Mom Still Gets in Touch
by Robert Roper
JANUARY 21, 2010 TAGS:
Do I believe in communication from beyond the grave? Not really. It’s just that my mother has been getting in touch. And she’s dead now.
If I say that I believe in the “messages” she’s been sending, does that mean I have to start visiting beyond-the-grave Websites? Seeking out spiritualists? Using a Ouija-board? I hope not.
My mother was someone who kept in touch. She saw her grandchildren and great-grandchildren often and made calls to those who strayed, usually briefly, from her warm vicinity. She was a mighty matriarch, not feared but not trifled with. All her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren; the children of assorted friends; the children and grandchildren of neighbors who had lived near her 20 or 30 or 50 years ago; former girlfriends of her son; and untold others related to her directly or haphazardly, but somehow related, received birthday cards from her every year, with a check inside ($50 for birthdays divisible by 10, $25 for the others).
On the morning she died, I received an extrasensory notification. This was a disturbing dream that brought me thrashing out of a good sleep, a dream I promptly forgot, yet a dream about my mother. I looked at the bedside clock: 4:53. I fell asleep again. At 4:58 the phone rang – it was my sister, who had just received a call from the nurse’s aide at my mother’s house, saying she had gone into the old lady’s room and hadn’t been able to awaken her.
That was Saturday. Friday, the day before she died, my mother had drawn a map with directions to the cemetery, where she would be buried two days later, a map she had given to another nurse’s aide, saying, “Keep this, Felicia – you’ll need it soon.”
She was someone who looked ahead, who did what had to be done. So the idea of her communicating from beyond the grave isn’t that much of a stretch for me. If anyone could pull it off, she could. She would figure out the complex procedures in that other world, make the many boring phone calls to disembodied spirit-bureaucrats to get everything ready and in place. Then, make contact. Contact with the sphere of the living again.
One recipient of a yearly birthday check was a former girlfriend of mine – let me call her Sylvia – for whom my mother had a warm spot (why I hadn’t had the sense to marry her my mother could never understand, but let that pass). Sylvia went into the Peace Corps after college. She had a horrible time in West Africa, got sick, had to be shipped home virtually a basket case, and while recuperating from a nervous breakdown as well as her other ills in Washington she got in touch with my mother, who lived nearby.
My mother visited her in the hospital, often. Fed her homemade food, got her a nice stylish haircut, bought her some new clothes so that when she went home to her own mother, in Wichita, she would look OK and Sylvia’s mother would not perish from anguish. When my mother died, I sent Sylvia an e-mail, and Sylvia, now a big successful lawyer out West, asked if she could make a contribution to some charity in my mother’s name.
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I made a mental note to find the name of such a charity. My own communications with Sylvia now consisted exclusively of e-mails on our birthdays – she sent me one on mine, I sent her one on hers, we never failed. Months passed. I could never remember to find out about a charity. Sometime in the spring after the year when my mother died I was on the phone with my sister, and I at last remembered to ask her about it, and she gave me the name of a charity, which helped children with respiratory diseases, and I was very proud of myself for remembering. I had been in a bit of a muddle in the months since my mother died – unable to get things going, to remember anything, to think ahead, to think. Now I realized that I had forgotten to send Sylvia her birthday greetings this year, I was so discombobulated, but with the name of the charity, I hurried upstairs to send her an e-mail, and then I realized that this was her actual birthday, this very day. So, not too late, after all. Right on the mark.
Way to go, Mom, I thought. And Mom, I take your point: Don’t forget birthdays. They mean something to a person. Now matter how grown-up they are. And everybody has one, you know.
About a year later. My roof in Baltimore is leaking badly. I call in the local slate-roof specialists, and they give me an astronomical estimate for repairs – slate roofs are an infernal trap, each little piece of slate costs about $75, and you must be joking, no, just forget it, I’ll have to let it go on leaking. I’ll call you back if I ever hit the lottery. In an unrelated development, my sister and I receive notice of a death benefit due us on account of our mother’s passing away, from an insurance company we’ve never heard of. The sum has not been tallied finally, but if we can prove we’re her heirs the sum will be ours, to be divided in two. Heavy rains continue to damage my roof and interior ceilings. I call the roofers again. They send out another representative, and in the meantime the American economy has collapsed, even roofing companies are cutting deals, and their new bid is 40 percent lower than the first one. Fine. That’s more like it. It’ll still hurt, but get on with it. Do the job.
