the end

Part Five: My ending

        I’m going to tell this story from the end. Because really, the end is all that matters, the end is all that you would be waiting for anyways, if I told this story from the beginning. I know you want to know, right, what happens in the end? In the end, things fall apart, but not in the way of Chinua Achebe, not in the way of Pema Chödrön, no, no, not like that. Things fall apart here in the way that things always do. Life is a constant falling, a constant thinging, a constant aparting. This is merely the story of a life, of lives, of what happens when living becomes ending.

        This story’s ending begins with my mother.

Part Four: My mother

        My mother, 41 years old. A short 41 years, if you believe that some years can be shorter than others. I believe that her years were the shortest years can get. She used to tell me that childhood is both the shortest and longest part of a person’s life. Short, because you spend the rest of your life wanting those years back. Long, because before you know it you’re dead. Children don’t think about dying.

        By the time I was old enough to recognize the fact that my mother was dying, that, in fact, she had been in a constant state of dying since even before I was born, she was dead. I was 26 years old.

        But for the first time, as I watched her lie in that hospital bed, my mother looked young to me. Funny how even though the years had stripped the flesh from her bones, even though her hair was missing in clumps, even though her jowls sagged like those of an old hound and her breasts had shrunk into hard little pebbles, even though her eyes had lost their shine and her voice she could hardly raise to speak, she, who was no longer the teenager who birthed me, who tried her best to raise me: funny how my mother, 41 years old, looked young to me.

        “How are you feeling?” I asked her.

        Her eyes reflected yellow back to me. Her breath whirred through a machine. When she spoke there were gaps in between the words longer than spaces, longer than pauses.

        “Fine,” she rasped. “Well,” here she paused, and I counted the seconds, “I guess I feel like I’m dying.”

         I nodded. My mother was dying and I nodded. I remember when I used to run into her arms as a child when she picked me up when school got out. That was the only time that I loved the liquory smell of her breath, because it reminded me that she was actually there, with me, with my arms around hers. And the way she closed her eyes and sang to Joni Mitchell on the ride home from school. She would let me sit in the front seat, even when I could barely see over the dash.

        “Do you remember anything? About before you got here, I mean?”

         She was so still it scared me. When she coughed the sound scraped the back of my throat like dust. “Leslie found me. Called 911. They brought me here.”

        “So you don’t remember anything?”

        “Jesus Christ, Samantha, what does it matter if I remember anything?”

        Her voice made me flinch like I was still a child.

        “They found you in a pool of vomit. At 41 years old you’re still choking on your own vomit.”

        She was still again. The machines that kept her alive seemed to contain more life than she did.

        “Do you want me to say sorry? Do you want me to say sorry for being a bad mother? For being an alcoholic? Is that really what this is about?” she asked.

        I didn’t say anything. I wanted to say yes. I wanted to say no. I wanted to know what this was really, truly about.

        “It’s too late for things to go differently, Sam. You know that.”

        She closed her eyes, pinched her forehead skin between her fingers. It was as if she was counting to some unknown number in her head, like I had forced her to do this and was waiting for her to reach one hundred. Go slower, she would whisper to me when I was a child, counting the seconds that our tea bags steeped in identical mugs. One-mississippi, two-mississippi. Go slower, Bird. Sound it out.

        While she counted, I remembered.

        Here is what I remember:

        Her sickly sweet breath. A smell which I learned to distinguish between the sweetness of non-eating, and the sweetness of her liver trying to save her from the flood of alcohol she drowned it in.

        The first car she totaled, then the second, and then she got her license revoked. After that we walked everywhere. She had never learned to ride a bike.

        My eighth grade graduation, which she missed. I looked out into a sea of faces and sang with all my might, hoping that the sound would reach her wherever she was.

        But also, I remember:
The nights she would read to me before bed, her voice still soft.

        I remember:
        The birthday cake she made when I turned eight. It was decorated with oreo crumbs and edible flowers and mint, with a pool of blue icing in the middle. As I blew out the candles she whispered, “A bird bath for my little birdy.”

        I remember:
        The way my mother would dance in the kitchen while she baked brownies. The way she would grab my hands as I rolled my eyes, and drag me to her, holding me close as if she was afraid to let go, afraid to lose me.

        And now I remember this.
        “Sing me something, Birdy,” she had breathed from her hospital bed.

        But I can’t remember what I sang to my mother on the last night she was alive. This absence tortures me. When I sleep at night, sometimes I think I hear the residue of the notes, the lyrics floating unreachable above me. I wake up gasping, clutching futilely for the melody. My therapist said that grief does funny things, but this I don’t find funny at all.

