shoulders. It was summer, but all the same, in my memory you’re wearing a turtleneck and a faded pink sweatshirt with an outdated geometrical design.

You had a name because we existed. I’m still here, but your name left without me, like a confused bird that didn’t know its job, like one of those geese that follows a magnetized pattern of the earth but got its poles mixed up. I could still say it, but it would be like giving something up with nothing to receive it. I tried yesterday, just to see what it would feel like. The word floated up to the ceiling and hung there a moment before dissipating into the atmosphere, and I thought about how I have become. Like those pine trees that decorate the ridge where the beach greets the forest, meeting the wind head on, taking the wearing cycles of weather until they go bald on one side. Everyone who lost you is first in line to feel the wind blow through them, losing layers in the struggle to fight through you.

Once we were haughty; entitled to the child’s expectation of being loved unconditionally. Now there is no danger of letting myself be taken over by grief; loss has followed me like secondhand smoke for so long that I’ve grown petrified, surrounded by Polaroids of death and summer. The music of your life. The gratitude that you existed in the first place. And the prisms we search for so that we can believe that this dry landscape--winter wheat and salted roads and an enduring homelessness within--is just a different kind of beginning.