Taking Flight (9 page)

After N broke up with me, my friends stopped returning my phone calls. Only Emily would talk to me, but she was always on her way to meet up with our friends. “Why can’t I come?” I would ask my best friend. My best friend, who you had fondly called “your other daughter”, the girl who I had seen almost every day for the last eight years. I knew that the majority of high school friendships didn’t last, but sometimes you get to keep just one. I believed then that Emily and I would make it until we were old ladies. We often talked about living in a retirement home together. I loved her.

“Because it’s weird right now. With N there, and the break up... I gotta go,” she would say, anxious to leave. 

When my senior year began, I walked into Chaska High School and immediately spotted my friends. They were standing in the same place they’d always stood, only when I approached them, they didn’t move aside to make room for me. They pretended like they didn’t see me. Eventually I walked away, ashamed and alone.

Emily came over to our house that same night. “Look, this isn’t easy to say to you. I just don’t think it works anymore. We all want to have a lot of fun this year. I mean, it’s our senior year. So, um, do you understand?” I was a chore to check off her list and then she could go back to her world. A world I was officially being kicked out of. 

Even though I have made new friends, better friends, adult friends, I still feel the sting every time I am the one not invited to happy hour, or out to lunch, or to a party. I beat myself up for days, wondering what is showing through that continues to make me un-loveable. I have proof all around me that I am loved, and yet I can’t help but worry every time I am left behind that I will always be left behind, by death, by choice, it doesn’t matter. Your death created a vulnerability inside me which I haven’t learned how to conquer. I am forever seeking the acceptance of others, wishing to win a popularity contest that doesn’t exist.

I hated you the night I watched Emily walk out of our house. Back to her normal life, her normal senior year of high school, to her deep and peaceful sleep. 

My senior year lasted two weeks. Then I got into bed and decided not to get up again, just like that girl at Lake Ann had told me she would have done if it had been her father that had died. I gave up. The house could have been on fire and I wouldn’t have run out to save myself. I was gone.

Mom pulled me out of school. It was one of the few times during those bad years that her parenting instincts resurfaced. I got up after she spent an entire weekend promising me that I never had to go back to the high school again. She arranged for a private tutor to help me complete the last credit I needed to graduate. My friends got to have their senior year undisturbed by my shadow.

Mom took me out of the house on the day I finally crawled out of bed. We drove to this little shop I liked that sold pens and books and journals. We pulled in the parking lot and I didn’t move to get out of the car. I may have been out of bed physically, but mentally I was still under the covers. The air was crisp, the leaves were changing, but I saw no beauty in the world, nor any reason to belong to it. “Please, Sarah? Let’s just go in and look around. You can buy anything you want.” Mom opened her purse and pulled out two twenties. “You’re scaring me.”

I bought some expensive gel pens, the kind teenage girls like me were supposed to write notes to their friends with. Even now, when I’m scared or upset, I find myself compulsively buying pens. I have Ziploc baggies full of pens, a desk drawer overflowing with them. I have a hundred notebooks and empty journals but I still find myself buying more.

It’s better than cutting, I suppose, but not nearly as effective.

Mom and I were so alone in our sorrow. That is what I remember most – the deep, soul hardening loneliness. The friends Mom had didn’t know how to continue a friendship with a widow. I realized that we were our friends’ worst nightmares come true. We were the reason they hugged their parents tighter or kissed their spouse before bed, because what happened to us was a cautionary tale. Every one dies, eventually, and the happy people around us feared that they, too, could end up like Jan and Sarah.

Uncle Terry moved in to our spare bedroom the summer after you died. His girlfriend had just broken up with him and because his life was always a mess he didn’t have anywhere to go. We had an empty house, so Mom let him in.

It was one of the biggest mistakes she made. 

Mom and Terry became a dangerous pair. They started going out to the casino almost every night. Terry didn’t have any money but he was paying his rent with moral support, or so Mom explained. Only I didn’t see things that way. I saw him as something worse than a step-father, because he was real family. He used Mom at her weakest moments while trying to step in to parent me. But you had been responsible, and strict, and funny without being destructive. Terry couldn’t live up to even the smallest of those standards, so I did everything I could to make sure he knew I wasn’t listening to him. 

