Positively Glorious!

At 8:30 am you get the call at your office. Knowing that it’s your sister, you’re not sure how worried you should be. The last time she called you here, it was to tell you that your brother died. She doesn’t call you at work just to chat.

She tells you, but it won’t sink in. It has for her, she’s had more time. She’s crying, and you try to comfort her, not knowing what to say, or even think. She says things like “Will you come…?” Using that word that sounds so foreign suddenly. You say things like “of course,” “I love you,” and “goodbye.” Then you hang up the phone.

It still hasn’t sunken in, and it won’t for a very long time, but you don’t know that yet. You’re too busy numbly wondering if you should stay at work or go home. You opt for the later– more because it’s what it seems that you should do than for anything else. When you get to your house, you spend a good 5 minutes staring at the phone wondering whether you should call your wife, wondering whether she should come home. Should she use her precious vacation time?

Then you realize that you’re not wondering whether she should use the vacation time.

You’re really wondering whether the death of your mother matters to you at all.

That’s when you finally start to cry.

The phone call is short, but it’ll take your wife 25 minutes to get home. 25 quiet, lonely minutes. So you grab your computer and do some programming. Ridiculous as it seems, it’s also comforting. For a short space, you wrap your head around a small, stupid programming problem. A small, stupid, solvable problem. Then your wife arrives and rips you from mindlessness into pain, so you start to cry again.

She says that you should do something that your mom would’ve like to do. You don’t know what that thing would be, and that lack of knowledge is a brick-hard pain that hits you in the chest in the way that only family hurts can.

The pain isn’t because you don’t know what she would’ve liked to do. The pain is not even because you don’t really know her at all.
The pain is from the realization that not knowing her was your goal. The fact that your mother was a stranger to you was in no way a slow, natural act of separation. It’s not distance or time that brought you to this place. It was a plan. It was methodical. It was driven.

That’s the part that hurts the most: your success.

But you do know that she always wanted to see The Columbia Gorge, and you live there, so you take a hike. You get outside and the fresh air is good. It revives you, it gives you perspective. Your wife asks you for stories, and you try to remember those fabled “good times,” but all you can come up with are the troubled ones. You remember the time she threw all the dishes in the trash because they weren’t clean enough. You remember months banned from stepping foot in the living room because you knocked her plant over– even though you cleaned it up,  vacuumed the carpet, hid the broken pot in the basement behind the shelving, and positioned the perfectly re-potted plant it as exactly as you could remember before she came home.

You remember the screaming. You remember the crying. You remember the look on her face that formed just before she would begin. The look that was a harbinger of what grew to be called, in your child’s mind, the crazy place.

Your wife wants you to forget the bad times, she wants you to think of “those good times” you had. “Those good time?” You think wryly. You can think wryly because of the fresh air. The Gorge is so beautiful in the spring.

During the hike, your wife tentatively asks you if you’ll be responsible for your mother’s debts. It’s a question that could hurt if it weren’t such a good one. Your wife knows as well as you the possibilities. Her bankruptcy immediately after buying the new car and all the furniture. Her search for, and eventual discovery of, a doctor committed to signing her disability claim. She knows the stories, and she’s actually just as desperate as you to disbelieve them. But disbelieving them is hard, as much as you try.

After the hike, you go shopping for comfort food. You want something that your mom would make so it has to be cheap, fast and provide “nutrition” only in the loosest sense of the word. You can’t think badly about that, however; after all that’s the very definition of comfort food. At the store you buy a few cans of tuna, some egg noodles, and a can of cream of mushroom soup. You also get a bottle of cheap wine– a decent Chardonnay from Australia. You want something she would drink, but can’t bring yourself to buy the Schlitz.

And movies, you get a couple old movies, because it’s just easier escaping to witch mountain than thinking of the witch– it’s too harsh, so you cut yourself off. It’s easier than thinking of it all.

By phone, you talk with your family, but really aren’t there. “Are you coming…?” Your cousin asks, using that word again. That word that sounds so unnatural and foreign when they say it.

“Yes,” you say, “I’m coming. I’m coming… home.”

Eventually, after the wine and the movies are both done, you crawl to bed. As you lay there in the darkness next to the greatest comfort you’ve really ever known, you think “I didn’t cry as much as I thought I would have today.” It’s a comforting thought. Then it’s a worrying thought.

Then it’s a dark, menacing thought.

You didn’t cry very much at all. Maybe it didn’t matter that much. Maybe the death of your mother didn’t matter very much at all.
But it did. You know it did. It creeps around the edges of the bed like the shadow of a monster- but this monster doesn’t want to eat you like the silly monsters of your childhood. No, this monster has an altogether more satisfying fare in mind. This monster doesn’t feed on your flesh, it feeds on your anguish. This monster wants to watch you cry. This monster wants to watch you curl up into a little ball– that same little ball that you curled up into when you were a little boy, and scared, and knew that your mother was passed out in another room and couldn’t come to comfort you.

So you give the monster what it wants, and you fall asleep crying.