In honor of my mother’s rebirth into a new life, on July 16, 2019, I am sharing an excerpt from my forthcoming memoir, which I’ve been writing, on and off, for the past few years.
The Bird
When she died, I concentrated hard, calling forth my superpowers to permeate the barrier between this realm and that, to find her, the way I always found her. I needed to make sure she was OK. I needed to look out for her, in that dimension as well as in this dimension. She might be scared; she might feel alone. Who would protect her if there were monsters? Loolwa, stop. This could be dangerous. I pulled back.
Was that the night she hugged me from inside? Exquisite. It never happened again.
I had been anticipating the moment for years. I had seen the before-and-after faces of the yoga teacher at that studio and the woman at my Adult Children of Alcoholics group. It’s not just the mother who dies, I knew. It’s the daughter too. I was terrified for decades. But dread does not prepare you for shit. It did nothing to brace me for the vastness and profoundness of the gaping hole.
His own mother, it turned out, was the woman who loved washing dishes, whom I had met a couple years earlier, the last time I had visited. They lived in different parts of the co-op. As she rolled around on the living room floor after dinner, playing and dancing with a little girl, he said, with a demeanor of sweetness and admiration, “She’s childlike.”
I can appreciate someone who does not let social constructs of age define her.
At 5:30 am, I felt woken up and opened my eyes, peering out the floor-to ceiling windows of the rooftop guest room. A bird came soaring toward me, emerging from the spectacular sunrise of orange, rose, and gold. She was OK. She was free.
I fell back asleep.
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