Mom took me out of the house on the day I finally crawled out of bed. We drove to this little shop I liked that sold pens and books and journals. We pulled in the parking lot and I didn’t move to get out of the car. I may have been out of bed physically, but mentally I was still under the covers. The air was crisp, the leaves were changing, but I saw no beauty in the world, nor any reason to belong to it. “Please, Sarah? Let’s just go in and look around. You can buy anything you want.” Mom opened her purse and pulled out two twenties. “You’re scaring me.”
I bought some expensive gel pens, the kind teenage girls like me were supposed to write notes to their friends with. Even now, when I’m scared or upset, I find myself compulsively buying pens. I have Ziploc baggies full of pens, a desk drawer overflowing with them. I have a hundred notebooks and empty journals but I still find myself buying more.
It’s better than cutting, I suppose, but not nearly as effective.
Mom and I were so alone in our sorrow. That is what I remember most – the deep, soul hardening loneliness. The friends Mom had didn’t know how to continue a friendship with a widow. I realized that we were our friends’ worst nightmares come true. We were the reason they hugged their parents tighter or kissed their spouse before bed, because what happened to us was a cautionary tale. Every one dies, eventually, and the happy people around us feared that they, too, could end up like Jan and Sarah.
Uncle Terry moved in to our spare bedroom the summer after you died. His girlfriend had just broken up with him and because his life was always a mess he didn’t have anywhere to go. We had an empty house, so Mom let him in.
It was one of the biggest mistakes she made.
Mom and Terry became a dangerous pair. They started going out to the casino almost every night. Terry didn’t have any money but he was paying his rent with moral support, or so Mom explained. Only I didn’t see things that way. I saw him as something worse than a step-father, because he was real family. He used Mom at her weakest moments while trying to step in to parent me. But you had been responsible, and strict, and funny without being destructive. Terry couldn’t live up to even the smallest of those standards, so I did everything I could to make sure he knew I wasn’t listening to him.
I was twenty when I found the letters hiding in a drawer that let me know how close we were to losing our house, thanks to the money Mom and Terry donated to Mystic Lake Casino. I hated them both for risking our security, for throwing your hard work away.
In July of 2003 Terry had an aneurism. Mom’s big brother was suddenly paralyzed on his right side. He nearly died on the bathroom floor. When he was released from the hospital he went directly to a long-term care facility, taking with him a diagnosis of another clot in a major vessel in his brain. Without another expensive surgery Terry would certainly die.
Mom threw herself into planning a benefit to raise money for Terry’s care. She couldn’t save you, but she was sure as hell going to save her brother. During this time she became good friends with a woman named Maria. Maria had worked with Terry at the Ford dealership. Mom and Maria hosted an incredibly successful golf benefit, raising nearly twenty thousand dollars.
A few hours after the benefit, Terry had a heart attack and died.
Maria was at our house to help plan for the funeral, and then, before I knew it, she was mixing Mom drinks and unpacking a suitcase in the guest bedroom. Mom had no strength left at that point, and Maria was the type of leech who saw our three bedroom house in the suburbs as a rent free paradise. All she had to do was keep Mom drunk and make her think she was her best friend. I was once again cast as the nasty step-child, making everyone miserable by pointing out how much Mom was gambling and drinking. Our family had become something you would see on a trashy television talk show. We had gone downhill so fast, fallen so far.
Mom and Maria would go out every weekend and sometimes during the week to the bars, coming in at all hours of the night. Mom stopped reading on the couch. She couldn’t sit still. If Mom wasn’t at work, she was at the bar. She lost weight that she didn’t have to lose.
I know now that Mom had become a functioning alcoholic. She never thought she had a problem because (some) of the bills were being paid and she made it in to work every day. She complimented herself often on how she might not be handling things perfectly, but she hadn’t rolled over and died, either. She frequently reminded me that without Terry, Maria was all she had. She was doing this on her own, so excuse her if she wasn’t doing it perfectly. Expecting anything more from her was out of the question.
One night I got a call from Maria’s boyfriend. Mom was completely out of control at the bar they were at. They had tried everything but they hadn’t had any luck getting her to leave. They were asking me to come help haul my drunk mother home.
The whole time I was driving to the bar I thought about how we used to spend Saturday nights watching rented videos and playing basketball in the driveway. How drastically our lives changed when yours stopped.
I got to the bar and worked my way through the crowd, past the sleazy looking men who offered to buy me drinks. I found Mom slumped over on the bar, laughing uncontrollably, while Maria leaned into her shoulder, looking exactly like the parasite she was.
When Mom saw me she went ballistic. She threw glasses and her rage at Maria. “I told you to never let my daughter see me like this! Sarah should never see this!” She was pointing at herself, at her low cut tank top. Her thick black eyeliner was smeared to her cheekbones. I was completely disgusted by her. Seeing her in that state dissolved any hope I had that my mother would ever come back.
I believed, for quite some time, that Mom no longer loved me. I wished more than once that she had died instead of you. I did not always keep that horrible thought to myself. You and I might have had our own problems had Mom died, but I couldn’t picture you going off the deep end with your grief like she did.
