by Suzan Saxman
“No,” she rasped.
“You’ve seen what I do. I talk to the dead. We’ll still be able to talk after you go. We’re not really saying good-bye.”
“No,” she said again. “I don’t believe in anything.”
I knew it was defensive. I knew that what she believed in was the judgment of a cruel and unforgiving God. I knew that she was sure she was going to hell. But I wanted her to be done with hell, to let go of it at last and open up to the possibilities of love and forgiveness. I really thought that it could happen for her at the end. Sometimes it does.
Even my crazy old grandmother, the one everyone thought was possessed, finally let go of her demons just before she passed away. My aunts said that when my grandmother had taken her last breath, her eyes had opened wide and her face had been transformed by an expression of wonder and joy. She died smiling.
“Do you see angels?” I asked my mother. I had been praying that they would come to comfort her.
“No.”
“Do you see your mother or your father?”
“No.”
Each breath she dragged into her body seemed like it would be her last. But she would not give up. Her fury and rage at life, at death, at her very soul seemed to keep her going.
I wanted to be gentle and comforting and loving. I was sure I was the right person for the job. I had my crystals and my feathers and my sacred oils. I anointed her third eye and at one point even climbed onto her bed and waved my arms to clear away any obstructions her etheric body might be experiencing.
Leave it to a priest to walk in at exactly that moment. There I was with my rainbow-colored dreadlocks, standing on the bed of this little old Catholic lady, flapping my arms like a lunatic. He stood in the doorway staring at us. My mother managed to turn her head away from him. She hadn’t let a priest come near her in years.
He left without saying a word.
I thought maybe I could bring somebody through from the other side to help my mother. But no one wanted to come. I called on Daddy, on Steve, on Aunt Mary, on Tatum, our dog. Please come and help her do this in peace, I begged them. But no one wanted to be in that room with my mother. I’ve never been in a place that was so empty of spiritual activity as my mother’s room as she died.
It’s only in retrospect that I realize that I was trying so hard to create peace for her because I so desperately needed it for myself. I wanted a word of forgiveness from her before she died, some gesture of understanding, of love. I held her hand in mine for days, but she never once squeezed it back.
Hour after hour, day after day I watched her breath, sure that each one would be her last.
I wanted her to be free, but she had never wanted to be free.
On the third day, exhausted, I picked up a book and let my attention wander away from her deathbed. That was the moment she chose to die. She didn’t want me with her. She hadn’t wanted the reminder of her sin at her passing.
“She’s gone,” said my sister.
The undulating line of the heart monitor had gone flat.
My mother was dead.
I didn’t feel anything at that moment, neither sorrow nor relief. I had been waiting for something, and I hadn’t gotten it.
The room was empty. I couldn’t feel my mother’s spirit anywhere.
An old nurse came in and murmured clichés like, “God bless her. Now she’s with the angels. At last she’s at peace.”
But I wasn’t so sure.
Had she just disappeared and become a glob with everything else? What happened to a consciousness like my mother’s at death? What had she experienced? I had no idea.
I wanted to see an angel come for my mother. I wanted to see an expression of bliss or happiness or simple peace on her face at the end. But nothing happened. I tried to feel the energy in the room, I was alert to it like a cat, but I couldn’t feel anything, not a prickle of an otherworldly being in the room. When my dog Milo had died, all kinds of other creatures had arrived to welcome him home—fairies, other corgies, even Saint Francis. A huge rainbow had spread out across the clouds at the moment of Milo’s death. But when my mother died, nothing happened at all.
Nothing had changed in our relationship.
I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me. My mother left the same way she had lived, in denial of love, in denial of anything truly spiritual. Nothing changes with death. The story isn’t over. There was just more work to do, for the both of us.
My sister let out a long sigh, stood up, and began cleaning out the drawers of my mother’s bureau. The nurse started filling out paperwork. From the room next door, a television blared a soap opera. There was nothing sacred about my mother’s death.
Her body was lying there on the bed, and I had no ritual and no sacraments for that moment.
I wanted some kind of ceremony. I wanted prayers, but I didn’t know which ones. I needed a way to close off the big gap in the veil torn by my mother’s death. But I had no idea what to say or do. At last I sang to myself the words of Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel”:
“You’re in the arms of the angel,
May you find some comfort here.”
When Daddy had died, I had wept. When Steve had died, I had cried my heart out. When my animals passed away, I always shed tears. But when my mother died, I felt nothing. It was as if nothing had changed between us. She had withheld love from me in life, and she refused to love me even at her death. But at least it was over.
My mother has never once visited me as a spirit. She never even visits my dreams. Other people’s mothers and fathers are always showing up in my sessions with last things they need to say, bits of advice, life tips, apologies. Daddy even came through to me once and told me that he’d always known I wasn’t his daughter, but it hadn’t made any difference at all because he’d loved me. He also told me to stop cooking with Teflon pans, that they give people cancer.
Steve visits me all the time, particularly in dreams. I often hear his laughter and feel his presence. I know he’s watching out for me, sword in hand. He’s one of my protectors. Just like Jack. Jack is always close.
But where my mother went, I have no idea.
