by Suzan Saxman
Steve had been a mess and a failure by so many standard measures, but he had been in love with his life. He had loved women and music and food and people and adventure. He had loved me. And he had been loved. I know he’s in heaven, and I know he’s got his leg back and he’s dressed up as Robin Hood and the angels are all laughing at his antics. But my mother? For my mother, who hated her life and simultaneously fought tooth and nail to keep it, hate and fear had always created her reality. In the end she had no beliefs to offer her consolation. Love, and the practice of love, that’s the only thing that saves you in the end.
No matter what sedative they gave my mother, she became more agitated. Sleeping pills would keep her up all night. Valium made her tear her clothes and writhe in her wheelchair. It was so terrible that she wasn’t even allowed to eat with any of the other residents. I had to believe she really was possessed. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I couldn’t accept that this might be who she really was.
Even more terrifying was the possibility that this was the fate that might be waiting for me. My mother’s mother had been similarly deranged in her last days. I shivered at the thought. The fear of mental illness in my life has been very real.
My grandmother had also been a frightened person, but when I was twelve she had gone berserk and begun ripping up Bibles and breaking her rosary beads. My aunts had called in a Catholic priest to do an exorcism on this eighty-year-old woman. No one would let me in the room. “Grandma’s not really Grandma anymore,” they told me. Could that possibly have been true?
I do think that at the end of our lives we become more open than we have been since childhood. The angels and demons are ready to fight for our souls again. It’s the last fight of good and evil. If we don’t have real faith, a true belief in goodness, the demons can claim our souls. But it’s not our outward professions of belief that matter in the end. It’s how we’ve lived and loved.
My mother kept telling me I was going to hell for being a fortune-teller, but she was already there. That nursing home was hell. Her dementia was hell. Every choice she made in her life, and probably in her past lives, had brought her to that particular inferno, and she was burning in it. It was a terrible thing to witness.
Hell is being stuck in our own karma. My mother was ending this life just like she had ended her last one—in an asylum, alone. But she wasn’t really alone. My sister and I were with her, and we wanted to love her. I’d always wanted to love her. She could have claimed her joy with Steve, with me, with my sister, in so many different ways, but she didn’t and she was in hell.
What had happened to my mother in this life, in her last lives, to bring her to such a place of demented terror?
I wanted to understand her, but over the years whenever I’d tried to talk to her about her family and her childhood she’d gotten defensive.
“Why do you want to talk about things like that?” she’d say if I tried to get her to open up. “I’m your mother, not your friend.”
She wanted to talk about what people were wearing, who was fat and who was thin, and the color of my hair. She was obsessed with appearances and how other people might see you. It all felt like some vast cover-up of, well, something.
Maybe that’s why I entered the truth-telling business, to say fuck you to that camouflage of conventionality.
The daily indignities of nursing home life, of simply growing old and helpless, were too much for my mother.
She got a bad urinary tract infection a few months after she was in the nursing home, and I was with her when the doctor arrived. As he tried to pull up her gown to examine her, she became hysterical, thrashing and screaming, “Don’t touch me down there! Get your hands off of me! Don’t touch me there!”
At that moment I felt more pity for her than I have ever felt for another human being on this planet. She was like a wild animal, using every part of herself to fight him off. Hell on earth isn’t an idea; it’s real suffering, such terrible suffering.
How could she look at me and say that I was going to go to hell?
Maybe she wanted me to join her there. But I wouldn’t. I just wouldn’t.
The more I resisted my mother’s efforts to bring me down, the more unhappy I was with Bob. He was disappointed in me because I hated the real estate class he’d made me take out of some ridiculous fantasy that we’d go into business together. “You’re just a piece of shit,” he said to me one night in a fit of frustration.
How dare he? In the midst of my mother’s final cruelties I just couldn’t take this. At least David had never called me names.
Bob and I threw a big Halloween party but ended up getting into yet another terrible fight—over the decorations. Halloween is a sacred holiday for me as a psychic. It’s Samhain, the Celtic “Festival of the Dead.” It’s the time when the veil between life and death is at its thinnest. I hated that Bob thought of it only as a time to put goofy cutout paper witches and ghosts in the windows and get sick on candy corn. I wanted a real Halloween. I wanted to honor the dead and commune with the spirits and the ancestors.
“Can’t I just put up my Halloween decorations, Suzie?” Bob begged.
“No!”
I hated ugly, warty green witches. Witches are real, and they should be respected. Besides, a lot of them are very beautiful. The way Americans celebrate Halloween is all about denying what that night is really about—trivializing it, making that energy small and manageable. It’s not that Halloween should be scary. It just ought to be real.
As a kind of apology, Bob offered to take me to Sleepy Hollow a few days later. It was a beautiful November day, crisp, with the leaves still bright red and orange. Bob wanted to find the legendary Headless Horseman, and there sure were plenty of postcards and tchotchkes in every quaint little shop in that suburban town. But there wasn’t that much to do there, and yet again the adventure revealed the rifts between Bob and me instead of reconciling us. He had no idea what I was really about.