I moved into my first apartment the same time Maria moved her two kids into our house. Shortly after I moved I became very sick. I had the flu, or pneumonia maybe, and I was burning up at 105*. Everything hurt and my mind felt foggy. When I tried to get out of bed and walk to the bathroom for medicine for my fever I fell over, too weak to walk. I called Mom a hundred times, thinking in my haze that she would come over and take care of me.
She didn’t return my call until after bar close. By then she was wasted out of her mind. When Mom was that intoxicated she would start repeating a few phrases nonsensically, as if she had been distracted by something and forgot what she had been saying. She would laugh in this high-pitched voice that I knew was her way of trying to cover up all the alcohol she had consumed. If I called her out on it, or asked how much she’d been drinking, she went into a rage.
“Are you home?” I asked.
“You don’t have to be such a bitch, little girl,” she slurred in my ear. When she was drunk she believed everything I said was a judgment or an insult. She also believed she had nothing to feel ashamed of.
“Can you please sober up and come over here? I don’t think I’m doing ok.” Drunk or not, I wanted my Mom.
“Sober up? What, you think your Mom is some kind of drunk? Is that what you think, is it? Is it? Then you can take care of yourself. You don’t need some drunk to come over.” She hung up on me then and wouldn’t answer until the next day, after she had blacked out the entire conversation.
I spent that night in the bathtub, trying to break my fever with cold water. I fell asleep in the tub and woke up when my head had dropped below the surface of the water. My body wracked with chills and sobs. If I had drowned, Mom wouldn’t have even remembered that I asked her to save me.
Sharing the dark years with you makes me feel like I have broken a nice lamp and have to fess up that I was playing ball in the house, even though it is against the rules. But the confession makes me feel free, too. Mom and I kept a lot of our imperfections a secret, disguising ourselves as an excellent employee or a competent college student. Grief is n
ot to be tolerated in America, it is to be kept hidden, timed and monitored, allowed at gravesites and on anniversaries only. Mom and I followed those rules as best as we could, but it never felt right to compromise my feelings for the comfort of others. To truly appreciate where we have come we must acknowledge where we have been.
For a couple of years I believed Mom and I would never have a relationship again. Then time, tricky and mysterious, worked its magic. I grew up and Mom and I both grew into our selves.
Mom and I startle people as we go from happy to pissed off at each other in no time flat. We annoy each other just as often as we make each other smile. But somewhere along the way, we both decided to grow into the people we were fighting so hard against. Maybe we were just lucky that we found our way back to each other, or maybe it was simply a matter of time before feeling angry and sad or empty was harder than being happy. To be a survivor means relieving yourself from a self-inflicted, ongoing guilt. We’re here and you’re not. And we can’t be who we were before. It hurts too much to try. We also can’t stop living because we feel guilty. Mom’s guilt is deeper than mine. She still believes she killed you. If she hadn’t supported your dream you would still be here. I can only let myself off of my hook – someday I hope she frees herself from such an absurd thought. If she hadn’t supported you, you two wouldn’t have been so happy. You wouldn’t have achieved something so remarkable. The reason why we miss you so much is because the three of us had something so very good. And every decision we made up until the crash is part of why we were the family we were. I wouldn’t change a thing.
If you were able to see Mom now, you wouldn’t recognize her. In fact, if you two saw each other today I think the sensation would be like running into an old friend or flame at a high school reunion. You would hug, laugh at the good times, and be amazed at how different you both are.
Mom isn’t your wife anymore. She’s not even a widow. She’s just Jan.
And I think she’s amazing.
Mom spent twenty years married to you, and she identified herself as “David’s wife”. She was a stay-at-home mother, she had dinner on the table when you came home from work. She kept the house clean, she conversed with other housewives, she went to company parties and laughed with the other corporate wives. The two of you had plans to retire together on a farm with a yellow dog. Those were the dreams you two shared as husband and wife. With your death, she had to let go of those dreams and that life.
Mom got better when she stopped trying to be your wife. She lived for too long under self-inflicted pressures. When she couldn’t meet her own expectations, or the expectations she felt you would have placed on her, she would spiral further down, feeling guilty and ashamed. I think she believed that if she began to live her life she would no longer be honoring you. It would be easy for me to point my finger and blame Mom for her actions in those dark years – I would have the most right to do so, and that’s what makes my forgiveness so honest. She could say the same about my behavior. I’ve learned that no one can know how they will react to the devastating events in their life until they are right smack in the middle of facing death, grief, loss, divorce, betrayal, any number of painful human conditions. There are wrong ways to grieve, but there’s no right way to grieve, either. Mom and I did the best we could with a loss we hadn’t anticipated.
Mom has come so far. She has learned how to balance her own checkbook. She moved out of our house that would always be haunted by you to an apartment that has become her own space. She told me once, bravely, “I wish I could be with my husband. But I can’t. I’ve been in a relationship my entire adult life. So now I need to learn what Jan likes to do, who Jan wants to be.”
Jan, as it turns out, likes hair bands, black leather clothes, and Harley’s. These are things I never would have expected, but they are genuinely who she is now. She took a motorcycle riding class in the parking lot of a technical college one summer and is proud to be a woman who can ride. She starts getting excited in March, when the days start to get longer and the weather starts to warm itself out of winter. When Mom is riding, or talking about riding, she is confident, relaxed and happy.
