Stepping Back from the Ledge, page 4
My mom came over the day before we were set to move from Phoenix to Cincinnati in late January of 2012. She helped me pack the last boxes, and we shared sushi, our favorite lunch choice. Neither of our husbands or my kids liked sushi, so it had become our treat. We stood in the kitchen, eating at the counter, and talked mostly about the kids. She was going to miss them so much and I knew how much they would miss her, so much so, I could barely mention it. She talked about how much they were going to like the snow, and we recounted all the gloves, hats, and coats I had bought for the kids in the past few weeks. We packed the last box with the final things my mom said to put in there—paper towels, plates, cups, bleach wipes, toilet paper, a packet of instant mashed potatoes she insisted I would be happy to find—things she said would be good to open first when we arrived at our new house. I hugged my mom standing in the kitchen that day and I felt as if I were hugging a black hole, like she wasn’t even there. If a hug could feel empty, this was it.
The alarm was set for five in the morning to load four kids and a dog in a minivan and drive eighteen hundred miles across the country. I held on to her and tried not to cry. Her shoulders felt narrow. I could feel her ribs in the back.
“I love you, Mom,” I said. “Always.”
“Love you, kiddo,” she said.
She suggested that she come by in the morning to say goodbye before we left, but we were leaving so early—hours before the sun was up—so the children could sleep the first few hours of the trip. I told her that it might be easier if she didn’t come.
On the four-day drive across the country, I took photos and posted them on Instagram as a way to document the trip for my mom. I had taught her how to use Instagram, and my mom was still so new to it that she didn’t have a profile photo yet, just the gray silhouette. We both hadn’t posted much of anything on it, so it felt like our own diary, in a way, more private than Facebook as we each only had a few followers. I experimented with filters and posted photos of the kids sleeping, or Lucy with her hair blowing in the wind with the window open, of the dog somehow asleep, yet sitting up. My mom wrote silly comments on my photos about us seeing snow for the first time on the road trip, and happy comments about places we stopped, always ending with “Love you,” “Love you all.”
Chapter 2
A Growing Distance
Most days during the first month we lived in Cincinnati, I called my mom on my drive to work. She wasn’t sleeping well, and seemed to be almost always awake. I took a route that snaked along the Ohio River, and would tell her what I saw as I drove. She missed the change of seasons, having moved to Arizona from Nebraska as a teenager. I told her about the barges on the Ohio—it was an actual working river. I still can’t drive that road without hearing her voice, and mostly I drive a different route to work to avoid it.
One morning, as I told her how beautiful it was when you could start seeing the downtown buildings on the drive in, the crown on the Great American Tower, the row houses in Mt. Adams that remind me of San Francisco, the curve of the Reds baseball stadium, she told me she’d been to Cincinnati once, as a young girl. She hadn’t told me before that she had ever visited, and I wanted to know more. She said she didn’t remember much, but they visited a big department store downtown and she got to shop for her Christmas dress. Was it still there? she asked, trying to remember the name.
“Maybe Shillito’s,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, excited that I knew the name. “It had fancy windows decorated with elves at Christmastime.”
I told her the department store wasn’t here anymore, but the name is so well known I had heard of it after only living here a month. Part of the building now holds apartments, I told her, and downtown is so pretty, there was a big Christmas tree in the center of downtown with an ice rink. And soon, I told her, the crocuses and tulips would sprout up in spring. Our three youngest kids walk through a gorgeous little wooded area to get to school. I said that one day, she would get to visit and walk with them through the little forest, that she would see Theo and Luke play baseball, and see how Lucy could now do the monkey bars. We had a guest room for her with its own bathroom. Three of the kids shared a room, so even with a four-bedroom house, we had a room just for her. I also told her that Lucy wanted a sleepover with her grandma and wanted her to sleep in the trundle bed in the room she shared with Theo and Luke. Lucy told me to tell my mom that if she wanted, my mom could sleep in the top bed and Lucy below in the trundle. They could look at the “Grandma book” together and tell stories.
My mom said she couldn’t leave her husband by himself for very long. Sometime, she said, she would come visit. I thought back to when I first had told her we were moving to Ohio—she had found a good price on a plane ticket to Cincinnati and wanted to make a reservation. I told her to wait until we actually moved, that I didn’t know what my work schedule would be, what the kids would be doing, what might be best for us. I had told her to wait. I didn’t think about what was best for her, that maybe she needed something to look forward to, a break of sorts.
A month before she died, I was having a terrible night. I had come from therapy where we once again reviewed that the sex abuse was not my fault and that I needed to stop feeling so guilty about it. I called my mom, trying to understand how her husband could have done this to me. I was angry—angry that it happened, angry at him, at myself for not telling her, not telling John, not telling anyone, and I directed my anger at her, in the way perhaps that sometimes only a daughter can do. It was a display of anger that felt like a tantrum, of emotions bottled up for thirty years free-flowing without a cap, without a way to stop them or even slow them. While she and I talked or mostly cried on the phone about how sorry she was, and about how much it hurt me, and how sorry I was and how much I missed her and needed her, she confronted him. I never had. And I don’t know if she had. I could hear her yelling at her husband, while she held the phone: “Did you do this? Did you?”
