It was 7:37 pm in Atlanta when the phone rang. March and unseasonably warm. My husband was on the front porch having a cigar and scotch while my son and I checked off nightly rituals. Bath and bubbles, giggles, singing, books, kitty cats, and lots of snuggles. He was 13 months old. My God, I’d kill to go back to 7:36 pm that night.
I was wearing a buttery soft, faint yellow nightgown with cornflower blue Scottish terriers embroidered on it. The terrier is a favorite of mine, for reasons nested deep within my intellectual being. The little blue pups were all over this nightgown and I loved it, and still do. I look like a 93 year old grandmother in it, but who cares. I don’t wear it much these days. Sometimes my son would point at the “puppy goggies” and rub them between his fingers as we snuggled to sleep. He has always loved different textures.
“Hello”
“Hi, is this Stuart?”
“Yes, can I help you?”
“My name is Ronnie, and I’m your mom’s roommate. I’m afraid to tell you that your mom is dead.”
In that instant, time stopped. My mind has locked that moment in time as a core memory. I can access it faster than any NASA computer can process rote mathematical equations. I see where I’m standing in my son’s bedroom, my feet with Perry the Platypus green toenail polish, bare on the deep Brazilian cherry wood floors. Faint smells of Johnson & Johnson lavender baby wash wafting through the air. The cat was napping to the right of me on the fluffy lion blanket; little loops of fabric were pulled through from the kitty biscuits he made every night. I can pinpoint the placement of every toy and stuffed animal, see piles of dirt on the floor down to the flecks of dust on the window sill, a half full sippy cup lying on its side in the corner. A bedside table was missing a bulb, my water glass half empty. Fingerprints on the walls from dirty, little hands, and toddler socks piled on the nightstand but not matched. I hate socks.
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons played softly in the background because my son loved listening to it as he drifted to sleep. For my new life in the southern heat, a place lacking four distinct seasonal periods, this soundtrack reminded me of the place I left far behind. I never found the violins overpowering and always thought it miraculous that musical instruments could tell a story without any imagery whatsoever. That would be the last night I played the music for him. To this day hearing it makes me feel ick. It’s usually in high-end stores and fucking elevators.
My throat instantly dried. I wanted to speak but I couldn’t. I wanted to ask questions. I wanted to scream. To cry. To throw the phone. My body felt burdened by a thousand weights around my neck, and breathing became hard. It was like I turned to stone and was being pushed into the floor, becoming one with it. I couldn’t pull a deep breath in. The floodgates from my eyes opened. No noise. Just tears. I blinked…a lot. Was this real?
I started shaking, but not panicky. More like clustered body spasms. Then a wave of fear washed over me like spirits from the netherworld taunting me and then fleeing for the very last time. All the terror from my childhood, that which related to Pearl, concentrated on one final supernatural push through the core of my being. I felt Pearl in my soul. I felt her inner demons, her fight, her loss to the horrors in her head. I felt every atrocity of my childhood, concentrated in one converging event, as they collectively took one final blow to my body before leaving me.
I could smell her hair, cigarette smoke, perfume, laundry detergent. I could hear her voice, her humming to music like she did at dinner. I heard the snapping of her Trident gum. Sounds of my mom crying reverberated through my head in a cacophonous clatter and I could practically taste her tears. The sounds of her weeping were muted and soft, and faded into the distance. Those nights she was hiding her torment from me while physically hiding from Mick.
Looking back, I believe this was my first disassociative episode. At least the first clearly defined one. The first time I actually had a name to put to the strange out-of-body experience. I was part of me, but not. Talking to some random woman on the phone, but it wasn’t me talking. I was still talking; how was that even possible? Something had taken over. I was functioning, but not. Stasis, but not.
Ronnie made a quick comment about what would happen to Pearl’s body and I came absolutely unhinged. On a dime. Fuck no. It will be a cold day in hell before anyone lays a finger on her. It was a protective almost territorial mechanism that remains indescribable to this day. It was instinctive, primal. Nobody had a goddamed right to her, her earthly possessions, or the circumstances of her resting place. I had been to hell and back with Pearl, sometimes at her hand, and I alone would protect her earthly remains and get her into the ground. The way she would have wanted it, and not one person alive knew her like me. Nobody would so much as move a hair on her head until I saw her.
My mother was a widow, I her eldest child. She had no will, no power of attorney, nothing. That responsibility, whether I wanted it or not, was mine. Legally, morally, ethically, and otherwise. Mine, and I didn’t want it, but wasn’t giving it up and would fight to my dying breath to be certain Pearl was handled properly. In keeping with her spirit. I sure as shit wasn’t going to listen to a complete stranger tell me what anyone was going to do with my mom.
