It turns out you can't hold on and fall backwards at the same time. Tough lesson, especially when what you want to hold onto is your mom.
Change. You can't prepare for it; you can't brace yourself. It just hits you. And suddenly, the life you knew before is over. Forever. Sometimes it's good: Falling in love. Seeing your baby for the first time. Stepping down in a new country. But sometimes it's like a bad accident: The car stops moving, but we don't. Instead we keep moving forward, not understanding that things have changed, until we hit the dashboard, the windshield, fly through the air. Untethered. Hurt. We wake up and we don't know where we are, or how we got here. We know just one thing, with sickening certainty - that we woke up in a different world than the one we woke to yesterday. The life we had before is gone.
My mom is still alive. She's in Ketchikan, Alaska for the moment. She has no permanent address. I got a letter that begins, 'Dear Family' - she's afraid to write any names. I don't know if it's because she's afraid the wrong eyes will see the card, or she's afraid that the card will arrive in a reality where her daughter's name is not Alicia. My mom's alive. Sometimes we don't know where she is for too many months and we try to staunch the panic that rises, that spreads through my sisters and I like a virus. No matter what our heads say, or what our hearts say, we get scared.
But thankfully, she's still here, still fundamentally herself. Funny, sweet, kind, opinionated. I lost her anyway. A long time ago. I can't even say exactly when, but there it is. I lost her, I pushed her away, I wanted her back, but it would never be the same. And now she lives in another Universe - like an exlover, out there in the world but no longer in my world - and there's no telling what will happen. I think I've given up that she'll ever rejoin my world, a world where she can be present with her grandson, really engage with him or pay real attention to what he says. Or to me, and what I say. She's ghost grandma; I buy presents for him at Christmas and his birthday, from her, so he knows she loves him. Because she does. I've never doubted that. But I can't say if he'll ever have, however brief, a moment of real connection with her. In ways I can't explain, she's gone. But still I hold on.
What would letting go look like? There was no goodbye, there's no headstone to visit. I can still write her letters, and she will read them. But I have such a hard time doing so; it stirs a pot inside myself I'd sooner leave be. Holding on is as hard as letting go. The thing is, I miss her. I need her. I don't understand, in the very core of me, why she left me. I mean, I get it in my head. I can even be philosophical about it. But everywhere else, I just ache. I want my mom back.
How do you go on without your mom, or your husband, or your child? How does anybody? Don't answer me. I don't care about grief and faith and the human spirit right now. I just want to know how it is that life can do that, that it can change so suddenly and with such finality. I want to know how that's even possible, on some subatomic level. Because I have woken up to that; I have woken up and realized I was not dreaming, that how I felt would stretch out before me indefinitely, that nothing would ever be the same. And I have felt that it is wrong. I have felt lost. I have felt blown apart.
But it is possible. It's even probable. Sooner or later, harshly or softly, tragedy impacts everyone. My mom loved me. My mom left me. I'm guessing that under the schizophrenia, she didn't want to. When I look at how desperately I want to always be there for my son, I can't imagine that she would choose to leave. Does it help to know this? I don't know.
Have you ever seen that Tom Cruise movie, Vanilla Sky? I'd forgotten about it, but it just popped back into my head, the scene at the end where he chooses to start his new life, and falls backwards off the top of the skyscraper. I'm gathering all of this to my chest - all the questions, all the feelings, how much I love her, how much I miss her, how safe and warm and comforting it felt to be near her back then, how on edge I feel around her now, and stepping off, letting go of something else. The idea that it could be any other way. The idea that any other life existed, or could exist. I'm not in prison. Where I am now is not a place to be endured by visiting what I once knew. My life feels strange and uncertain and still, even 20 years later, a brave new world.
But the answer, I finally understand, is not to right my life, to create some place of peace and security and fun. I've been trying for 20 years and it seems like in response life has been determined, in numerous small ways, to stymie me. To show me that it's not the answer. I can't tell you exactly what the answer is, right now. But it starts with holding everything I am, and everything I feel, as sacred. Taking it with me as I step out on what still sometimes feels like foreign soil. Hold my hand up to shade my eyes from the sun as I look around, take stock, feel the tingle of a new landscape before me. My life, in this moment, on this day.