He kept saying, “I don’t remember. I don’t remember.”
She was so angry, yelling at him again and again: “Why did you do this?” I was silent, listening to their conversation from the spot where I sat on the kitchen floor. The call ended with nothing resolved, only sadness and anger and both of us in tears, and his saying he didn’t remember.
Her husband was sixty-six and sick. He still drank too much, and a brain tumor and a stroke had left him dependent on her. My mom and I had been circling each other warily, each apologizing to the other. Nothing seemed resolved. I wrote and deleted and rewrote a letter, finally hitting Send.
Nothing I wrote told her anything that she didn’t already know or that I hadn’t told her, but the letter spelled out that her husband had abused me for years, how hard it was to have him come into my room so many nights, and then there was this: I didn’t tell her then because I had wanted her to be happy. I told her I didn’t forgive her, because I didn’t need to forgive her. It wasn’t her fault. It was his.
I told her I loved her and needed her. I wanted her to know the truth of what happened, the reason I didn’t tell her, and that eventually we would be fine. But now I believe I saw only what I needed to see, neglecting to understand what she needed or what she was going through.
I never talked to her after I sent this letter. I thought the letter would make it all OK, that it would make her feel better. I wanted her to not just hear it, but to see it in print—that I didn’t blame her, and that I loved her.
We’re not supposed to blame ourselves when someone we love kills themselves, but many of us do anyway. After my mom died, the letter gnawed at me. Also, what if I had let her buy that plane ticket to visit? What if I hadn’t moved away? What if I’d kept quiet about my stepfather? What if I’d never sent that letter? What if I had answered her phone call the morning she died? The “what if” questions held me in the tightest grip at night, keeping me awake counting backward until the sun peeked through the shades. All of them tried to answer: Was I to blame?
I reviewed what my mom’s life had been like before she died, or at least the part I could see. So much of it seemed great, or better than great. She was a retired nurse and hospital administrator who had saved her money responsibly and had a solid pension. She was adored by my children and my sister’s four children. She was in a book club and had close friends she hiked with weekly in the desert paths just outside her front door. While she hated that four of her grandchildren had moved so far away, my sister’s children lived close, and she had planned to visit us soon. I know her husband had been sick, but he’d been sick for a while. He had been in a rehabilitation center after his stroke. Doctors recommended he go into a nursing home, but she wanted to bring him home. She devoted her life to taking care of him, getting him to therapy appointments, making sure he was exercising, and he had been improving. My mom’s mom was still alive and healthy and lived in town with my mom’s sister. My mom took trips with her friends to a cabin to fish and hike; she went to church and wrote letters to my kids. She strung beads together into jewelry and volunteered at a homeless shelter. She had traveled the world. She bought a house set into the side of a mountain, nestled among elm and ash trees that sometimes made you feel as if you were in a tree house.
I needed to find out what about her I had missed. I needed to know, to understand how someone who seemed to have so much, and who seemed so happy, could in fact be so sad. Or could you be both, and sometimes one of them won?
I combed through my mom’s life, looking for clues. I learned she had been seeing a psychologist and psychiatrist and had been prescribed antidepressants. I better saw the strain that her husband’s illness and his alcoholism were taking on her. She had started to attend weekly meetings for partners of alcoholics to learn to cope. I talked to my sister and my dad’s sisters, tried to ask questions of my grandma and aunt, but they had little or nothing to say. Later I drove 966 miles to Florida to spend a week with my mom’s best friend from when I was a child to find out if my mom had been depressed when I was young.
I learned everything I could from doctors who study suicide notes, from psychiatrists who personalize medicine to treat depression. I would learn that suicide had become the tenth leading cause of death in the United States in 2018, with numbers increasing in almost every state, and that money for research to better understand it remained low.[1] I explored the ripples of sexual abuse. I struggled not to follow her as I walked closer to this edge myself.
But first, we needed to say goodbye.
The day before my mom’s funeral, the church where her service was to be held was quiet. It was May and already one hundred degrees in Phoenix. I walked past the meditation chapel at the Franciscan Renewal Center, past the white stucco buildings with red tile roofs that looked like they could be found at a resort in Santa Barbara, through a healing garden and rock labyrinth, and under the shade of palo verde trees to stop by the main office. The church, also known as the Casa, is run by the Order of the Friars Minor, part of the Franciscan family, and is owned by the Franciscan Friars Province of Saint Barbara, which works in cooperation with the Catholic diocese. This was an important distinction for my mom, and the reason I was there that day.
When my parents divorced, the priest at our neighborhood parish where I had been baptized and celebrated my First Communion told my mom that as a divorced woman whose marriage wasn’t annulled, she was no longer welcome. It wasn’t that she simply was no longer welcome to take Communion, but that she really shouldn’t come back. We would later learn that at that same time, priests within the diocese were moved from one parish to the next for abusing children. My mom was devastated that her church had turned its back on her, especially when she felt as if she needed it more than ever. She discovered the Casa, a welcoming Catholic church that accepted her without question.
