The Long Winter | Pt 2: Untethering
Journal entry: September 13, 2022
I feel an air of death all around me. Slowly the seasons change but with it comes a sense of death like I’ve never felt before. What is this feeling? A kind of dark blanket slowly surrounds me, why do I feel this in the air?
It seems there is a death of life as we knew it. Celebrating Romeo’s 1st year of life has given us that. An end to the hardest, unrelenting first year. So new is on the way. But no, this can’t be it. The death I feel is greater than this metaphorical death of a season. I don’t know how, but somehow I know it’s a feeling of true death… just lingering in the air.
Weeks after writing this, I awoke with another strong sense... I needed to go to my mother. It was as if I could feel her from hundreds of miles away, and I knew she needed me. But she didn’t need me, her daughter. She needed me, the mother.
“I don’t know how I know, but I need to go to my mom,” I told Cesar. “It’s as if I can feel her needing love. The love of a mother.” I didn’t understand it myself…. But I trusted my gut.
Two weeks later we boarded a plane to Arizona.
When we arrived, the house was … different. The absence of my mother’s tending hand throughout was immediately obvious. Her caregiver did a wonderful job preparing a room for us, but of course it’s never the same. It struck me how this was perhaps a way I’ve taken my mother for granted. And it wasn’t until her tending care had gone, that I realized, this was an act of her love, too.
My mother wanted more than anything to be able to move and do the way she used to. But on this trip, we knew that was of time before. Reality now meant making the most of the little we had. Slower days, fewer outings, emotion-laden conversations… but also homemade pizzas, time in the pool, watching home movies, and mastering the art of simply being together.
Romeo had just begun taking steps on his own, but when we arrived in Phoenix, his tiny steps grew into long stretches, and before we knew it - he was learning to walk completely, right before his adoring grandparents’ eyes. It was as if he was waiting for this moment — for them — to blossom through this milestone. They watched in awe as he bumbled about through the walls of that home. That home which held so much… memories, good and hard, brutal and beautiful. Those walls had seen it all, held us through it all… and now it stood witness to the next generation gaining the steam of life, while my mother journeyed towards her life’s eternal rest.
We cleared out the garage, we went through her things, and when we were alone, I would ask my mom questions about life. About whether or not she was happy. But by this time it was very difficult for her to speak, so often she’d just look at me with tears in her eyes, and cry. I’d see her whole life in those crystal blue ocean eyes.
I wanted to say, “tell me mom, tell me everything you’re feeling, and what’s buried deep in your soft tears. I’m here and I’m listening, but you must hurry because time is running out!”
But of course I’d have been asking what was impossible to say. So instead, I simply held her. I rocked her back and forth like a mother and child.
She let herself fall into me, she let herself weep.
“It’s okay mama. I’m here with you. It’s going to be okay.”
I could feel she was afraid. To die. To be ill in this way. To be running out of time. It was too much and not enough all in the same breath.
Mom asked to watch home videos, over and over again. It was painful to do, and I wondered what she loved so much about it. In the scratchy old tapes, her voice was brilliant and clear, so much of her life yet ahead of her. Now here she sat, being slowly ravaged by disease, almost completely unable to speak. I wonder if she was trying to get closer to the good?… good memories, good times in her life… to soften the reality of the present? But maybe I was missing part of the reality that she saw. Here she was - son on her right, grandbaby crawling over her lap, giggling as they played, while Christmas 1994 thrummed in the background. I was losing her, and that was gutting me. But staring at me too, in the face of tragedy, there was joy. There was laughter. And there was love. And while I couldn’t hear her say that, I could see it on her face.
Never could I have known that trip to Phoenix would be the last of so much. The last time we were together in that house, the last time Romeo would ever see his Nana, the last time we’d lock eyes, mother to daughter, and know. It was as if she was assuring me, “it’s OK Liz, you can let me go.” And a kind of untethering began. Looking back, I’m so grateful I went, no matter how dissonant it was. And though I’ll never know how I could hear her heart calling, I’m so glad I did.
We got back home to LA, and change was in the air. I gazed at the big tree out my window, her leaves turning, beginning to fall. Winter is near, she whispered. And something told me - this was going to be a winter like I’d never known before. Just a few weeks later, I got a call that changed my life — my mother was gone.
As my brother said, “in one instant everything was, and then everything wasn’t.”
Death had been near.
But it wasn’t only my mother’s death — for when she died, a part of me died too.
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THE LONG WINTER
part 1: The Truth | part 3: Finding Home