        Part three: My mom

        On the morning of my ninth Christmas Day I found my mom passed out with her head in our toilet bowl. At this point in my life this sight was a regular occurrence for me. I ran to the kitchen, my toes whispering on the floor (I developed the habit of walking on my toes early in my childhood, of skipping from room to room, of flitting across surfaces like I was a bird—hence, my mom’s nickname for me) and cracked open a can of beer to bring to her, along with a wet washcloth. I touched her softly, so she wouldn’t move too suddenly and crack her head on the porcelain of the toilet.

        She didn’t move for a while, her breath coming out in these heaving rasps.

        Eventually she awoke. “Hey,” she groaned, pushing her sweaty hair back from her forehead. I dabbed her face with the washcloth and watched her take a swig of the beer. “Thanks, Bird.”

        She set the beer on the floor and I sat down next to her.

        “Can we still go ice skating tomorrow?”

        She didn’t say anything. Her eyes were closed, and I held my fingers in front of her mouth, feeling the sweet breath on them.

        She swatted my hand away. “How about the day after? I promise?”

        I nodded.

        “Today’s Christmas! We gotta celebrate,” she said, as if we ever really celebrated Christmas.

        I didn’t get any gifts that year, or the year before that. Once, I remember going to my grandmother’s house, and there I got so many gifts that I couldn’t carry them to the car by myself. It was the only time before college that I had been out of the state of Oklahoma, and I remember watching the fields and trucks whir by me, the sun shining in, and thinking, tomorrow I am going to think this was a dream. The gifts were novelties that I wouldn’t even have known to ask for. Coloring books, fairy dolls, tutus, treasure chests filled with toys. When I tore away the wrapping I felt pure happiness, but when I looked over to see my mom sitting on the couch, shrunken into it like she had petrified there, what joy I had felt left me. My mom and her mother hardly spoke to each other the entire time we were at the old lady’s house, except for when they’d fight in whispers in the kitchen.

        On the car ride home I told my mom that she could have the tutu and the coloring books, I just wanted the dolls and treasure chest for myself. She didn’t say a word, just drove us into the parking lot of the Goodwill and took my toys out of the back. When she came back the toys were gone. I didn’t say a word when I saw the tears on her cheeks.

        This year, the ninth year, we ordered Chinese takeout and my mom fell asleep before we could leave to pick it up. We walked at 10 pm in the dark to the restaurant, hand in hand, and when we got there they told us they had thrown the food out. We sat in a booth for fifteen minutes while they remade our order. By the time we had walked home again, the food was cold. But my mom didn’t eat anything anyways.

        My mom would do this a lot. She had these ways of being, of existing that I learned to live with.

        I’m feeling peckish, she would say, as if anything more than eating like a bird was a goddamn shame. But really, that’s what she would do, peck at a piece of bread, tear it to bits to disguise the fact that not a single piece made it into her mouth. I would watch her eat, anticipate, wait, beg, in my mind, for her to bring the food to her mouth. But she rarely did.

        And the irony was that the only goddamn shame was herself.

        She knew it. I knew it. The whole goddamn town knew it. We didn’t even pretend to be normal. We just pretended not to know about my mom, about shame.

        I don’t talk about my mom now, but if I did, I think my friends would pity me, find her disgusting in a sort of way, and me by association.

        I had this conversation with a close friend in college, about this specific memory, but more broadly, about my relationship with my mom in general.

        I told my friend about how on my college applications I had written about my mom, about being the daughter of an alcoholic, and for some reason that essay filled me with indescribable shame. Sure, I got into the college of my choice, and the college of my choice paid for my tuition and all of that, and I succeeded in moving as far away from home as possible, but still, I felt ashamed. It was like I had killed my mother in that essay, broken her into fragments of being.

        “But your mom was terrible to you. I don’t get why you’re still in contact with her,” the friend said.

        I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t really like my mom was terrible to me, but that she was terrible around me, at me, in me. I couldn’t ever get mad at her without getting mad at some part of myself.

        “She was terrible,” I said, and then I paused for too long. The conversation was ready to be over, but I couldn’t leave it at that unjust statement.

        “I don’t know. She’s still my mom, I guess.”

        At college, I called home once a month to make sure my mom was still breathing. Even if she hadn’t been breathing, I convinced myself that I wouldn’t care.

        “How is school?” she would ask me. “What classes are you taking?”

