Roots

My childhood home has been in my family for over 60 years. Located in the suburbs of San Francisco on a lane with nearly identical houses all around it. They each have a small porch, large square window, and a smaller hexagon portal like window near the garage. Some are two stories, ours is only one. Plus an attic which holds decades of treasures mixed in with receipts and old Christmas decor. I loved the attic as a kid. I still do now. Being up there has always made me feel like a detective. That up there, breathing in the smell of plywood and insulation fibers I had insights into the world that were not available to me in my bedroom below. I suppose even as a child I felt stronger and wiser surrounded by so many old things. These days I sift through notebooks and photographs and to discover clues about those who lived in this house before me. Learn how they shaped my mothers life and in turn my own life.

My mother would tell me stories as a little girl, in a tender and nostalgic voice, about growing up in this house. She spoke wistfully of having soapy water to paint pictures on the paving stones in the backyard. She carefully described her old room. Barbies and frilly bedspread. It is a tiny west facing room. The smallest for the baby of the family. Julie Ann, born December 20th 1960. One of five kids. Her closest sister was 7 years older than her. Now her bedroom is my dad’s office, I sit there sometimes on the computer and imagine how hot she must have gotten. How she must have loved looking out the window at the plants in the side alley as she did her homework.

When I was about 12 years old, my Mom and I were driving home in her blue Lexus. The car is old now but still runs. Now that she is gone, it is my car. It was a golden June afternoon. The car smelled like crayons. It still does over a decade later.

We were heading north on 280. I gazed out the window at the sunlight on the revisor. Life has always seemed more hopeful winding down this stretch of highway. The water looks like glass in the valley below us. Reflecting back the sky and green trees. Pristine. Free of boats and humans. Sometimes fog blocks it, but cruising by that view I feel a little closer to a God that I’m still not sure I believe in.

I was feeling mature sitting in the front sit, knees tucked up under me, looking out the window. I was comfortable with my mother and the radio. A sunburst filled daydream.

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town. Waiting for someone or something to show you theway.

I do not remember hearing the Pink Floyd song before then. It caught my attention because my mom was singing it softly. I liked the lyrics.

So much anticipation of loss in my early years made me more acutely aware of time then most kids my age. Our lack of time. I was in a rush for the first 27 years of my life. But on that day the song seemed like a happy addition. It was summer and I was living in the peaceful present. Content, riding home with my mom. To both our childhood homes.

Time is a long song. It gives you time to think in between verses.

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun. So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking. Racing around to come up behind you again. The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older, shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

As the song faded, my Mom said something that jolted me slowly out of my warm haze and in many ways out of childhood.

“This is how I feel. That I missed the gun.”

Her voice was low and slow. She didn’t sound like her. She was right next to me but I could feel her mind was a million miles away. She had said it without thinking. She was not really speaking to me. This freeway really has a way of lulling you into a state of consciousness that is pure. It has brought about many realizations across my life. Truths are somehow more accessible.

“What do you mean mom?”

I didn’t understand why this comment made my stomach turn over.

Now, I can see that it was the first glimpse I had into the reality that my mother was a full human. A woman that had a life without me. I thought she had every answer. She planned everything. She survived breast cancer. She was a hero. She walked me into kindergarten with no immune system or hair. Her sheer force of will seemed magical to me. How the fuck could she possibly think that she had missed the starting gun?

“I am in my hometown. I got married right out of high school. No one I knew went to college. No one even talked about it. I went on my adventure to Long Beach but got divorced and came back here. To be with my mother as she died. I am still here. I wonder if there was more out there for me. Who I could have been? Who I’d be if I had gone to school? Who I would be if I had taken better care of myself and not gotten cancer? I don’t know. I am happy with my life but sometimes I can’t stop thinking that I’ve ended up where I began by accident. That I should have run”

My memory of her answer is colored by information I have learned about my mother as I grew up. I do not really remember her exact words. There is no way she said so much to me that day, but the overall sentiment is correct. The details are factual. I have just layered them all into this memory.

I don’t really remember what I said back to her, I just know that I was stunned. Slapped in the face by reality. My mother was my hero but she did not see her hero’s journey the way I did. Her narrative about her own life was so different than what I thought it should be.