Eight thousand three hundred forty-six dollars. That’s $8,346 for only half of the square footage of my slate roof (only half of it needed to be fixed). The work is scheduled for a Thursday. On Wednesday I receive my half of the death benefit: $8,346.12. Thank you again, Mother. That’s most kind of you. And what’s the leftover twelve cents for? Right – I used to be crazy about bubblegum, Bazooka brand bubblegum exclusively. I used to get it in the five-and-ten when we lived on Grubb Road, with a little waxed-paper comic strip wrapped around each chewy piece. Two cents a piece, so six pieces. That was my usual purchase in those days. I remember.
In the spring after my mother died, all the dogwoods in the universe bloomed – it was an extraordinary year for them, brought on by a certain number of days of frost, rain at just the right time, many factors, the horticulturalists said. But the two healthy dogwood trees in the backyard of my mother’s small suburban house, where she had lived for over 50 years, did not bloom at all.
A bit of a poetic touch there, Mom. Not your style, a bit twee, but it caught my eye. Hard to pull off, those naturalistic interventions. Suspending the laws of space and time, jiggering the function of the xylem and phloem, and so forth. It goes over into the supernatural, to be frank about it. Let’s say that certain dead people prefer to stay in touch, as long as they have business with us. Maybe they don’t intend to forever – for a certain period only, while we’re missing them so much. They were the type of people who sustained things when alive, who knit the world together, and now they partake of godly consciousness for a while – maybe they enjoy a new-member benefit. And so they say hello, subtly or not, using these borrowed powers. The intricacy of fate is their métier for a time – for the period of our hardest grieving. And then they say goodbye. To live on in the ordinary way – or maybe “live” is not the right word. To persist, to endure. Here in our unforgetting hearts.
If I say that I believe in the “messages” she’s been sending, does that mean I have to start visiting beyond-the-grave Websites? Seeking out spiritualists? Using a Ouija-board? I hope not.My mother was someone who kept in touch. She saw her grandchildren and great-grandchildren often and made calls to those who strayed, usually briefly, from her warm vicinity. She was a mighty matriarch, not feared but not trifled with. All her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren; the children of assorted friends; the children and grandchildren of neighbors who had lived near her 20 or 30 or 50 years ago; former girlfriends of her son; and untold others related to her directly or haphazardly, but somehow related, received birthday cards from her every year, with a check inside ($50 for birthdays divisible by 10, $25 for the others).
On the morning she died, I received an extrasensory notification. This was a disturbing dream that brought me thrashing out of a good sleep, a dream I promptly forgot, yet a dream about my mother. I looked at the bedside clock: 4:53. I fell asleep again. At 4:58 the phone rang – it was my sister, who had just received a call from the nurse’s aide at my mother’s house, saying she had gone into the old lady’s room and hadn’t been able to awaken her.
That was Saturday. Friday, the day before she died, my mother had drawn a map with directions to the cemetery, where she would be buried two days later, a map she had given to another nurse’s aide, saying, “Keep this, Felicia – you’ll need it soon.”
She was someone who looked ahead, who did what had to be done. So the idea of her communicating from beyond the grave isn’t that much of a stretch for me. If anyone could pull it off, she could. She would figure out the complex procedures in that other world, make the many boring phone calls to disembodied spirit-bureaucrats to get everything ready and in place. Then, make contact. Contact with the sphere of the living again.
One recipient of a yearly birthday check was a former girlfriend of mine – let me call her Sylvia – for whom my mother had a warm spot (why I hadn’t had the sense to marry her my mother could never understand, but let that pass). Sylvia went into the Peace Corps after college. She had a horrible time in West Africa, got sick, had to be shipped home virtually a basket case, and while recuperating from a nervous breakdown as well as her other ills in Washington she got in touch with my mother, who lived nearby.