I needed to find the priest, the one my sister said our mom had talked to after Sunday Mass, just four days before she died. I asked for him by name at the front office and the church secretary came back with a man with a trim white beard and round wire-rimmed glasses. I followed him into a counseling room where the whir of the ceiling fan competed with his gentle voice. I wanted to know what he remembered about my mom. Tell me, I asked, what she was like when you last saw her. Did she seem sad? Was she depressed? I wanted to know.
He said he couldn’t tell me what he had discussed with my mom because he didn’t want to disclose confidential pastoral conversations with me. But on the last day he saw her, he said, she told him she thought she was fine, better even. He knew that she had been seeing a psychiatrist and was receiving counseling from him. She told him she thought she didn’t need any more counseling. He said he was surprised and that he shook his head when my mom told him this.
“I told her I didn’t think she was ready to stop coming yet,” he said.
I have learned that when some people decide to kill themselves, they seem more at ease than they have in a long time, because they know that if they show any suicidal signs or too much distress, others might try to talk them out of it. It is an irrational idea, of course. I wondered if my mom thought she actually was getting better that Sunday, or if she was thinking her pain would end soon with her suicide so she wanted to let her priest know she was fine. Or did she really think she was OK that day? The rational mind doesn’t kill itself. The body wants to live—even a dying body tries to preserve function to live.
I hadn’t been to church in years. I was raised Catholic, received my Holy First Communion, but never was confirmed. In junior high school, I was waiting in line for confession that I needed to make to be confirmed. I decided that if my mom wasn’t welcome in the church, I wasn’t joining—not wanting to be part of a church that didn’t include her. (I also didn’t want to tell the priest I had borrowed my sister’s new Esprit dress without asking or that I had skipped PE that week to watch a soap opera at my friend’s house, so perhaps my skipping confession wasn’t completely altruistic.) I went to a Jesuit university and took the required religion classes. John and I got married at St. Agnes Catholic Church in a ceremony so Catholic that we brought roses to the statue of the Virgin Mary. We baptized all four of our children in the Catholic church where my father-in-law was a deacon, in part to please my in-laws and in part so that our children could wear a baptismal gown passed down for four generations in my husband’s family.
But my faith had faltered over the years, and we never pursued a First Communion for any of our children. I struggled with the very notion of faith. I understood and believed in the concept of church as a spiritual home for many, a community of people who care. We tried an Episcopal church for a while when our kids were little, liking the familiar rituals and liturgy but also the liberal views allowing gay marriage and women to be ordained as ministers. But we hadn’t been to church since we moved to Ohio. I still didn’t know if I believed in God, but I knew my mom did, and I knew her faith had been important to her. And so that is why I was there.
I asked the priest if my mom was OK. I thought he could explain where she was now, tell me about redemption and heaven. I wanted him to tell me she was now safe and at peace. I wanted a fable, I think, of clouds and white robes, of angels and comfort.
He nodded and reminded me that he couldn’t tell me anything, that what she had told him was in confidence.
“But what else?” I asked him.
“All families are difficult,” he said. “Some families just know it, and others don’t.”
I sat down in one of the reclining chairs, frustrated.
“I just need to know if she is OK. I need to know that she’s in heaven.”
I wanted a simple answer that only a believer could give me, speaking about another believer. The whole purpose of believing, I thought at the time, was to know people would be saved when they died, that devotion to Jesus and the prayers and readings meant they had somewhere to go when they died, that they would be taken care of, redeemed.
Instead of answering, the priest sat down on the sofa across from me and told me a story about his own mom who had died, and how on an autumn day a few years ago when he was lying in a hammock here at the church, he saw her again. He was in the shade of the trees on one of those magical fall days, the kind after the summer heat breaks, a day that reminds you why you live in the desert. His mom came to him and they talked, or maybe, he said, he was just napping and it was all a dream. “Either way, I felt her presence,” he told me. “So we don’t know what is in the beyond.”
“That’s it?” I said, standing up. “You have nothing else?”
He nodded. “We can’t know what is beyond this earthly life. We can only know our faith.”
I wanted to talk to another priest who might tell me my mom was at peace, or that she was in heaven, or someone who understood that I needed to hear it.
My sister and I had agreed on a few things: I would write our mom’s obituary, our mom would be cremated, the service would be at the Franciscan Renewal Center. We called her service a celebration of life, as if there was such a thing in the moment. We wanted to create a service we thought she would want at the church where she attended mass on Saturday evenings or Sunday mornings. My sister, who had been close with my aunt and grandma since she was little, had planned the service with them and the staff at the Casa before I arrived back in Phoenix.
One of my mom’s favorite places was her garden. In the house where I grew up, she planted irises and sweet peas, roses and marigolds, flowers that stood up to the summer heat. When we moved into her boyfriend’s tiny condo, my mom planted a rosebush in the little fenced courtyard outside our front door to start a new garden. My mom had sold our childhood home back to my dad that year, and one night I had mentioned to her that my dad was out of town, and she said, “Let’s go.” She took a shovel and drove to our old house where she dug up the plants and their bulbs and took them back to our new home, replanting them in the courtyard.
