Life After Her

 

I

I’m not sure I believe in God anymore.

But therein lies the problem.

My mother was a believer, and I believe in her.

A year and a half after my mother died, I had a foggy dream, the realistic type that made my capillaries stretch to take it all in. I was in a train station of yesteryear, with huge semi-round windows that made everything glow, like a sepia tint come to life. People were a blur of black and gray, and I just stood there, watching life pass me by.

The dream shifted at some point—people started rushing to the door in a panic.

Maybe a bomb threat or fire, I’m unsure, but the horde went forward to the doors, and I went with them.

When I got out of the station, I started looking for my mother. I found her sitting on a concrete bench. Her feet were almost dangling with the sweetness of a little girl, and she was wearing the visor she wore when she cut the grass.

I felt so relieved.

I told my brother about this dream, and he asked me what I thought it meant.

“I think I’m always going to be looking for her,” I told him.

Maybe it’s my age. Or maybe it’s what I’m going through. But I don’t understand the preoccupation anyone has with the afterlife.

Heaven.

Purgatory.

Hell.

Why does it matter if it’s real and waiting?

Surviving this life is hard enough.

II

If I were in a church, I would whisper the following.

If I were in love with someone, I would seal the following with a breathless kiss and a tug of the hair to distract them from the bad news I was about to tell.

If I were elderly, I would ask someone to hold my hand and see the blue in my veins like rivers on a map and know that I’m trying to point them to their salvation from starvation.

In agony, I’d whisper in their ear, “I’m trying to save you from my fate.”

My belief is unpleasant and sullen, it’s divisive and surreal. It won’t make sense, and many will want to burn me. But here it is.

I think this is Hell.

We’re not dead.

But we are all damned.

When my mother was put into home hospice, the purgatory of care, I remember the day after telling my employer. My coworker was driving with my boss in the front seat. They both knew what was going on with my personal life. I was exhausted from crying the night before, so I was just gazing out the window.

They were talking about their last experience with Pei Wei, while I mindlessly watched cars pass. As I reflected on the drivers, I was out of my body.

I slowly turned my head to the left and saw mediocrity.

I bobbled to the right and saw the same.

Maybe I could spread the pain, and that would help, I thought to myself. I pictured the blackness in my lungs seeping out through my pursed lips, being inhaled by everyone who dared step into my path. If somehow the festering, heart-wrenching torment inside me could be shared, maybe I wouldn’t have to carry so much.

But no—life carries on, rather indifferent to singular pain; everyone has to carry their own. And my coworker and boss continued to talk about orange chicken.

I was suffocating on dry land, but I know things are much worse than my one story.

Hell exists in war and famine, in struggle and strife that denies people their basic humanity. It exists in capitalism that seeks to tell people that they are inherently lacking without a product to come to their rescue, and in the child labor and brutal conditions that produce those products. It’s in the othering of others, the brutality of others, the indifference of others.

But I’ve come to believe that somehow, with the big and bold errors of mere existence, Hell also exists through carelessness and the ordinary, when people want to shove things away in neat packages rather than expose the wound to healing light. It’s in the hours when feelings are buried, the moments when life just carries on.

God might exist. But the most foolish thing I ever believed in wasn’t God. To want to believe in something that would bring order out of chaos isn’t wrong.

Instead, virtues extolled in religion, like compassion, justice, and kindness, rarely manifest themselves into creating a Heaven on Earth. And now I’ve seen too much to be scared of the Hell that Christianity paints for me.

Because I’m different now. I’m fundamentally changed by the things I’ve seen. So many want me to collapse with joy and laugh with freedom, but they don’t understand what midnight holds for me. I have memories of watching the best person I know die painfully—a person who believed that this life is just what we settle for while we wait for Heaven.

My soul is scraped bare, and the muscles and sinew of my heart are flimsy flaps failing.

I’m revolting.

I’m revolting because she’s gone, and people want me to be the same, but I’m not.

When I was a teenager, I thought the worst thing that could happen to a married woman was that her husband would leave her. Potentially a close second was that a woman would stay single forever. So when my father left my mother and my parents got divorced, that 2006 child believed that I was watching the worst thing of my mother’s life unfold. I felt so bad for her.