        “No one calls it school, Margaret. It’s college. I’m not a child anymore.”

        She would say something along the lines of: “You are always so angry these days. You were such a sweet little girl.”

        And I would sigh and she would sigh and we’d leave it at that, my anger dissipating just seconds after it would form. “I’m taking physics classes. And some math, but I don’t like it as much.”

        I wanted to hate her for that deathbed confession. I felt like that little bit of information said something about my selfhood that would have the effect of changing me into a girl I no longer recognized. When as a child I asked about my father she would tell me that he was a high school fling. And I always resented her for that, too.

        “You’re a good Christian girl,” the doctor would have said. “I knew your father. He was a good man.”

        Margaret nodded. Because after all, she was a good, Christian girl.

        She kept the baby. And she loved the baby, in her own way.

        I don’t know much about Margaret’s family. Her father worked for some military base or other. They moved around a lot before settling in Amarillo. After he was “honorably discharged” he worked in a meat packing factory. My grandmother wanted five children, but she only got the one, Margaret. When Margaret was ten, her father passed away.

        I wish I asked Margaret more questions about her life when she was alive, but I just convinced myself that I didn’t really care. I was more concerned about the current version of her — the version that couldn’t keep a job or put food on the table but could bring home a new man or a new bottle every week — that I didn’t even stop to think about the Margaret that came before.

        If I piece together all that comes after that doctors appointment, it goes like this:
        Margaret finds out it’s a girl during the fifth month. She drops out of school in the seventh month. Tenth grade. I am born a month premature, small and wet and colder than anticipated. At age 17 Margaret is kicked out of the house for promiscuous behavior. She crashes with her 23 year old boyfriend at the time, waits tables, and begins binge drinking in earnest. After that it’s history, right?

        In the tale of Margaret’s life, I don’t think she’d want me to dwell on her sexual assault. She never blamed anyone or anything but herself for her alcoholism. I’m not sure I agree with this sentiment. On the nights of her most serious drinking episodes, she’d enter this sermonic phase before heading out on the town or passing out on the floor. God made me this way, she’d say. Not my mother or my father or your father. Birdy, this is just who I am.

        I’d be sitting at the dining room table, working on homework or reading a book, the only light coming from a floor lamp in the living room. I wouldn’t respond to her but just watch as she swayed and tipped and plummeted.

        She’d come in close to me, and I’d flinch away. Her breath would be hot and sweet and the smell would contain a memory that made me sick. Her arms would wrap around me. Her voice would be in between a whisper and a shout.

        No matter how it happened, I am grateful for you.

        She only tried to get sober a couple of times. For Margaret, I don’t think she could conceive of a life without alcohol. She loved me, and she loved alcohol, and if I proposed to her the question of which she loved more she’d say there was no point in comparing the two.

        I love to love, Birdy, she’d squeal on good days.
        I love you too, I’d think.

        Part one: My life

        Do you want to know all the gory details?
        Do you want to know about all the terrible things my mother did?
        Do you want to know about my father?
        Do you want to know about me?

        Do you want to know all the ways I am messed up?
        Do you want to pity me?
        Do you want to ask how could you ever love her?

        Part zero: Me

        I wish she could have been a girl for longer. I wish we could have been girls together.

        I have this vision at times, something like a dream and a memory fused together.
Something like a memory that could have been.

        It’s of my mother and I. We’re both young, maybe I’m around eight, which must make her 23, or 24. We’re running through a field hand in hand, almost like we’re starring in a music video.

        There used to be this abandoned junkyard near the apartment that we lived in when I was in elementary school. The junkyard would sprout these weedy flowers during the springtime. The scene looks like that field, but without the surrounding industrial sprawl, without the houses with porches collapsed in on themselves, without the overhanging smell of blood and sweat and dust. It’s just the field, and the cement blocks, and the tall yellow weed flowers.

        There’s no sound in the background but a train running by. The hissing of the grass. Our quiet breathing. If I want to sing then I could but this time I think the song is in our heads; we are in sync with one another, no need to blow the words out into the world. If my mother’s breath is sweet it is just from some dessert she has bought us. A lemon tart, with raspberries on top.

        We run through the field together, hands brushing grass brushing air brushing dirt breeze pollen dreams. She’s chasing me, but I’m not scared. I don’t know where I’ll go, where I’ll run to. I’m just relishing the feeling of being chased, squealing with love all the while.

        That’s the scene. It’s the purest (non)memory I have of my mother. That’s it.

        The end.