I was twenty when I found the letters hiding in a drawer that let me know how close we were to losing our house, thanks to the money Mom and Terry donated to Mystic Lake Casino. I hated them both for risking our security, for throwing your hard work away.

In July of 2003 Terry had an aneurism. Mom’s big brother was suddenly paralyzed on his right side. He nearly died on the bathroom floor. When he was released from the hospital he went directly to a long-term care facility, taking with him a diagnosis of another clot in a major vessel in his brain. Without another expensive surgery Terry would certainly die.

Mom threw herself into planning a benefit to raise money for Terry’s care. She couldn’t save you, but she was sure as hell going to save her brother. During this time she became good friends with a woman named Maria. Maria had worked with Terry at the Ford dealership. Mom and Maria hosted an incredibly successful golf benefit, raising nearly twenty thousand dollars.

A few hours after the benefit, Terry had a heart attack and died.

Maria was at our house to help plan for the funeral, and then, before I knew it, she was mixing Mom drinks and unpacking a suitcase in the guest bedroom. Mom had no strength left at that point, and Maria was the type of leech who saw our three bedroom house in the suburbs as a rent free paradise. All she had to do was keep Mom drunk and make her think she was her best friend. I was once again cast as the nasty step-child, making everyone miserable by pointing out how much Mom was gambling and drinking. Our family had become something you would see on a trashy television talk show. We had gone downhill so fast, fallen so far. 

Mom and Maria would go out every weekend and sometimes during the week to the bars, coming in at all hours of the night. Mom stopped reading on the couch. She couldn’t sit still. If Mom wasn’t at work, she was at the bar. She lost weight that she didn’t have to lose.

I know now that Mom had become a functioning alcoholic. She never thought she had a problem because (some) of the bills were being paid and she made it in to work every day. She complimented herself often on how she might not be handling things perfectly, but she hadn’t rolled over and died, either. She frequently reminded me that without Terry, Maria was all she had. She was doing this on her own, so excuse her if she wasn’t doing it perfectly. Expecting anything more from her was out of the question.

One night I got a call from Maria’s boyfriend. Mom was completely out of control at the bar they were at. They had tried everything but they hadn’t had any luck getting her to leave. They were asking me to come help haul my drunk mother home. 

The whole time I was driving to the bar I thought about how we used to spend Saturday nights watching rented videos and playing basketball in the driveway. How drastically our lives changed when yours stopped.

I got to the bar and worked my way through the crowd, past the sleazy looking men who offered to buy me drinks. I found Mom slumped over on the bar, laughing uncontrollably, while Maria leaned into her shoulder, looking exactly like the parasite she was.

When Mom saw me she went ballistic. She threw glasses and her rage at Maria. “I told you to never let my daughter see me like this! Sarah should never see this!” She was pointing at herself, at her low cut tank top. Her thick black eyeliner was smeared to her cheekbones. I was completely disgusted by her. Seeing her in that state dissolved any hope I had that my mother would ever come back.

I believed, for quite some time, that Mom no longer loved me. I wished more than once that she had died instead of you. I did not always keep that horrible thought to myself. You and I might have had our own problems had Mom died, but I couldn’t picture you going off the deep end with your grief like she did.

I moved into my first apartment the same time Maria moved her two kids into our house. Shortly after I moved I became very sick. I had the flu, or pneumonia maybe, and I was burning up at 105*. Everything hurt and my mind felt foggy. When I tried to get out of bed and walk to the bathroom for medicine for my fever I fell over, too weak to walk. I called Mom a hundred times, thinking in my haze that she would come over and take care of me.

She didn’t return my call until after bar close. By then she was wasted out of her mind. When Mom was that intoxicated she would start repeating a few phrases nonsensically, as if she had been distracted by something and forgot what she had been saying. She would laugh in this high-pitched voice that I knew was her way of trying to cover up all the alcohol she had consumed. If I called her out on it, or asked how much she’d been drinking, she went into a rage.

