Same Day: A Death and a Birth
My boss poked her head into my office to say good morning. “Love that dress,” she gushed. “Thanks, it’s part of the Mom Collection,” I replied. Her eyes smiled above her mask and she moved on toward the coffee. That day’s dress was a silky, floral shift with a black background. It landed higher on my thigh than my typical dress, which made me a little self-conscious. I remember when my mom wore it she always had leggings on underneath and a sweater wrapped around her frail shoulders. We tried to keep her fashionable late in her life. She had control over nothing, but at least we could have her looking cute.
The Mom Collection moved four times in three years. My sister and I had to make choices with each of those moves, paring the collection down significantly. We started with the walk-in closet in the master bedroom of our childhood home, which Mom had taken over entirely since Dad died years before. We ended with a four foot wide tiny closet in an assisted living home. The in-betweens aren’t worth mentioning.
The fifth move the Mom Collection made was into my own house. I tried to keep everything from the Mom Collection, even socks, but my sister, Danielle, was more clear-headed that day and put only the clothes in the best shape into the bag labeled “Rachel”. The garbage bag full of the Mom Collection stayed in my garage for months, all through the winter. Then it moved to the laundry room. Gradually, in the spring, it moved, washed and ready, into my own closet.
We knew Mom was going to die. She suffered from a progressive, neurological disease for a decade. We knew the diagnosis was terminal. Our grief had been with us for years. Given that, I had a plan for my continued grief journey following her death. After Mom died, when I was relieved of the 24/7 stress of caregiving, I would remember who she was before her diagnosis. It had been one of the cruelest elements of losing her to dementia - I could not recall who she used to be. Instead of being plagued by her endless demands and acerbic insults, I would be visited by all of the good memories from the first 30 years of my life that I simply could not conjure during those last years of her own.
But as the trash bag holding the Mom Collection sat in the garage, the memories did not come back. My brain would only retrace the last few years of her disease, the darkest of the hell we had been through. My body sank into the couch every evening and would not get up. An inertia took hold of me. The grief journey was not going according to plan.
The pull of nature is strong and the cherry blossoms of early spring sprinkled some life back into me. I have always been drawn by their delicate beauty and the petal confetti that rains down when a gust a wind comes in. This year seeing them bloom was both a hard and welcome reminder that our world continues to turn.
I took my 80-year-old neighbor for both of her covid-19 vaccines and I could feel how proud Mom would have been. Mom was a Jew who lived into Love Thy Neighbor better than any Catholic you’ve known before she got sick. I walked through the botanical gardens in my town and noticed every bloom she loved. As the new buds turned into blossoms, I would sometimes be able to recall seeing it in the garden of my childhood home. One afternoon, I sat in the butterfly garden and observed no less than ten butterflies fluttering and dancing and playing around me. The thought, “Hi Mom,” popped into my head.
On another day in early spring I passed by an older couple when I was out for my daily walk. The man was wearing a “Duff’s Famous Wings” t-shirt. They had to be from the western part of New York state (many visitors think Anchor Bar has the best wings, but lots of locals prefer Duff’s). I said, “Love your shirt!” and we proceeded to have a 15 minute conversation on the sidewalk about my parents, who met at Buffalo State College and had an abiding love for western New York. As I walked away I had a distinct, if fleeting, memory of eating wings and drinking a beer with Mom and the rest of our family, out a local restaurant over some long-gone winter break.
I wanted a dream, like I’ve heard so many people have, after their loved one dies. A dream to let me know that she was ok, she was at peace, she was whole again. And, selfishly, I wanted her to send me a signal through that dream to communicate that she knew Danielle and I tried our very best to take care of her in the shadow of the beast, and that we did a good job. The dream hasn’t come.
Throughout the spring and into the summer, the house next door to me, which had been vacant for the better part of a decade, was transformed. The builders completely gutted the place, opened up the main floor, installed a gorgeous stone fireplace surround in the lower level. The house got new windows, a new roof, new siding. The house is essentially the same as ours, but when the owner of the building company brought us in one day to show us the improvements, it looked like completely different. It was beautiful and inviting.
Not long after a couple of cars drove up to the newly remodeled house and five minutes later two school-age kids were swinging on the tree swing in our yard. We met our new neighbors and hit it off. Little Ozzy, the baby of the family, has the softest skin and a blond tuft on top of his head. He laughs as he plows into their puppy, grabbing at his fur. We’ve watched Ozzy learn how to walk over the past several weeks and it feels like I’ve observed a great miracle of life. My mom would have adored Ozzy. When she was healthy, she loved spending time on my street, genuinely interested in getting to know my neighbors.
Me and Ozzy
Could the new neighbors, much like the butterflies and the Duff’s t-shirt, be actual signs from Mom? There are a million ways for me to rationalize these things. But there also seemed to be an invitation. I wanted a dream and resurrected memories. Those haven’t really come, but maybe something else had found its way into my grief journey. I had a choice - to look at these synchronicities as meaningful signs from something larger than me, visiting me in the spirit of Mom, or explain them away with rational thought.
I’ve chosen to open up to the idea of spirituality. I’ve wanted to embrace the idea that love never dies and that we can receive signs from God or the Universe or even my dead mom. It sounds maybe more out there than it is. I’m simply choosing to slow down, notice, and make meaning from what I see. I could chalk this stuff up to coincide, but there is a sweet comfort in choosing to believe otherwise.
One day this fall I posted a photo of my parents’ gravestone on Instagram. I got this message in my DMs: “Hey, it’s your neighbor :) I’m not sure if you believe in signs. But I saw your post and the day your mom passed was the day Ozzy was born!”
So, yes. I’ll keep choosing to see the signs.