Not wanting to belittle the pain and heartbreak of divorce, but no, it’s not the worst thing that can happen to a person. When something like that happens, I feel like there’s a choice—stay in the moment where one is betrayed or take baby steps forward. If my mother had chosen to stay in the moment where she was left by him, it would have been the worst thing ever. And I may not be writing this story now because she would have been a different person.

Rather, she chose to take the path of baby steps forward. And yielding to cliché, it was the start of a new chapter for her. And this new book would be filled with riches without Richard and an independence so savage that it echoes in the walls of the home she bought herself.

One night, she was propped up in her chair in home hospice. She had just made her decision that she was done with treatment, and through the awkward silences of those closest to me, I figured things out way before she said anything.

So when I finally saw her, so she could save her limited energy, I said something to the effect of, “I know.”

She looked at me, and referencing a childhood friend, she said, “Angela doesn’t have her daddy.”

I was selfish. I am selfish. I wasn’t able to fully give her up yet. I kissed her on the forehead and said, “You know you wouldn’t be a burden if you wanted to try more treatment. We will take care of you.”

She said nothing—we went back to watching more television.

I believe so acutely that this might be Hell, but I’m a heathen in my own beliefs.

My mother was escaping her Hell.

Feel free to burn me. Maybe I have it coming. But I hope there’s a part that understands that my mother didn’t deserve the type of death she got, so reverence for God is the last thing that enters my mind daily as my body takes the score.

If the idea of Christian Hell as punishment in my future is supposed to make me fall in line and quiver with fear, I think He’s going to have to do better.

III

In Ancient Egypt, passage into the afterlife was secured by weighing a heart against the feather of Maat, goddess of truth and justice. While Anubis watched, Thoth recorded the outcome. And if the heart was lighter than a feather, a soul could live in paradise forever with Osiris.

That image always struck me because it’s just such an ideal. Weighing someone’s soul against a feather to me says: be light, be soft, be kind.

And I can’t help but think now if anyone’s soul is lighter than a feather, it might have been my mother’s.

There are many things I don’t understand, but how my mother raised such a creature as me—I just don’t get it. I am a sponge soaking up the world’s troubles, despondent and unsure of answers. But she was a lighthouse—steadfast against the mightiest storms. And I’m still trying to figure out how that calm extended into her last phase of life.

Before she died, my mother talked openly about what foods she was going to eat in Heaven. Because her cancer had spread to her intestines and she hadn’t eaten solid food in a while, her picture of Heaven was partially food-based. She talked about how she remembered in her youth there was a time when corn wasn’t sweet; she hated sweet corn. But in Heaven, she was going to eat the corn she remembered from her youth. And desserts—lots of desserts.

The anger pulsates in me most days. I get annoyed with teenagers side-eyeing their mothers in the grocery store. I’m no longer the friend to confide in about mother troubles. It’s so strange, doubting God’s existence. Being so angry at His work. But I am charmed by my mother’s version of Heaven—its innocence and sweetness. Its simplicity and lack of splendor. She didn’t wish for the riches she never had but looked forward to the comfort she currently did not have.

And I am going to look for signs in daily life that it exists.

But it wasn’t just calm she exhibited—somehow, she exhibited humor as well. Another night, when she was in home hospice, I fell asleep with her in her queen-sized bed. In the morning, while sitting up, she looked me straight in the eye, her head now with a perpetual tremor from muscle weakness.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said.

Fearing a dying woman’s last confession or another morbidity, I looked into her eyes as she continued.

“You have some strong morning breath. Put some toothpaste on your finger and do what you can.”

I burst out awkwardly laughing, with cackles and shouts. My brother thought that I was crying and came rushing in with his eyes wide. He was relieved when it wasn’t what we were all waiting for.

After we transported her to the final hospice facility, she asked for a few things from her home. She had asked for one of my paintings. But always concerned for equanimity amongst her children, she also asked for something of my brother’s. So I grabbed his baby book, and at her last bedside, I remarked that my brother was an ugly baby.

“So were you,” she retorted.

So that happened—I got dragged by my mother who ended up dying 24 hours later. I file that under ‘going out as a boss.’