“Are you home?” I asked.

“You don’t have to be such a bitch, little girl,” she slurred in my ear. When she was drunk she believed everything I said was a judgment or an insult. She also believed she had nothing to feel ashamed of.

“Can you please sober up and come over here? I don’t think I’m doing ok.” Drunk or not, I wanted my Mom.

“Sober up? What, you think your Mom is some kind of drunk? Is that what you think, is it? Is it? Then you can take care of yourself. You don’t need some drunk to come over.” She hung up on me then and wouldn’t answer until the next day, after she had blacked out the entire conversation.

I spent that night in the bathtub, trying to break my fever with cold water. I fell asleep in the tub and woke up when my head had dropped below the surface of the water. My body wracked with chills and sobs. If I had drowned, Mom wouldn’t have even remembered that I asked her to save me.

Sharing the dark years with you makes me feel like I have broken a nice lamp and have to fess up that I was playing ball in the house, even though it is against the rules. But the confession makes me feel free, too. Mom and I kept a lot of our imperfections a secret, disguising ourselves as an excellent employee or a competent college student. Grief is not to be tolerated in America, it is to be kept hidden, timed and monitored, allowed at gravesites and on anniversaries only. Mom and I followed those rules as best as we could, but it never felt right to compromise my feelings for the comfort of others. To truly appreciate where we have come we must acknowledge where we have been.

For a couple of years I believed Mom and I would never have a relationship again. Then time, tricky and mysterious, worked its magic. I grew up and Mom and I both grew into our selves.

Mom and I startle people as we go from happy to pissed off at each other in no time flat. We annoy each other just as often as we make each other smile. But somewhere along the way, we both decided to grow into the people we were fighting so hard against. Maybe we were just lucky that we found our way back to each other, or maybe it was simply a matter of time before feeling angry and sad or empty was harder than being happy. To be a survivor means relieving yourself from a self-inflicted, ongoing guilt. We’re here and you’re not. And we can’t be who we were before. It hurts too much to try. We also can’t stop living because we feel guilty. Mom’s guilt is deeper than mine. She still believes she killed you. If she hadn’t supported your dream you would still be here. I can only let myself off of my hook – someday I hope she frees herself from such an absurd thought. If she hadn’t supported you, you two wouldn’t have been so happy. You wouldn’t have achieved something so remarkable. The reason why we miss you so much is because the three of us had something so very good. And every decision we made up until the crash is part of why we were the family we were. I wouldn’t change a thing.

If you were able to see Mom now, you wouldn’t recognize her. In fact, if you two saw each other today I think the sensation would be like running into an old friend or flame at a high school reunion. You would hug, laugh at the good times, and be amazed at how different you both are.

Mom isn’t your wife anymore. She’s not even a widow. She’s just Jan.

And I think she’s amazing.

Mom spent twenty years married to you, and she identified herself as “David’s wife”. She was a stay-at-home mother, she had dinner on the table when you came home from work. She kept the house clean, she conversed with other housewives, she went to company parties and laughed with the other corporate wives. The two of you had plans to retire together on a farm with a yellow dog. Those were the dreams you two shared as husband and wife. With your death, she had to let go of those dreams and that life.

Mom got better when she stopped trying to be your wife. She lived for too long under self-inflicted pressures. When she couldn’t meet her own expectations, or the expectations she felt you would have placed on her, she would spiral further down, feeling guilty and ashamed.  I think she believed that if she began to live her life she would no longer be honoring you. It would be easy for me to point my finger and blame Mom for her actions in those dark years – I would have the most right to do so, and that’s what makes my forgiveness so honest. She could say the same about my behavior. I’ve learned that no one can know how they will react to the devastating events in their life until they are right smack in the middle of facing death, grief, loss, divorce, betrayal, any number of painful human conditions. There are wrong ways to grieve, but there’s no right way to grieve, either. Mom and I did the best we could with a loss we hadn’t anticipated.