I’d just clicked on my seat belt for the drive back to New Jersey when words unexpectedly shot out of my mouth. “I wanna go to Woodstock,” I announced.
“What?” said Bob.
“Let’s go to Woodstock.”
My voice was speaking, but the words were coming from behind that trapdoor that opens in the back of my brain when I’m doing readings.
“What’s in Woodstock?”
I had no idea.
I had no idea where Woodstock was, how far it was from Sleepy Hollow, or why I had just suggested we drive there. I knew it was connected to hippies and sixties music, but I’d never been a hippie, and I’d never even liked American rock and roll. I wasn’t into the Grateful Dead, and I thought The Last Waltz was about a dance. When I was a teenager, I’d been longing for England and listening to old folk ballads about medieval times.
“You really want to go to Woodstock?” Bob was scratching his head.
I nodded, almost despite myself. “I want to go to Woodstock.”
“Was the concert there?” asked Bob.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I guess so.”
Bob was programming the town into his GPS. “It’s about an hour and a half away,” he said.
“Okay,” I answered. “Let’s go.”
“Why not?” said Bob, pulling out of our parking spot.
We didn’t talk much on the drive north on the thruway. Huge mountains loomed in the distance.
I began to feel these familiar prickles up and down my arms when I saw them.
We turned off the highway and onto a rural county road that led us past furniture stores and gas stations and more and more trees. I was feeling increasingly giddy, like a little kid, jumping up and down in my seat.
“What are you so excited about?” asked Bob.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
“Welcome to Woodstock,” announced a sign at the crossroads. Next to it was a cutout wooden sculpture of a guitar and a peace sign. The huge mountain I had seen on the highway
was right beside the town. It felt protective, as if it was holding the little village close to its heart.
Inside my own heart something sang out in recognition and reunion. I’d made it. I’d crossed over some invisible finish line in a race I hadn’t known I’d been in. I felt a release of energy within me. I was here.
We followed the sign and turned left towards Woodstock. The spire of an old-fashioned white church rose before us, and there were lots of little shops and restaurants arranged along either side of one simple street. You could hear the sound of rushing water from nearby streams and rock music coming from the shops and drumming from the flower-filled village green. I felt a sparkling electricity, a serpentine energy emanating from the ground that I had only felt once before—at Glastonbury.
“What a lot of freaks,” said Bob.
Strolling along the sidewalk was a very tall man wearing pink fairy wings. Most of the women had long hair, the men had scraggly beards, and one of the women had a beard. A lot of people were actually wearing tie-dye. This old guy with a long white beard was dressed in a patchwork dress and carrying what looked like a wizard’s staff. There were dogs everywhere. Bob parked the car and we got out to walk around, and a man in worn jeans and a ratty sweater pressed a small rock into my hand and gave me a thumbs-up. I looked down at the rock and it was covered in a symbol I would later learn said “Om.”
The strangers passing me on the street were smiling and waving at me.
“Hey!” said a punked-out young woman with a dog.
“Hey!” I found myself answering.
There were a lot of young people milling around. Ordinary teenagers on skateboards, stoned-looking boys lolling on park benches on the green, and a lot of kids who looked like they’d put on costumes that morning.
“The people around here all look like you,” said Bob.
Bob, however, looked completely out of place in his bright polo shirt and pressed pants, like the whitest slice of Wonder Bread you’ve ever seen.
For lunch we went into the Joyous Lake, a famous old restaurant where a lot of music greats had gotten their start. We sat out on a deck looking out over the town, and a pretty blond with streaks in her hair just like mine came over and pressed a CD into my hand. “I think you’re going to love my music.”
A handsome-looking guy, clean shaven, leaned over to me as he passed our table. “Who are you?”
It was strange and wonderful at the same time. I felt like I had arrived in the fairy realm at last.
“Are you a rock star?” asked a large, blowzy woman covered in rhinestones.
“Not yet,” I joked.
I was used to attracting attention in New Jersey. I was used to people pointing at me, or snickering, or pulling their kids away when they got too close. This was different. I felt welcomed.
My whole life I had been a fish flopping on the dry boards of the dock, and now I was back in the ocean. I was back in the water again. I could feel it. I could breathe here. This was my element.
“They like you here,” said Bob with a note of surprise in his voice.
A couple with cameras around their necks came over and asked for my autograph.
“Can I get a photo of you with my husband?” asked a woman.
After lunch Bob and I went window-shopping, checking out stores filled with jewelry and leather goods, upscale clothing and novelty T-shirts. There were a lot of art galleries. We crossed a stream that burbled through the center of town. There was a shop filled with statues of fairies and old icons, another with Tibetan mandalas and Hindu posters. We passed a head shop or two and a wine store and then came to an old white Victorian building that announced it was a dance and drumming studio. There was a “For Sale” sign on a small patch of green grass.
Bob and I stopped and looked at it. Both of us were drawn to it.
After a short silence, Bob turned to me. “Do you want me to buy this for you, Suzie?”
