I think about my mother every day. In every interaction that I have with a barista in a coffee shop, or the register girl at Macy's, or a coworker at my office.
I think about the way she would tilt her head to the side when she wanted someone to know that she was really listening to them. Like a dog. But it was sweet. It made you feel like she was really paying attention to you. Hanging on your every word. It made you feel special.
No, my mom isn't dead. She lives all the way across the country though, and I think about her all the time, and her garden and her red Adirondack porch chairs.
I hear her when I speak, usually in moments of excitement, or fear. I hear her in my voice. The lilt of of it when I am angry. The sigh of it when I am appeased. The way that I move my body is similar to how she walks a room. I mimic her from 3000 miles away.
A story now, about my mother.
My mother found a dying young woman once on the side of the road. The girl had crashed her car into an oak tree in someone's front yard. The front of the car was utterly compacted, the black Honda wrapped completely around the wide trunk. Her legs were crushed. Mom said the accident must have only just happened as she crested the hill, that she missed witnessing the crash herself by maybe 2 seconds.
A man was running from his home to the crash on his front lawn, hands in his hair, mouth open and aghast. This young woman, her arms were stretched outside of the open window, but she was trapped. Her neck was bent at an odd angle. She was still breathing.
My mom threw her car into park and lept from her vehicle. She was on her way to teach a class at the local community college. It could have been one of her students, for all she knew. As my mother knelt down beside the driver's door, she could see the young woman was barely conscious. She was afraid to touch her, to move her too much. Her neck was broken. There wasn't much time for anything else but compassion. The homeowner stood on the porch with a cordless phone in his hand, his other hand gripping his hair. Help is coming, he shouted to my mom on the lawn.
My mother's name is Anne, and she told the young woman this. I imagine the conversation went something like this, "Hi, sweet girl. My name is Anne. Don't be afraid. I'm right here." because this is something I can hear her saying in my head right now, with her head tilted a little to the side.
When my mom gets to this part of the story, she puts her hands on her chest. It's an involuntary motion, as if she's literally holding her heart in as it pounds with the memory of the little girl and her bent neck. She was wearing black pants and a pink tank top, with black oil slick safe shoes. She probably a worked in a restaurant. Her hair was freshly washed and dried, and smelled like floral shampoo. It was loose and down around her shoulders, some if it stuck to her sticky lip gloss. My mom pulled the stray pieces from her mouth, tucked them behind her ear. My mother closes her eyes as she recalls every detail about the young woman and this moment.
The man from the front porch, he was just coming down onto the lawn with the cordless phone. He was trying to ask my mother something about the girl. Was she breathing? Could she speak? Were her eyes open? Yes, I don't know, no. But the girl, she was starting to gasp. Big, heaving gasps. It's called agonal breathing, but my mom didn't know that. The man who owned and who every Saturday mowed the lawn the girl was dying on didn't know that. Agonal breathing sounds like trying to take a breath with water in your lungs. It's a wet, horrible sound. The man, he was back on the phone desperately trying to explain to the 911 dispatch what was happening. It's not an easy scene to describe.
The girl began to shiver and shake. Her lips were turning blue. This is shock, and it happens when your body has undergone such immense trauma that the blood starts going to only the organs it needs to stay alive. She wasn't cold. She was dying. But my poor mother, she didn't know. She couldn't know. With her big purple skirt billowing in the wind, she remembers taking off her indigo cardigan sweater and wrapping it around the girl in the crushed car. My mother reached in gently, tucked the sweater in around her tighter, leaning into the car further to wrap her shoulders. The radio was playing. It was a melancholy love song with the singer crooning, "oooh, I love you, I love you so." She shouldn't be cold, my mother said. She should feel warm, and safe. By that time, the air was filling with sirens. My mother stared down at her dark blue cotton sweater cocooning her adopted daughter, and her first tears fell. The first responders rushed to the black Honda and the oak tree, gently moving my mom to the side, thanking her, asking her to please wait, to talk to a police officer. Ushered to the edge of the road, lights flashing everywhere, a small crowd of neighbors had formed on the sidewalk. This was a rural neighborhood. The houses weren't right next to each other, but instead about a quarter of a mile apart. The group muttered amongst themselves. So many kids die in car accidents in Western New York, one would have said. Windy roads and no seat belts, another would have agreed. My mother wondered how long they had been standing there, mouths covered by hands, tears streaming down faces, watching her comfort a dying girl.
The police officer interviewing my mom asked her questions like,
Did you see the accident?
Did she say anything to you?
Did you move the body?
Wait, move the body?
The officer placed her hand gently on my mother's arm. The EMTs were folding a white sheet across the girl on the gurney. Red splotches formed on the crisp white linen. My mother's blue cardigan sleeve was visible, it hung down past the edge of the death cloth, still wrapped around the cold body of someone's daughter or sister or best friend as she was loaded into the back of the ambulance. The lights were off now. No more sirens. The neighbors were dispersing.
The officer asked my mother to make an official statement, took her phone number and let her leave. This was almost 15 years ago now. Last summer when I was home visiting from California, mom and I were sitting on the red Adirondack chairs on the porch talking. She said, "That girl would have been about 35 years old now. She might even have children." I didn't have to ask who the girl was. I knew it was her adopted dead daughter from the car accident. She's become something of a legend in our family. A ghost story, the girl in the blue sweater with the broken neck. A macabre tale rehashed over warm beer to the younger cousins at family reunions over the years. But not to my mom. She still lights a novena candle for her at Christmas. She still makes the sign of the cross when she passes by the road she died on. To my mother, the girl in the blue sweater was an oracle. Or an omen, but either way deserving of respect. When you are present for the ushering of a soul into or out of this world, it changes you.
For years, the idea of my mom's cardigan sweater in a plastic bag in a morgue somewhere made my skin crawl. I wondered when happened to that sweater. Did someone burn it, or throw it away? Did it get taken home by her family? Did they see her in it at the hospital, when they must have come to identify her and wondered, who did this? Whose sweater is that? Her parents probably tried to place it in their minds eye a thousand times - Was this the sweater she wore to church last week? Was it her friend's? I think I've seen her in it once... - before realizing, that no, it was a stranger that had wrapped their girl in a warm garment to keep her comfortable as she died. Did they know how much my mother loved her? Did it matter?
Sitting on the red porch chairs dreaming of the dead, I know that somewhere, woven into the fabric of the universe, there is an indigo thread from my mother's sweater.