My sister arranged the simple funeral. There was a wake with an open casket, and I felt compelled to take death-mask photos of my mother’s waxen corpse. My cousins were aghast, but people used to always make castings of the dead, and I couldn’t see why I shouldn’t do the same. I didn’t develop the photos, though.
My mother was cremated and my sister brought her ashes home. I guess cremation is okay for some people, but I’ve been burned in so many past lives that, in this one, I want for once just to let my body crumble and my bones turn to dust.
The priest who delivered my mother’s funeral mass was from India and had a heavy accent. My mother had always been very racist and judgmental about foreigners.
“Grandma wouldn’t have liked this guy at all,” whispered Gavin to me. We both started giggling and couldn’t stop.
“It serves her right,” said Gavin, and I agreed.
“Do you think Grandma is in the bad heaven or the good hell?” asked Gavin as we filed out of the church.
“Does it matter?” I said. “Wherever she is, she’s still unhappy, isn’t she?” But I think that was his point. Wherever she is, she’s waiting with her arms crossed, dissatisfied. What did she want? I’d always wanted to know and now I never would. At least that’s what I thought at the time.
A few weeks after the funeral, I asked my sister about my mother’s will. Was there going to be a reading? I guess I still thought it would be like in the old movies where all the relatives sit down in some oak-paneled lawyer’s office. But my sister just sent me a copy of it.
I wasn’t even mentioned.
My mother left everything to my sister. She gave Gavin a few thousand dollars, but my name was nowhere in the document.
Bob said that legally I could challenge it, that she couldn’t completely cut me out of an inheritance without o
bserving numerous legal formalities. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t exist to her. She didn’t want me to exist. She never had.
When she died, she aborted me at last. I was in shock.
It wasn’t until she was dead that I realized the only way I could have made her truly happy was if I had destroyed myself. But I didn’t. I had a life. I got married. I traveled. I had a child. I even found a man to take care of me financially. But none of it mattered. My very existence had taunted her. She was a woman whose life was filled with secrets, and I was not only the evidence of her biggest deception; I was also uniquely gifted to see through all of her lies.
Many years after her death, I exchanged sessions with a woman who did something she called Violet Alchemy Healing. She chanted over me in some strange language and waved incense around, and I actually saw a circle of spirits around me. Outside of that circle, far beyond it in the shadows, I had a glimpse of my mother, her eyebrows arched, her mouth scowling. “Come join us!” I called to her, but she wouldn’t.
Jack was there, though, and he smiled at me. He was young again and dressed like the Artful Dodger. With a great sweep, he took off his top hat and bowed to me. “I’d do anything, for you, dear, anything,” he sang.
I wondered if in the world of spirits he’d put in a good word for me with my mother. He probably did.
At first, the middle-aged woman who showed up for a reading was skeptical. “How do you do this? What’s your technique? Can you explain to me how this works?”
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I have absolutely no idea. None at all.”
Still, she decided to sit down in my room and let me take a look at her life.
“There’s a man standing behind you.” I saw him at once. “He’s short but strong. He died quickly of an aneurism. But he’s still with you. He’s very close to you. He’s standing right behind you and he’s wrapping his arms around you like they were wings.”
The woman gasped. “Wings?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s what they remind me of, cupped wings.”
It turned out her lover had bought, just before he had died, a painting of golden wings that he hung above their bed. The wings weren’t outstretched but folded inward in an embrace, just the way I’d seen him holding her.
Usually, when people have just died, I have to help them move on and understand that their loved ones can’t exist in the same realm with them anymore. But this man didn’t want to move on. He was right there with her, and he was going to stay there for the rest of her life. He wanted to. She was never going to have another boyfriend or husband. But she would always feel this man close. She never had to think he wasn’t there. He was.
“You don’t have to learn how to live without him. You have to learn how to live with him in this new way.”
21
By the Time I Got to Woodstock
A few days after the funeral, in the middle of a March snowstorm, Bob and David drove me up to Woodstock. On the drive up the thruway I decided I needed a new name. My mother had christened me Suzan, but I was ready to leave everything about her behind in New Jersey. I decided to call myself Fiona, after my devoted cat.
Bob and David unpacked two cars’ worth of stuff. They painted the walls; they set up a jewelry tree I’d found and racks for clothes. They built a large cage for my two cockatoos and Amazonian parrot. I put my four-poster bed in the front room of the second-floor apartment looking out on the mountains. I painted the room pink, and I hung fairy dolls from the bedposts. I made everything as feminine as possible. It was a girl’s room, a no man’s land. David moved a few of his things into the attic, and Bob staked out the back room on the first floor of the shop.
I know how strange it seems, a dysfunctional Oreo with me as the creamy center. But I was done with them both, and I was friends with them both, and I loved them both. I was grateful that they were willing to be there for me and that they had found a way to get along with each other.
David told me that Bob had called him up to say that he wanted to “pass the torch.”
“What torch?” asked David, baffled.
“Suzie,” said Bob.
It made me feel like an inanimate object. I was furious at Bob and more determined than ever to be done with him, although Bob wanted us to evolve into some other kind of modern family.
