Junkyard Roses

I consider it my good fortune to have learned of my mother's terminal illness in time for us to share precious moments together before she died. At the news of her impending death, I made the cross-country flight from Colorado to her home state of North Carolina four times in four months. I did not fully realize it initially, but these visits would forge a profound understanding of the way human relationships constantly evolve. In her dying, I began to see her differently; she gained dimension and became new to me—but in the most familiar way. It was a lesson about the dance of paradox—that potent intertwining of opposing truths that only the natural world, in its infinite audacity and wisdom, could have dreamed up. A lesson about living and dying, newness that is inherently coupled with endings.

She became new to me but in the most familiar way.

Don't get me wrong, she was still the same mom in many ways, bossing me around on her deathbed as commandingly as she had her whole life. I watched her kindly embrace the hospice workers while also telling them exactly what was on her mind, never mincing a word. She gave advice to her caretakers about how to raise their kids or how they should get regular manicures, and laughed with us kids over a lifetime of inside jokes. So much had not changed, and yet a new version of her was emerging. I began to see that not only was she a dreamer, but she was an achiever of dreams. I understood her tendency to dream but hadn’t fully comprehended the sheer force of will she wielded to create exactly the life she wanted—tolerating nothing less. This revelation altered my entire understanding of her identity.

“A well-lived life is a constant dance between dreaming and doing.”—Beth Kempton

I learned that her power was not just being a dreamer but bringing her dreams to fruition. I felt surprised, wonderstruck, and devastated as I formed this new, softer view of her. There had been difficult years between us when she was mentally unwell and unstable. At times, the strain brought pain and silence that punctured my heart. This change in my perception of her was happening at the very end of her life. What would it have been like if I had seen her this way before? What if chasing her dreams was part of what I admired instead of begrudged? What if never settling and doggedly crafting the life she aspired to was her most outstanding attribute rather than blind ambition? The mix of devastation and wonderment came in heaps during this prerequisite course in dying—a time of confusion and enlightenment, a constant paradox in death. 

I was forming a new relationship with her, here, at the end.

What struck with such force was her ability to live between wistfulness and determination. She had an organized a list of life goals that spanned a wide range of aspirations: to be a gourmet cook, write a book, have a vegetable garden, own a house in France and speak the language, sew her own clothes with Vogue Magazine patterns, beautifully decorate her home, earn her doctorate, become the president of a university and publish her research findings. They were not goals of one dimension; they were a map through her inner world, which was colored by what I am most drawn to, a blend of whimsy and pragmatism. She looked at me poignantly on one of those visits and said, "Heather, I have no regrets. I have lived exactly the life I wanted." She had sought a richly textured and vibrantly hued life—and she had attained it.

Throughout my adult life, I had longed for a more secure relationship with my mom. When she became ill, I was saddened that we wouldn't get to keep working to improve it. I had been on a life-long pursuit to find consistency in the depth and safety we had at times, but was slippery and could easily escape our grasp. I could never entirely hold onto it the way I wanted. How I felt about her and our relationship wholly shifted during those four months. We would stay up late at night—just the two of us. She couldn't always sleep, so in the shadows of her living room, where she was bed-bound in one of the haunting hospice-provided beds with rails, I would hold her soft, warm hands and look into her gem-toned green eyes, asking a million questions. I wanted to absorb her before she evaporated. I wanted to make up for the lost years—and we did. 

She would order me to get a particular tattered and well-loved book off her shelf and then tell me a story about it—but really, she was sharing a window into her soul. Mom had a lilting southern accent that became more pronounced now that she was living in her beloved North Carolina again. "That green one, Heather, get that one and bring it here. Now, this book is my favorite French cookbook and all those years I had the house in France, I would carry it around with me. Then I'd shop the outdoor markets and cook for the neighbors. I really enjoyed that, having those parties." She didn't tear up when she shared these stories from her deathbed. She just smiled, the charm of those beautiful memories filling her eyes—not holding onto them with a white-knuckled grip, but letting them flow, enjoying them all over again in the retelling.

She wasn't crying, but I felt hot tears spilling from my eyes, wells of wanting more time overflowing and streaming down my face. Why now? Why couldn't we have done this before? How did I not see your bravery until now? Why didn't we sit and talk like this until now? I am clinging to this and never want these midnights alone with you to end. Tears of clarity, of seeing her in her truth for the first time, not as my mother, but as a woman forging her own way when the odds had been stacked against her from birth. Tears of joy that this gift came, even if only at the end. A reunion of healing surrounded by the cruelties of dying—a rose growing in the junkyard. 

I arrived on that first visit partly out of duty, partly out of a courageousness that pulls me towards death—not wanting to be scared away from the precious opportunity that death presents in the arc of living. I had just lost my father 18 months before and knew about the enlightenment this courage bestows in the face of death. I believe that when those we love are dying, we ought to go to them and share our truths whenever possible. Attending to death is what I want—a rich albeit shaky engagement that isn’t ignored because of how painful and uncomfortable is it. To talk, weep, and look into one another's eyes with rawness and love. With a trembling voice, snot, and tears, I have held the hand of each person I've lost and told them what their legacy is and what they mean to me. I knew I needed to do this again with my mom, and I expected the usual gifts: closure and eventual peace. I had no idea that an additional gift lay in store: my relationship with my mother would bloom—despite this context of finality. How could this be? How could something between us burgeon in the throes of decay? 

As I felt the rosebud blossoming between us, the years being healed, the fog of disconnection burning off, I experienced an ineffable flush of awe as I witnessed the transmutation from life to death. I clutched the rose, in wonder of its freshness—that this relationship could end differently than it had existed for so long. Now, several years after her death, the profundity of this paradox has not faded. I have a lighter clasp of our rose these days, knowing I don't have to grip and clutch, knowing there is more to come. This thing she and I planted in the wee hours of her fading life will continue to grow—a junkyard rose courageously dreamed into existence. 

Enjoy the slow- Heather