Crested Butte, Colorado, my 60th birthday
I always think of you when I hear the Fleetwood Mac song Gypsy. For years, that song has reminded me of you, and I always picture you in your Alaska days. Tonight, during their show, for the first time I felt myself reflecting back on my pre-Arlo days, thinking like a gypsy in spirit. I kept thinking about how cool it would have been if you and I were able to meet when we were both in our young twenties. I think we would have been best friends. Thank you for gifting me with a part of your spiritual gypsy soul. Love you always! Emery December 3, 2018
Emery sent this email to me after a Fleetwood Mac concert, when she was living in Fort Collins and I was still in KC, but would be moving to Boulder the following summer. I liked to think about Emery and me as friends— going to concerts together and wearing vintage clothing with braids in our hair. I held her idea, knowing that someday we would go to a Fleetwood Mac concert and pretend to be in our early 20s, instead of a young mother and grandmother. Those words hold far more value for me today, as do the conversations, the photos, the experiences, and the plans that never came to fruition, because now they carry the weight of being finite entities.
This is not the typical beginning to a Mother’s Day post for me, with musings of pop tarts on make-shift trays and kids fighting over who gets to sit next to mom. Instead, I’ve been dreading this Mother’s Day. Emery, who is why I landed in Boulder, and was the one who ensured I was given a proper Mother’s Day celebration, is gone. I don’t know what to do with the day or myself, knowing that her plans for us to celebrate our roles as mamas will be painfully absent.
Last year on Mother’s Day, Emery and I celebrated our motherhood doing what we loved — we played in the dirt and planted three carloads of perennials in her front yard. Emery did what I never could on Mother’s Day. She told Miles she wanted to spend the day planting with me after our family brunch. It was her version of me wanting to go to the movies by myself for Mother’s Day, but unlike me, she asked for what she wanted and got it. Miles took the children fishing, and Emery and I rolled up our sleeves and dug in the dirt. We planted, we laughed, we told stories, and we cried, all with the beautiful music of Stephen Sanchez in the background. Emery preferred the wild, untamed, and overgrown look of an English garden, whereas I preferred the orderly and tidy look of a French garden. I told her we would know exactly who planted what in three years, as her area would be a tangled mess. She smiled at me and said, “I know, Mom…exactly like I like it.” I told her it would be fun to see the results of our plantings on the following Mother’s Day, when much of what we planted would be beginning to show blooms. She suggested we do the same thing the following Mother’s Day. I agreed. I loved the tradition we had set into motion.
We talked about travel plans — a trip to NYC, and when the children were at an age when she could leave them for a longer stretch, maybe Paris. She said she would visit me when I returned to the house I had rented on the Oregon Coast the following year, cloudy days and all and asked me where I wanted to celebrate my 70th birthday. Emery had planned my 50th and 60th birthday celebrations, so I knew my 70th would be no exception. The anticipation felt good. We had so much to look forward to. That ended on January 4th, at 11:38 am — a time on the clock and forever in my heart that marked my before and after. It became my line of demarcation between when my life was whole and when a big part was gone. It marks the time from when I looked forward to the trips and plans made, to not wanting to do anything. It is my before, when joy was present and my heart felt full, and now the after, when I can barely get out of bed in the morning, can’t sleep at night, and cry without reserve or explanation at inopportune times. It marks the time when I knew who I was, to the time when I have no idea who I am, or who I will become in my grief of missing my darling girl. It marks the time before, when I bought two Mother’s Day cards last year to be given on two consecutive Mother’s Days, because they were that good, to the time after, where there will always be an unsigned Mother’s Day card in the top drawer of my desk, because I bought it for Emery, and no one else.
Thomas and Grant, who I became a mother to before Emery was born, have mothered me since January 4th and the 48 hours that preceded that difficult day. They held me up, gave me their shoulders to cry into, came to me from another room when they heard me sobbing, and never once told me it would be ok, because we all knew it never would be. As we were leaving Emery’s hospital room the morning she died, Thomas said, “You can’t hold your sister’s hand while the machines that were keeping her alive are turned off and walk out of the room the same person.” He was so right. We are all changed, and our love of Emery and each other is holding us together. Through their love, I have found my respite and refuge and because they are a part of me, they are the ones who can help me carry the tremendous load of grief I have for the part of their life and mine that is missing. They have been by my side as we navigate this unfamiliar journey that often feels like an icy precipice with limited visibility on a knife-edge cliff. They have become my strength, my comfort, and the outstretched hands in person and words over the phone that have become my stability. They are my comfort. They are my world. They are my opening into the wisdom of how we will carry this grief and how to set it down, if only for a moment. They carry stories that only we know, that are now safeguarded for Emery and Miles’ children, Arlo and Muna. To Thomas and Grant, I’m honored that you call me Mom on this most difficult of Mothers’ Days and every day after. You hold my heart.
Emery’s Dad, Charlie, and I were with our girl for her first breath and also her last. We linked the circle of Emery’s being in the hospital room, overcrowded with machinery, anticipation, and hope, while time slipped and stalled and ended with a painful loss, whose depth we are still grappling with. And just as Thomas would later confirm, we filed out of her room, different from the people who had entered.
