Driving In The Rain

on the one month anniversary of my mama's death

It happens in the car. Hot leather greets my thighs and the air burns with trapped sun. Driving in the summer begins with a scorch. Scorch. Start the car. Buckle up. Automatic movements wrapped in heat. That’s where it happens, in the automatic. The unthinking.

Scorch. Start the car. Buckle up. Call mama.

I’m fluid, easeful in the ingrained nature of these steps. And then, a glitch. Call mama. How many times have I clicked her name, the first listed under “Favorites” in my phone? And how many rings until I hang up? Until I remember?

I remember. I hang up. But I don’t understand.

“I don’t understand,” was the first thing I said when my mama died. When she crossed from here to not here. “I don’t understand.” My head burrowed under the purple pillows of my childhood bed. My face ravaged with disorientation. “I don’t understand.”

My mama died on a day with no sudden movements. A calm bestowed itself upon our house and we moved as if gravity was just a little more in our favor than usual. We took a family portrait. A phone positioned on the mantel beside the ashes of two of our dogs, self-timing. We found our spots easily, like a puzzle before you lose the final piece.

She died in her favorite room of the house. One that she loved because of the angle with which it captured the sun. Light cascaded through the windows and bloomed amaryllis in its wake. Outside, her garden was lush. We held hands, my mama, my mommy, my sister, and me.

Beside us was a translucent bottle filled with four ounces of white powder, a snack sized serving of apple juice, and a cherry ice pop. I stared at my phone and tracked the minutes. My heart thudded in disbelief.

We said the serenity prayer like that. With gravity on our side and the sun in caress. “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” We spoke in unison, our voices steady, our cheeks wet with quiet tears.

My mama swallowed. Four ounces of life ending medication mixed into two ounces of apple juice. I watched. One hand on her thigh, one hand on my sister’s. I swear gravity was different. It was different while she swallowed.

I always assumed the line between here and not here was straight. That it was precise and absolute. But it’s blurry. It’s blurry like driving in the rain.

Her head grew heavy in my mommy’s hand, and we laid her down, unconscious. Her breath came out in gasps, but not sudden ones. Meticulous and metronomed. You could count the seconds between them and at one point I did. Eight. There were eight seconds between her breaths.

I held her hand and rubbed her feet, still warm. She was her. That’s what I need you to understand. She was her. She was unconscious but she was herself, her eyes closed and peaceful, her long toes on her size 11 feet so precisely and perfectly hers. I laid my body beside her. I held her close.

We sang her favorite songs, Patti Smith and Led Zeppelin. And then our favorites, Carole King and James Taylor. We played her acoustic guitar and let the melody travel through her. We told her we loved her, that she was brave, that she did not need to worry, we would be ok. Sometimes when I got extra close to her ear and whispered so that only she could hear, her breathing sped up. Six seconds.

Five and a half hours. We had five and a half hours like this. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends came and spoke to her. All of it free from sudden movements, loud noises, from disruption or distraction. That’s what I keep coming back to, how peace had descended upon us. I’ve never felt anything like it before. Peace like a gravity blanket.

All that happened when she died is her breathing stopped. That’s all that happens when we die. How can something be so simple and so impossible, all at once?

I left her favorite room in the house and buried my head beneath the purple pillows of my childhood bed. “I don’t understand.” I repeated the words out loud. Like a march. A prayer. “I don’t understand.”

My mama’s been sick for almost six years. I spent almost six years braced against her death. And then she died. And all that happened is she stopped breathing.

I guess I always thought dead bodies would be scary. But they aren’t. Or hers wasn’t. We put pink socks on her feet, so she wouldn’t be cold. Because we needed her to be herself and herself was often cold. I laid back down on the couch beside her and held her body close against my own. There was stillness where her gasps had just been. Utter stillness. I spoke to her anyway.

A hospice nurse was called. Time of death was declared. “I don’t understand,” I said.

The funeral home was called. Two women came to take “the body.”

“That’s my mama,” I wanted to tell them.

The women from the funeral home were small. Smaller than me. And “bodies” are heavy. They couldn’t lift her on their own. My uncles had to help them carry her down the stairs. I could hear my mama’s voice making a joke about feminism in the funeral home industry. I could literally hear it. “I don’t understand,” I said.

Life keeps happening and I keep waiting to understand.

We set the table for dinner because your mama dies, and you still need to set the table. Now there are three place settings instead of four. I feel her absence in the spaces she used to fill automatically. The habits I didn’t know I had until they were taken. Like apparently, I call my mama every time I get in the car.

And I hear her voice.

On the day after her memorial service, my mommy and I bring bouquets of flowers around town in thanks. Peonies and pansies and petunias, explosions of color so luscious and life like, I almost don’t believe in death.

We bring flowers to our local bakery, to our favorite hospice nurse, to our cantor. With the cantor, we lay on her floor and pet her dog, and for an hour, or maybe two, we talk. We meet her husband, tour her house, and make lunch plans. And I hear my mama’s voice. It is my mama who taught us to give flowers, to say thanks, to make friends.

At Maplewoodstock, music flits across the park and the grass is littered with lawn chairs and picnic blankets and coolers. It threatens to rain but doesn’t. I drink a lemonade out of a Tupperware and the sugar hangs on my tongue. My mommy brings trays of cookies, leftover from our shiva, and carries them from picnic blanket to picnic blanket. “Free cookies!” She smiles. She talks to strangers. And I hear my mama’s voice.

We buy bunches of fresh basil and plant them. Their smell is the smell of late summer, of ripe tomatoes and mozzarella spread across a plate and drizzled in oil. Of sunshine on a porch. Of my mama, standing over a sink on the North Fork rinsing piles of leaves we’d pulled from the garden. Every summer growing up we’d make homemade pesto.

I hear myself at five years old, “Add more cheese, mama!”

And hear her voice in response, “More cheese it is!”

I hear my mama making jokes I know she’d make, and giving advice I know she’d give, and her voice is so automatic in my head, so full and so present, that I trip up and crack open each time. Another glitch. Then I remember. But I still don’t understand.

I used to think that the line between here and not here was firm. But it’s blurry. I get into my car. The seat burns my thighs, and the air is stiff with summer heat.

Scorch. Start the car. Buckle up. Call mama.

There’s one of these storms we’ve been having lately, torrential and God-like. The sky opens up. I am driving in the rain.