“Lay a finger on my mother and I will hunt you until my dying breath. Do you understand me?” And I meant it with every ounce of my being.
She replied with, “so that’s how this is going to be?”
“Yes, mark my words, let her be and do not enter her home until I arrive. I do not care that you live there.”
The phone line went dead.
I don’t remember planning to scream, thinking I should, or even starting to make a sound. A deep, guttural noise erupted from me. A mix of air, snot, tears, and years of torment exploded outward in a blood curdling cacophony that made its way down two flights of stairs, past storm doors and windows, and to my husband on the front porch. It seems I also startled the neighbors on both sides of our home.
I, for the first and only time since that moment, forgot I had a child. I was nobody but Pearl’s daughter in those moments. Stuart was not a wife, not a mother, nor anything else. Just Pearl’s pumpkin seed. The beautiful little boy who I had just scared to his core by my screaming actually took me off guard when I realized I wasn’t alone. His screaming stopped mine. I left the room without so much as a thought. My husband took over.
I picked up the phone, found the number for the VA hospital where Pearl had begun decomposing, and called. For being a large, federal bureaucratic organization, they were remarkably efficient. Within a few minutes, I was placed on a speaker phone talking to my mother’s attending physician, her cardiologist, and the hospital chaplain.
It seems Pearl was in the cardiac cath lab, getting what is now considered a rather routine procedure thanks to the shit food, lack of exercise, and general state of American health. Oh, and her prolific smoking habit. Upon waking from anesthesia, her cardiologist informed her that she would not be going home as planned after the catheterization he’d just performed. She would be admitted and would undergo a life-requiring quadruple bypass the next day.
Pearl looked at the man, a well-qualified but painfully young surgeon, square in his eyes, and said, “I’m going home. Finally.”
She flatlined on the table.
After 70 minutes of attempts to resuscitate her, she was pronounced dead.
I had no words. Silence split the connection from Atlanta to the great western place from which I hailed. The place with purple sunsets that held my deepest secrets. Gingerly, and with respect, the doctor said she was at peace. He explained that the attempts at resuscitation were “quite violent,” as they customarily are, but she still had the lingering effects of anesthesia on board and was likely gone in mere seconds. She didn’t suffer. I’m not sure that I actually believed him so much as I am that I really needed to.
Before her spark forever extinguished, mere moments before she coded, she thanked him for his care over the years. He told me that he’d never had a patient so calm, with “some strange intuition” he’d never before seen, acknowledge her fate, accept it, and walk directly towards it. “Your mother was a force to be reckoned with and was also peculiar as hell.” I’ll never forget those words. He later admitted that he wasn’t sure she could have survived the surgery required to prolong her earthly existence. Seems the years of smoking, cooking with bacon fat, mental torment, abuse, cortisol dumping in her system, and anxiety finally won.
I hung up the phone and wept. I cried the tears of the scared little girl who loved her mommy but didn’t understand her. I cried the tears of a now married woman with a child who finally understood the depths of her mental illness. My mind had already begun playing tricks on me. Pearl’s departure certainly increased the frequency of the shenanigans in between my ears.
There were so many snapshots of our life and they replayed like a personal slideshow, one that only I could see, through my mind’s eye. Memories of dictionaries and finger painting, bad Halloween costumes, and green chile. The death of Ding Dong. Spelling bees, school plays, when I got my first period. Of smudged mascara and my first failed attempt at baking cookies. Of living in her little car, losing my childhood home, being hungry, and eating from cans of food without labels indicating their contents. But mostly, I wept over the loss of her striking blue eyes, jet black hair, and the absolute perfection of her beyond-damaged life.
I cried tears of joy and peace. Pearl was finally free. My mom went home and was unburdened by her mental health illness and the torment and abuse that Mick branded upon her. She missed the love of her life, my step father who had died a year prior, and was finally with him.
As I lay in bed that night staring at the ceiling, a feeling washed over me that continues to burden me as if it is a fresh, out-of-the-box emotion. Every day, the same razor’s edge slices through me when I think of Pearl. Losing a parent is hard, but losing your mom is life-changing, reality altering, and beyond existential. Pearl’s death was especially problematic; our relationship was not clean or traditional. It was ugly, messy, tainted by her illness, which ruined her and also hurt me. But it was ours, imperfections and all. The vessel that brought me life was gone. Somehow, in that instant, my life stopped making sense and I felt orphaned…at 39. The womb that brought me into this world no longer lived. How and why was I even here? It’s as if my very existence was being called into question. Gone was my tether between the heavens and earth; I was no longer attached…to anything. I continue to feel this deep foreboding, alone in my head, and it is a completely different experience than anything I have ever encountered. I’ve not shaken the feeling since.
My anchor to this world was gone, and I have been wafting about without any temporal reason for belonging. For 15 excruciating years.