My mother visited her in the hospital, often. Fed her homemade food, got her a nice stylish haircut, bought her some new clothes so that when she went home to her own mother, in Wichita, she would look OK and Sylvia’s mother would not perish from anguish. When my mother died, I sent Sylvia an e-mail, and Sylvia, now a big successful lawyer out West, asked if she could make a contribution to some charity in my mother’s name.
I made a mental note to find the name of such a charity. My own communications with Sylvia now consisted exclusively of e-mails on our birthdays – she sent me one on mine, I sent her one on hers, we never failed. Months passed. I could never remember to find out about a charity. Sometime in the spring after the year when my mother died I was on the phone with my sister, and I at last remembered to ask her about it, and she gave me the name of a charity, which helped children with respiratory diseases, and I was very proud of myself for remembering. I had been in a bit of a muddle in the months since my mother died – unable to get things going, to remember anything, to think ahead, to think. Now I realized that I had forgotten to send Sylvia her birthday greetings this year, I was so discombobulated, but with the name of the charity, I hurried upstairs to send her an e-mail, and then I realized that this was her actual birthday, this very day. So, not too late, after all. Right on the mark. Way to go, Mom, I thought. And Mom, I take your point: Don’t forget birthdays. They mean something to a person. Now matter how grown-up they are. And everybody has one, you know.
About a year later. My roof in Baltimore is leaking badly. I call in the local slate-roof specialists, and they give me an astronomical estimate for repairs – slate roofs are an infernal trap, each little piece of slate costs about $75, and you must be joking, no, just forget it, I’ll have to let it go on leaking. I’ll call you back if I ever hit the lottery. In an unrelated development, my sister and I receive notice of a death benefit due us on account of our mother’s passing away, from an insurance company we’ve never heard of. The sum has not been tallied finally, but if we can prove we’re her heirs the sum will be ours, to be divided in two. Heavy rains continue to damage my roof and interior ceilings. I call the roofers again. They send out another representative, and in the meantime the American economy has collapsed, even roofing companies are cutting deals, and their new bid is 40 percent lower than the first one. Fine. That’s more like it. It’ll still hurt, but get on with it. Do the job.
Eight thousand three hundred forty-six dollars. That’s $8,346 for only half of the square footage of my slate roof (only half of it needed to be fixed). The work is scheduled for a Thursday. On Wednesday I receive my half of the death benefit: $8,346.12. Thank you again, Mother. That’s most kind of you. And what’s the leftover twelve cents for? Right – I used to be crazy about bubblegum, Bazooka brand bubblegum exclusively. I used to get it in the five-and-ten when we lived on Grubb Road, with a little waxed-paper comic strip wrapped around each chewy piece. Two cents a piece, so six pieces. That was my usual purchase in those days. I remember.
In the spring after my mother died, all the dogwoods in the universe bloomed – it was an extraordinary year for them, brought on by a certain number of days of frost, rain at just the right time, many factors, the horticulturalists said. But the two healthy dogwood trees in the backyard of my mother’s small suburban house, where she had lived for over 50 years, did not bloom at all.
A bit of a poetic touch there, Mom. Not your style, a bit twee, but it caught my eye. Hard to pull off, those naturalistic interventions. Suspending the laws of space and time, jiggering the function of the xylem and phloem, and so forth. It goes over into the supernatural, to be frank about it. Let’s say that certain dead people prefer to stay in touch, as long as they have business with us. Maybe they don’t intend to forever – for a certain period only, while we’re missing them so much. They were the type of people who sustained things when alive, who knit the world together, and now they partake of godly consciousness for a while – maybe they enjoy a new-member benefit. And so they say hello, subtly or not, using these borrowed powers. The intricacy of fate is their métier for a time – for the period of our hardest grieving. And then they say goodbye. To live on in the ordinary way – or maybe “live” is not the right word. To persist, to endure. Here in our unforgetting hearts.
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