What My Mother Left Me With — Fiction
What comes into existence must go. At some level, I understand this. You can’t live forever. No one can. Forget dying — you can’t even hold on to the living while they’re still alive.
When my dog got sick and passed, I justified it as an act of nature. When my husband left for good, I convinced myself it was for the best. When I lost my best friend because she decided she didn’t want to be friends anymore, I accepted the lack of closure.
I had gotten good at separation and compartmentalization. I could just move on from any level of loss. I had mastered it. Nothing could faze me. If anything did faze me, I had even built a toolkit of self-care rituals to fight back. And if nothing helped, my morning runs always made me feel better. I won’t let you beat me down. Not today. Or so I told myself.
I had sold myself to the Western ideas of feeling good. I’d compulsively spend hundreds of dollars each month on the self-care industry, always leaving a generous tip. It was my good deed given that the care industry underpays people. My job didn’t always afford my lifestyle but at some level, I had come to believe that I needed this lifestyle just to stay in my job.
I worked at an advertising firm in Chicago as a copywriter, which is euphemism for being a failed writer, which is euphemism for being a self-published writer no one reads. My job didn’t pay as much as my master’s in creative writing and the accompanying student loans warranted. But it paid enough to live in the suburbs of Chicago and take the train up, and it paid enough to afford the rituals that allowed me to keep my job a.k.a. keep me sane. Morning run. Done. Hot yoga. Done. Detox diet. Done. Therapy to validate my feelings. Done. Having been raised in an Indian home, I was already the master of the Eastern wisdom of repressing difficult issues. With my self-care rituals, I had become invincible.
Then one day, my mother died.
Poof. Gone. Disappeared.
I don’t know what hit me worse. Was it that she was just gone, or that my self-care arsenal was suddenly inadequate and left me unprepared?
The adult me was the antithesis of the environment I had been brought up in. I had grown up in a chaotic household. One that primarily revolved around my mother. I do not mean this in the way that she was the priority, that she was high maintenance or that we all catered to her needs. It was none of those things. It was the opposite. It was she who was constantly worrying about all of us. Why the household seemed to revolve around her was simply an artifact of her demeanor juxtaposed against my dad’s at-best muted background presence in our home. She was loud. He was quiet. She was expressive. He was subdued. She was anxious. He was calm. She was full of stories. He was a listener.
It was my dad who called me. I didn’t hear the phone ring. But my Apple watch vibrated violently. I pushed aside the blankets, pulling my arm out to find my phone. I saw Dad calling on WhatsApp. Dad never called. It had always been mom. But none of them ever called during my nights. We usually talked in my morning, their evenings. Panicked, I reached for my phone, pushing aside my dog Rufus who was sleeping next to my mattress on the floor. Thanks to his arthritis, I no longer had a real bed.
There was a long pause before I heard my dad’s voice on the other line. “It’s mom,” he said. Another pause. Not a good one. I knew what it meant. Her passing wasn’t entirely untimely. She was 72, which is ten years more than both sides of my grandparents had lived to be. She had lived a long life, at least in terms of average life expectancy in India.
Instinctively, I always knew she’d be the first to go. Or maybe I hoped. I think it’s so I could have a real relationship with my dad, who had always been more like me. Or even simply to watch him become more of himself.
“I’ll be right there,” I said, snapping out of my thoughts. I didn’t think to ask him how he was doing. My dad and I didn’t talk like that. We didn’t talk much, even though I was more like him in how I looked and in my personality. The father-daughter bond was dormant outside of our morning runs. During those early hours, all through my upbringing, Dad and I quietly found our rhythm. We didn’t need words.
I said I’ll be there but he and I both knew it would be a fifteen-hour flight and countless hours before that trying to make it to the airport to get to the flight, check-in, lines, whatnot. At least I had TSA pre-check, which meant I could go through security with my shoes, my jacket, and my dignity still intact.
In my head, I made a list of things I needed to do. Pack essentials. Get a dog sitter. Email my boss. Buy a plane ticket. Get on the plane.
But here’s the thing about unexpected loss: the list of things you don’t prepare for never runs out. I wasn’t prepared for the sound of my mother’s absence, to see my reflection in the mirror and notice her features in mine, or even to face my own father.
My father and I stood silently gazing at the tiny urn that held her ashes and didn’t do justice to my mother’s grandness. My mind wavered to worries about what would now become of my relationship with my father. It was through her that I knew him. When the silence broke, it was he who spoke.
“Beta, care for a run?”
***
Thank you Erica L Soerensen for the prompt to contribute to your collection and dabble in non-fiction: https://medium.com/admiring-multipotentiality/write-for-us-admiring-multipotentiality-16cac9f2fa8c