He decided we all needed to go on a cruise together to heal. Bob, Gavin, myself, and David. Needless to say, it was awkward. What I discovered, though, was how much I’d missed David. He loved nature the way I did and would swim out in the deep water while Bob splashed around in the shallows. At dinner Gavin got dressed up in a suit and tie, David dug into the buffet, and Bob seemed strangely jealous of how easily the rest of us got along. I was stressed out and ready to return to Woodstock and a room of my own that I wasn’t going to share with anyone again, ever.
I still feel that way.
I am done with romance. There is just none left in this girl, let me tell you. I don’t want to call myself a crone, I still think I look pretty good, but let’s face it, that’s where I am. I love my animals. I love my son. I love my friends. I even have a lot of affection for Bob and David, but I’m just not anyone’s wife anymore.
A friend told me that the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece was always a woman who was done with marriage and children. She was usually over fifty. That’s the new phase I’m headed towards, I think. Freedom. I have women friends who are still desperate to find men, to hook up with boyfriends. They are in their sixties and seventies, and they’re still on the prowl for that perfect guy. Maybe it’s easier for me because I met my soul mate in this life, so I can let that all go.
These days I’m married to me.
After moving me in, Bob and David drove back to New Jersey to be with Gavin, who was going to finish up the year at his school and come up to Woodstock on the weekends. They left me alone in the building with three birds, two rats, and Milo, my Welsh corgi.
I was in my late forties and this was the first time I had ever lived by myself.
The mountain was shrouded in snow and absolutely beautiful. I felt like I was finally home.
People had been dropping by while we were moving in. Apparently, the building had a lot of history. It had once been a vegetarian health-food store in the sixties run by a commune of hippies; after that it had been a magic shop. Once it sold only kaleidoscopes. An old woman had supposedly fallen down the stairs and died just after the turn of the century. But if so, I’ve never seen her. Bob Dylan was rumored to have written a song in what was going to be my bedroom.
In all, the energy in the house was calm and settled. I was surprised when that first night I wasn’t lonely at all. I was so used to feeling separate from everyone and everything in New Jersey, but in Woodstock I felt surrounded by my people. The man with the fairy wings had popped in that first day to see if I had any evening dresses he could buy. I sold him one for ten dollars.
My first morning in Woodstock, Milo and I went out for a walk to get some breakfast, and everyone who passed us waved and said, “Hi.” Families stopped to pet Milo; people on the street introduced themselves. In New Jersey I felt like people were always checking each other out to make sure they were fitting in, and I, of course, never did. But in Woodstock I could step outside with my purple hair, and people would come over to me to say hello. I felt like I was in some cheesy fifties musical, and in an instant everyone would start dancing and break into song.
And there were all kinds of people, not just hippies. What I liked best were the artists—the musicians, the painters, and the writers—who’ve been coming here since the turn of the last century, long before the famous music festival. A lot of people don’t realize that this area has been calling out to spiritual types for a long, long time. Even the Esopus Indians considered it sacred grounds. The ley lines that lie beneath Woodstock are so similar to the ones at Glastonbury. But Glastonbury was the past and Woodstock was the future. I was so happy I was here.
&n
bsp; That morning I passed a bush in front of a local convenience store, and it called out, “Hello!” I thought I might be having some kind of biblical moment where even the plants were starting to talk to me when a small, sinewy old man with a grizzled beard emerged from the shrubbery.
“You look like my ex-wife,” he said. “She was one good-lookin’ dame.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m Rocky,” he said, holding out his hand.
“I’m Fiona.”
Later I found out that the bush was only his temporary home. He’d been a famous featherweight boxer, had once served time for manslaughter, and was now a town fixture, one of many homeless people who wandered the streets of Woodstock—hippies, drug addicts, dropouts, wandering musicians.
The man who had given me the stone with the symbol on it turned out to be a spiritual ascetic who rarely spoke and went around town painting blessings on rocks and bits of paper he found. Someone explained that once upon at time he’d been a successful New York patent lawyer, but he had dropped out of that world to paint and meditate.
Another fellow I learned later was called Puppy John tipped his hat to me as I passed. “Good morning, Suzan,” he said.
I was startled. I’d been telling everyone my name was Fiona, but I was to discover that many of the street people in Woodstock had psychic powers. They were very attracted to me, it seemed, which would at times become problematic. I’ve never been able to do readings for the mentally ill; their egos are too shattered for me to get a clear line on any information. But the people in Woodstock were different. There was a charged spiritual energy that seemed to flow up from the ground and touch everyone in some way.
I was to find out that the area had been spiritually sacred to the Lenape Indians long before the arrival of the Dutch and English. The town attracted religious characters of all types. There was a Tibetan monastery at the top of the mountain, and red-robed monks often smiled at me as we passed on the street. There was a Greek Orthodox monastery down the road and a Zen Buddhist monastery where two streams converged a few miles to the west. There was a Sufi center, five Christian churches, a lively synagogue, and countless other meditation, channeling, and yoga groups. The Dalai Lama was coming to visit in May. Half the people in town had names given to them by their gurus.