I can understand on a rudimentary level that cell life must die. But I can’t understand her elegance and poise in knowing her death was coming, and she was equipped enough to jab and poke.

This is who she was—a quasi-devious mind, living life, accepting things as they unfolded. My lighthouse never demanded that the storm go another way—she accepted the path of the storm. I mix metaphors because I associate my mother with the ground, fundamental to my feet and being. And now she’s gone, so my footing is lost.

In her cancer journey, she spoke freely about how foods have more chemicals now, and maybe that was a part of everything that had happened to her.

I can’t help but reprimand myself because I think I should have caught on sooner to a few things.

Haunted is a strong word for the memories I have. Maybe between curious and haunted, someone would find me thinking about a singular look she gave.

On Sunday nights in the home we shared, we watched “Masterpiece Theatre.” I continued that tradition when she was in the hospital for so long. So in her hospital room, on PBS, a preview for one of those Viking cruises came on—the ones that look lavish and bold but without the families with toddlers.

She used to say that if she had a million dollars, we were all going.

So one Sunday night next to her hospital bed, I remember telling her that once she was done, we were going. She and I—we’re setting sail. We’re going to leave everything behind, and I would quit my job if I had to. But we would adventure and sail away, and it would all be okay.

She gave me this look I can’t name in one word. It wasn’t sadness. It was the look an adult gives a child when they’re performing a wild and crazy play, one with plotlines of utter nonsense, but applause will always follow.

I think it was the look of, ‘You don’t get it, but one day when you’re older, you’ll understand.’

IV

Life has this habit of continuing.

It moves on through headaches and dull mornings when getting out of bed seems like a chore. It moves on through mornings where Budweiser feels like it could be breakfast and it’s tempting to have a liquor lunch. It has subtle progress when those things are put down, and it’s acknowledged that the desire to forget everything is real—but life is real, and fully forgetting is impossible.

Life is made of stone, and humanity is soft to its scratches.

My mother would be flustered by how I carry her. She wanted one of her funeral songs to be “Smile” by Nat King Cole.

“Smile, even if your heart is broken,” she would tell me.

But I would fight and fuss and tell her, “No, momma. You deserve this. You deserve to be carried like this. In my heart and soul. My life should feel different without you. You made a mark like this. I am fundamentally changed by its difference.”

She would tell me no, and it would be a thing. We would probably have to agree to disagree.

I find trauma to be a loaded word but it’s the precipice I live on. I get EMDR therapy to try to reprocess what I saw while she was dying. Every other week, I tell a therapist what color I think my throat is while I recount memories and describe the part of me that is suffering the most, the part that makes me feel like I’m suffocating on dry land.

My throat is purple and it’s an arch.

Then it’s blue and looks like a waning moon.

It’s yellow and looks like something that was pushed out of a playdough mold.

It’s taking time, but when I talk about one of these traumatic memories, I’m learning to breathe again.

Lacking the dysentery and snake bites, a cancer journey is like an Oregon Trail run. She was on the undesired coast, and we wanted the promised land. And we got pretty damn far—she was in maintenance mode for a few months.

It was like for the moment, we had seen the coast together, the point where the ocean and the sky collide. But then things turned and she had to forge ahead, alone. She left us standing on the beach as she approached the water. The trail ahead went cold, and she was the only one with the compass.

But she turned around, to look back at her family who had come so far with her and it’s like her last few days with us were a cumulation of her saying, “I got this. Don’t worry.”

I saw no fear in her eyes. It was remarkable. It was legendary.

So on the days I can manage it, I breathe. I sit down in the sand. Bring my knees into my chest.

I’m not sure I believe in a version of God anymore. Yet, maybe, just maybe, somehow she is not lost to me, forever.

Maybe she has simply moved on for now.

 

____

Rachel M. Reis is a writer and photographer from Dallas, Texas. Her work has appeared in Ruminate Magazine, Fathom Magazine, The Dillydoun Review, Barely South Review, and You Might Need to Hear This. Her freelance photojournalism focuses on civic activism and protests. She has a bachelor’s degree in history from William Jewell College and a master’s in public administration from the University of Texas at Arlington.