“I understand why David loved flying now,” she tells me, and I am overjoyed, because I know how happy flying made you. This must mean Mom is in a good place now.
Even though I am a married woman and much too old for such things, Mom brings me 7-Up and chocolate when I get sick. She buys me an Easter basket with a stuffed bunny every year. When she plays with my two dogs I feel a pull inside my heart to see her playing with a grandchild. She is not the mother I had, but I no longer feel as though I lost both my parents.
Mom didn’t survive. She learned to live.
You wouldn’t recognize her, Dad, but you’d sure as hell be proud.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I suspect that every father dreads the day their daughter, especially their only daughter, falls in love. My Dad probably knew he wouldn’t need a shotgun to scare away potential suitors. His tall frame coupled with a glare from his serious face would have any teenage boy either running away or peeing in their pants. Still, I’m sure the idea of me dating made him nervous, uncomfortable, sad and scared.
Dad lucked out in a lot of ways. Not only was I a good kid, I wasn’t boy crazy. I had crushes from time to time but I was more interested in painting or writing poetry than in chasing boys. I had as many friendships with boys as I did girls, so it’s possible that Dad assumed he had plenty of time to worry before something more developed.
I was fourteen when I met Christopher at Many Point Scout Camp. My friend’s younger brother was spending a week at the scout camp while we would be with her parents in a cabin across the lake enjoying the less rugged family camp. I certainly didn’t go with the expectations of meeting a boy, but love is tricky that way. The less you’re looking to meet someone is when that someone enters into your world.
Many Point was four hours away from Chaska in Northern Minnesota, a half an hour from Lake Itasca. Our van pulled into the parking lot in the late afternoon. I was waiting outside the van for our cabin assignment, admiring the calm lake that stretched out from the main lodge when Christopher walked by. I watched him disappear into the staff door of the lodge, but didn’t think anything special of him. I turned my attention back to finding our cabin and unloading the van.
There was an opening campfire ceremony that evening, and Christopher was stationed among the other counselors. He seemed both comfortable and bashful as he stood in front of the large crowd. I watched him entertain some little kids, not minding when they climbed on him like he was a jungle gym. He had a gentleness about him, a sweet smile that set him apart from the other teenage counselors. The sun was sinking beneath the trees and loons were bobbing along the shoreline, calling out to one another across the lake. In that simple summer moment something changed inside me; I wasn’t a kid at camp, I was a girl who was noticing the way a boy whom she had never met could make the eyes linger and the heart race.
On the second night at camp I saw Christopher out of his scout uniform. While some people might have seen a trouble maker under the baggy jeans and chunky ball chain necklace, I saw a multidimensional person. I saw someone who was like me, who followed the rules, who was the kid adults respected, but who was also someone who had a personality inside that defied responsibility. With one smile in my direction, I was a goner.
The last night of camp Christopher and I exchanged numbers. He was coming home from camp in two weeks and asked if he could call me. I didn’t know then that sometimes boys don’t keep such promises, so I left absolutely elated, counting down the days in my mind when we would talk again.
My parents took me out to dinner the night I got home from Many Point. Before we went to the restaurant I made them stop at Target so I could drop off the several rolls of film I had taken at camp. At dinner I tried to make them understand the magic of that place, the kindness and humor of the counselors, the sounds of the loons on the lake and the
stars that shone in the inky night sky. I didn’t tell them about Christopher, though I’m sure they could tell something was up. I had never been so excited or chatty before about anything. To their credit, they didn’t pressure me for any details.
It was pouring rain when we stopped back at Target after dinner. I ran out of the store with my pictures stuffed under my shirt to keep them dry. In the backseat I flipped past sunny days and silly poses of my friend and I in our cabin, until I found the few snapshots I had gotten of Christopher. Christopher climbing into a canoe and holding the side so I could step in safely, Christopher at the campfire, Christopher and I standing beside a wall of pine trees, our shoulders barely touching. I looked at the photos constantly while I waited for my phone to ring.
He called, just as he had promised, and before long Christopher was part of my every day life. It was incredible to have a crush out in the open, to have it reciprocated. Maybe it’s like this for every teenager the first time they fall in love, and maybe there are a few couples who are different. Couples who, when they say they love each other, actually mean what they’re saying. I believe Christopher and I meant it. We lived forty minutes apart and we were too young to drive, so the only connection we had grew from our conversations.
My parents met Christopher on Halloween. They had agreed to let me go on a date to one of those places with haunted houses and trail rides. There were hundreds of cars outside the entrance dropping off hundreds of teenagers. My parents were nervous about leaving me in the crowd to meet someone they didn’t know, so Christopher had been instructed to find our car so he could meet my parents and reassure them he wasn’t a psycho.
We waited for a long time in a line of honking cars before he finally appeared. He had cut his shaggy hair off and what was left was styled into short spikes. A section in front, the one that had been white since he was a little kid, was dyed dark blue. He was cuter than I remembered and I couldn’t get out of the car fast enough.
Taking Flight Page 7