To Mom, with love
I recently found a photo of me, probably all of two-years-old, looking contemplatively off into the distance. It’s a photo my mom put in my high school yearbook my senior year, with this caption:
Shannon,
We’ve always known you were special. Now you have a chance to show the rest of the world. Take no prisoners! Love: Mom and Dad
What do you do when someone who loves you with such fierce belief in your potential is gone?
Today is the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death. My mom and I always had a sort of psychic ability with one another, an understanding of how things are tied together in ways we can’t always explain and a belief in ghosts. As she lay dying on the hospital bed, I said my good-byes and whispered in her ear, “Come see me anytime.” I meant it with all my heart. She has yet to come, but I did dream of her recently—she had her own sailboat and looked happy and energetic, the wind in her hair, not quite able to read the map. She never sailed, but she loved the water, loved boats and being in the sunshine.
My therapist says that when you lose your mom, you also lose your archive of memories, of all the things you were too young to remember or record. I feel that intensely.
Carla on her 50th birthday.
I started EMDR therapy a few weeks ago, and the ways memories link is powerful and almost magical. Imagine having all of these movie scenes stored in your head and suddenly they are linking up, referencing one another, opening doors you did not know were there.
My mom’s terrible car accident has been coming up a lot. I was 12, we had fought that morning. When she dropped me off at school and, as I remember it, I didn’t say “I love you.” A few hours later, driving to a conference with my grandfather, a piece of metal fell off of a semi-truck, spun up and went through the windshield of my grandfather’s car, hitting my mom on the side of her head. She passed out with her eyes open and he thought she was dead. Luckily, my grandfather had a phone in his car (this was in the late ‘80s, so not common), so EMS was able to come quickly. She had to be airlifted to the hospital. I remember the feeling of not knowing, tying my shoes wrong getting ready to leave for the hospital I felt completely helpless and set adrift, could not begin to imagine a world in which she did not exist. 35 years later, I’m living in it and it does not seem any more real.
I don’t know what the right memories or words are to share when you lose someone. Sometimes we create these myths, make them perfect, and maybe I do that from time to time. But there’s nothing that can replace the real-ness of someone being here in the world with you, struggling through it, helping you understand it.
She gave me everything and more, but she also could lose her temper, remind me of the opportunities I had that she never did. When she had me she was only 21, how young that is for motherhood, especially while working in broadcasting with its crazy hours. Once, she got so frustrated with my tangled, curly hair that one night, after getting out of the bathtub, me in tears from her combing through the tangles, she took scissors to it and lobbed it off. The tears moved from mine to hers as we sat on the floor together crying. The next day, she took me to a hair stylist and they were able to make it look like the ‘80s popular Dorothy Hamill cut. Which is funny, because I think I may have a similar haircut right now.
Years later, I was fixing her hair. She was going somewhere and always anxious about how her hair looked, how it was thinning, not enough, too gray, etc. I remember the softness of it in my hands as I massaged it into a gentle French twist. We laughed as I made her close her eyes when I applied the hairspray. She was so grateful and happy for my help. I felt like an older sister giving attention to a younger one. That was our relationship in some ways. It was like that with us—this teeter-totter of maturity, of love, of grace, of softness.