I’ve been going through the files on my computer titled Emery. In it are countless letters and essays I’ve written to or about Emery, along with emails from her. I found the words I wrote for her Celebration of Life, and next to that, a copy of her death certificate. That last entry makes it feel like the file had been closed, but it hasn’t. It can’t be closed just like I can’t tell people I have two children. I have three, two of them living. In rereading the essays and letters, there is a common thread of my difficulties in letting go that started with her going to kindergarten and ended with her getting married, and eventually, moving to Colorado. I didn’t want to let go. I didn’t know how. I learned the night after getting her settled in her dorm room at college, when she called and asked if I could return to college and be her roommate, she didn’t know how to let go either. I knew she was joking, but I also understood the sentiment behind her words. We missed each other when we weren’t physically close. One of the letters I found in the collection was one she wrote me for my 60th birthday. I stopped and started it several times as it was painful to read and decided to include part of it given that it’s Mother’s Day.
August 30, 2015 (from Emery)
“You taught me to always listen to my intuition and follow my heart. I’m so glad I listened to you because I wouldn’t be who I am today if it were not for you.
This is what I’ve learned about the heart and the mother and child’s bond:
When two people are near one another, their hearts’ electromagnetic fields synchronize. This synchronization is like a support system, one heart learning to beat with the other. The first begins in utero, when the mother’s and baby’s hearts synchronize. When you’re away from that person, your heart goes through a period where it has to focus on beating without the other heart, and it takes some time for your heart to get back to beating on its own in a normal fashion. This is the feeling of heartache or missing the person. It is real.
As two people who have spent so much time together, our hearts sigh with relief when we are together, Mom, because we are so familiar with each other. So, when I say I love you from the bottom of my heart, I really, really mean it. I love you so much, Mom. Emery”
You were right, my darling girl, the feeling of heartache is real. I wonder how much time it will be before my broken heart goes back to beating in the way it beat before January 4th at 11:38, if that will ever happen.
I’ve often spoken of the umbilical cord when writing about mothering, or the metaphorical cord after the physical one has been cut. I’ve referenced my umbilical cord stretching itself to three different parts of the country, where my three children lived. I don’t know how far Emery’s cord stretches now, but I know it’s still there. I can feel its tug when I see Muna’s big brown eyes and soft curls, so much like her Mama, or when Arlo leaned in at our birthday dinner, wanting me to tell him stories about his Mama. I will tell him all the stories I can remember, and story by story, word by word, he and Muna will have the tools to paint a picture of their Mama when she was a child. I feel the cord wrapping itself around my own heart, which is no longer intact, yet, the connections continue —a red-tailed hawk circling overhead, a quarter found on the floor next to my bed with 1990 on it, and a framed photo also near my bed that randomly fell over yesterday. Connections are different, but present.
I used to tell my kids that I would stand before a moving train if I had to to protect them. I spoke metaphorically, but the deeper I got into motherhood, the less metaphorical that statement became. I’m sorry I couldn’t stop that train on Jan 4th, Emery. I couldn’t even find the tracks, and as a mother, not being able to come to your rescue has been so painful that I sometimes struggle to find my breath.
My Mother’s Day post in 2017 was dedicated to Emery as she had just given birth to her son, Arlo, four days earlier, ironically, on my firstborn, Thomas’s, birthday.
It feel timely to include an excerpt from that post.
Mother’s Day, May 4th, 2017
I will always be your mother, and you will always be my daughter, but now we’re entering into a new place, given that we both are mothers now, and that in and of itself is just about the most beautiful and perfect thing I can think of on this very first Mother’s Day for you.
You will have days that you feel like you are swimming upstream in mud, and it will be hard to maneuver yourself out of the mire, but you’ll figure it out, and before you begin to slump into a human question mark, rest assured, dry land is never out of sight. You’ll stumble, you’ll fumble, you’ll eat a bag of chips with a salsa chaser for breakfast, and you’ll call pajamas clothes for more days than you care to admit, and to that I say “do it.” And do it repeatedly because you deserve every morsel of not-so-healthy and every hour of long past time to get out of your jammies. You’re a mama now. Claim that right with pride.
You grew up with a mom who often felt like that frazzled, wild-haired bus driver in the Magic School Bus series, which I greeted at the time with a sigh and a promise to myself to get it right the next time. Still, decades later and without apologies, I realize that the messy, the dirty, the not wearing the right shoes, or shoes at all, and letting go of a whole lot of shoulds and coulds, just might have been one of the best gifts I could give you. I can’t end this letter without a big shout-out to your partner in life and love, Miles. His hands-on fathering melts my heart. What a lucky baby Arlo is to have you both as parents.
From one mother to another, I wish you the best of everything and several consecutive hours of sleep this Mother’s Day, dear Emery. Only now that you are a Mom, can you begin to understand how much I love you. And I do. So much.
Still.
To all reading this, celebrate your role as a Mom, or celebrate your Mom today. It matters deeply.
Mother’s Day, 2012