I was startled. “Why?”
“You once said you wanted a store.…”
“I talked about it once, that’s true.”
“This would be a good place for you to have a store. This is a good town for you.”
“How far are we from New Jersey?”
Bob shrugged.
Neither of us said anything else, but I realized at that moment that Bob was as exhausted by our relationship as I was. This was his way of putting me out to pasture. He was done, and he was going to give me a store as a good-bye present. I had failed at normal. Miserably. But it was also something else. He was right. This was my town. I belonged here.
Almost immediately Bob put in a bid for the store, but it turned out it was already contracted to somebody else who wanted to turn it into a restaurant. I found myself praying fervently that the restaurant deal would fall through and Bob and I would be able to buy the building after all. I was already collecting fairy dolls and punk clothing that I wanted to sell in my shop. But most of all, I wanted to move to Woodstock. I had to move to Woodstock. I couldn’t stop imagining myself there in that store.
My friends were stunned. “You don’t belong up there with all those hippies. What about your readings?”
But I didn’t want to do readings anymore. I wanted a little shop filled with clothes and jewelry and crystals. I was losing my mind from doing readings. I was done with readings. I let people know that I was going to retire. Though I promised that I’d still do a reading here and there for my regulars.
A few months later, Bob got a call saying that the other person had backed out of the deal and had decided not to buy the building after all. Bob put a down payment on it at once.
Around this same time David got evicted from his apartment. Out of the blue, Bob invited David to live with me in Woodstock. Over the years, as Gavin went back and forth between us, David and Bob had unexpectedly become friendly. But he didn’t ask me if I wanted to move back in with David; Bob just decided that I was going to.
Over the years I’d remained close to David, not just because he was Gavin’s father, but also because he was my oldest friend. But I knew then that Bob really wanted to be done with me. He didn’t want me going back and forth to New Jersey to bring Gavin to see his dad. Bob wanted to put me away up in the mountains, just like my sister had put my mother in the nursing home.
Except that to me Woodstock felt like heaven.
David moved into our condo while we were waiting for the closing and Bob moved back in with his parents. While David and I were organizing our things for the move, I started looking through my old photo albums. In one there was a picture of me at the baby shower my girlfriends had thrown for me just before Gavin was born. I was wearing a T-shirt, which was unusual enough, but when I looked closely I could see what was written on it. “Woodstock: Peace and Love.”
It was then that David remembered what the angel had told me. “Remember? She said you were going to move to the Catskills, that you would be safe there.”
“I’m not moving to the Catskills. I’m moving to Woodstock.”
David laughed. “Those mountains you saw? Those are the Catskill Mountains.”
“You will be safe there,” I heard the angel saying.
Safe from what?
The night before the closing, the car was all packed and I was ready to do my last reading for five people. As usual, I needed the money. I brought my cards and my tape recorder and sat down with the women around a coffee table. I shut my eyes for a moment, and when I did I saw a red velvet curtain, one of those theatrical curtains with golden tassels you see at a Broadway show, softly beginning to close. I opened my eyes and still I saw it. The curtain was closing. Something was coming to an end.
The women were getting restless.
“I can’t see anything,” I said. The curtain before my eyes had shut.
A closing? The closing on the shop? The closing of my psychic life? What was closing?
When I got home, David was waiting for me. “Sit down. I need to talk to you.”
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“What?” I said, instantly concerned.
“I went on the Internet tonight. Jack Wild just died.”
A small stone dropped into my heart and sent ripples outward. I’d known he was going to die since I’d met him. Still, it felt significant to have his death align with this huge transition I was making.
Three days later my mother also passed away.
The spirit of an older woman appeared in a reading I was giving that turned out to be my client’s mother. In the crook of each arm she was cradling a baby. One was her own miscarried child. And the other was her daughter’s. She was so happy to be holding them. Her daughter was weeping as I described how happy these unborn babies were to be in her mother’s arms. They were all reunited.
20
How Not to Die
I was still visiting my mother every day in between packing when, just as I was about to say good-bye to her and move, I noticed a new smell coming from her body. I remembered that smell from when both Daddy and Steve had died. It wasn’t so much the odor of decay as the sweet, sickly smell of funeral lilies. My mother smelled like flowers. Death was coming.
She was conscious and her eyes were open, but her breath had begun to rattle in her throat. She stared straight ahead, rigid and terrified. She was over ninety-five years old then, and her heart was still strong, even though every other part of her had begun to collapse.
I knew that she didn’t want to go. She was afraid that heaven wouldn’t take her because of her adulterous affair, because she was “dirty.” Or at least that’s what I thought.
I desperately wanted my mother to experience some kind of peace before she left. The hard thing was, I know from my readings how little changes for the dead. They take with them their rage, their confusion, or their joy. It’s not so much death itself that should frighten us, but who we are when we arrive at the moment of death.
My sister and I sat with her, each of us holding one of her hands. “You do know that there’s an afterlife, don’t you?” I whispered, trying to soothe her.