I didn’t have words for this at the time. I didn’t understand that this conversation would be one that I would remember for the rest of my life. That this would be a pivotal moment in my life. I had no idea that this moment would be one I unconsciously referred back. That now, as I move through the world without her in it, her comment on lyrics would help to guide me. To pull me center and share what is true for me with the world.

Many years after this car ride I sat wrapped in a blanket in our backyard. It was early December of 2017. Thursday midmorning. The flowers and her ashes sat silently on the mantel in the living room. I had given her eulogy. The first accomplishment in my life I was truly proud of myself for. Something that was not expected of me that I had chosen to do. I poured my grief into writing. Planning the party. I was a force of nature that week. I was like her. Making sure every detail was perfect. A perfect party that she wouldn’t see.

No one tells you what to do the day after your mother’s funeral. When everyone else has gone home and you are alone with that big hole in your life. When the shock of what has transpired finally starts to set. When you finally start to feel in your bones that this is your real life. That you have not been staring in a movie. This was not a bad dream. The thing you have feared your whole life has happened. She is gone.

I didn’t know what to do with my hands. To do with my life. Who I was without her? I felt unmoored. Drifting in an ocean of grief. My anchor was no longer in this world. I also felt conflicted for feeling so inspired. My mother would never have imagined that the church would be standing room only at her funeral. That the hospital would be filled with people for the days leading up to her death. She never healed from her trauma. She never could see what I saw. That she was a hero. That I would have loved her no matter what she had done across her lifetime.

The car ride sticks out in my memory so much because my mother let me see that she was human. The view and the warmth of the sun had lulled her into uttering truth. Truth which has shaped my life.

A quote from a book comes to mind. The narrator is dying and she says that as her life comes to a close

I would rather be known than loved.

My mother would have liked that book. The Nightingale. The pain I feel in my heart knowing we will never talk about the book feels different now than it would have the day after her funeral. It feels pure. I have learned over the last three years to separate sadness from anxiety. To see the other side of my grief. The side that is a sunburst. Light that refracts in new ways because of the cracks in the window. I have learned to tilt my gaze and see this sadness as the most pure type of love I have experienced. A heartbreaking and heartwarming sensation. Loving someone who is not in this world to love you back. Of being able to respect that longing. Respecting the cracks the absence has left in our lives. To feel that pain of missing someone and to remember them anyways. To keep the connection alive inside of you as you move through the world. To take on the responsibility of loving someone and expecting nothing in return.

But on this day after the funeral, I had none of these thoughts in my mind. I didn’t understand grief at all. That I had been pushing down anticipatory grief my whole life. That I was about to embark on a painful journey to heal.

On that day I knew nothing of the next three years. I felt numbed. Slow. I didn’t want to feel that way. I had felt connected and powerful the day before. An all-star griever. How could it be that today was so different? I didn’t understand the duality of death. The appreciation it creates for life right along with so much pain. I look back at my old self with empathy.

I felt so small that morning. Broken. Trapped in her house with the ashes and dying flowers. I retreated to the backyard. I pulled an uncomfortable brown metal chair with no cushion under the big tree in the backyard. The tree my mother and I both climbed during our childhoods. A space that made us each feel safe across the many stages of our lives. Sunlight burst through the golden star shaped leaves. When I was little, we would talk about how those were tree stars. That dinosaurs ate them. Something about being under that tree in the sunlight made me so aware of time. That I would never have these moments again.

So I sat under our tree, wrapped in her brown blanket and I recorded myself. In a voice that was low and slow. A voice I do not recognize. I made a vow that went something like this:

I will live for both of us. I will take up space. Live big. It is my duty to spend my time seeing all the places she had wanted to go. To climb Machui Piccu. I will design a life that was mine. So one day, if I have a daughter, I can drive along 280 freeway listening to Pink Floyd and feel at peace. Feel at peace knowing I spent my time how I wanted. Feel at peace knowing my mom looks down on us smiling.

It has been a little over three years since I have made that vow. I thought that in order to keep it, I would go on wild adventures to far-off places. There will time for that. To stay up till sunrise and feel awe inspired. The first step was one that I had not anticipated. It was not an escape to far away places. My journey was not an escape but a deep dive into my soul. One of slowing down. Of healing.

I wonder if I would have healed faster if I had run away from my childhood home right after she died. But I am mother’s daughter. My home and family are an extension of my soul.

That I am a tree and my roots are stretched and intertwined with the one in our backyard. But I have nurtured my roots. Given them love and space to grow