8 minute read
Signal
By Tory Walker
Your computer goes into sleep mode, flashing black as the screensaver loads. You see your image in the monitor before the pink glow of the first slide takes over; even in the low-resolution reflection, you look tired. The momentarily black screen shows your eyes as exaggeratedly sunken pits, mouth slightly agape, and the frizz of your unkempt hair creates a chaotic kind of halo around your face.
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“Did you cut your bangs again? That’s why it frizzes like that, you know.” You groan; you cut your hair in kindergarten, and Mama’s reminded you every time she looked at it since.
“It’s the rubber bands and how rough I am with it; it takes a lot of damage, but I just can’t stand hair in my face.”
She sniffs, having already made her opinion clear about people who have the audacity to let their hair get messy and hang in their faces.
“You make everything harder than it is, always reinventing the wheel.” Your mother’s voice carries the same irritated tone in your head as it did when she was living.
“Not now, Mama,” you mutter, and as an afterthought you add, “that was not helpful.” You’d like to imagine this small rebuttal would have been respectful yet clear enough to stop her, but chances are that’s as much in your head as her voice is. Your mother was a whirlwind, and no one told her no with much success, respectfully or otherwise.
You stalk out of your office and down the hall to the kitchen, bare feet slapping on tiles that glow in shades of blue reflected from a floor lamp. A drink isn’t going to fix anything, but it will lessen the frustration and loosen your muscles.
“Oh HONESTLY,” Mama growls at you, “get to it!” She never did have patience for wallowing, and she doesn’t hang around for it now.
You remember a passage you read in Harriet the Spy on a day when the loss was more recent and the grief felt like a rip current dragging you along; you can even hear it in her voice, pragmatic and sure of herself.
You wonder if anyone is ever actually “old enough” to lose their mother without feeling lost themselves. Mama was 53 when hers died unexpectedly. You were thirty-one, and it was anything but unexpected. You lived across the country while your beautiful mama’s fiery spirit was slowly and painfully being smothered by cancer treatments and the disease itself until it finally extinguished. One month later, the states began their COVID-19 shutdowns, and you spent the next three years in increasing isolation as the grief ran its course.
Mama hadn’t shown up until after you moved back to the South, and then she was everywhere. It had been less of a haunting and more of a million little thoughts and feelings, but she still occasionally visits you. It’s why your sheets get changed as often as they do, why you dust the baseboards, and why anyone listening through the duplex’s paper-thin walls will hear you talking to yourself at all hours.
You know it isn’t real, but do you? After all, according to that snarky professor with the bushy mustache, reality might very well not be. You know she isn’t there, but you feel her, hear her. Some days are an ongoing conversation, as if she is ever-present. You take her with you on adventures, share with her the things you love.
Even when you don’t hear her, you are thinking about her. The hypnotic sound of a sewing machine, the sight of someone diligently completing a crossword puzzle, the rich taste of hot chocolate on cold mornings, the warmth and feel of the earth under your nails when you mine it, and the sweet and musky smell of roses all assault you with memories, every bit as sharply intrusive as thorns.
Like her beloved Tevye, your mother trusted tradition, and it is those moments that are deeply ingrained in your memory. Without fail, the family would gather and listen to Mama read the second chapter of Luke on Christmas Eve from her worn, blue leather armchair that creaked comfortably along with the pops and crackling from the fire and the rich, deep tone of her voice. Your mother cajoled her children into yearly viewings of Fiddler on the Roof on New Year’s Eve after a hearty dinner of oyster stew and clam chowder. You can hear Mama distantly reading aloud from the Scriptures every evening before bed, her voice starting strongly with, “And it came to pass,” and fading into quiet murmurs. You can see her kneeling every morning before school and leading her children in prayer. There were nightly Norman Rockwell-worthy dinners and Sunday mornings where y’all sat in the same pew for almost thirty years.
But the remembering hasn’t always been this graceful or composed. For three years you sequestered yourself while the emotion raged through you, knowing if you got too close to anyone your dam of sadness and anger might break and drown you both. A lot of days were ugly, and you barely stayed above the water, so maybe it was best done alone.
Often, your chest ached like it would split open, and you’d clamp your arms around your middle to hold the cage doors closed inside you. You cried to her, sobbing your grief out loud. You told her, over and over, that you missed her. You told her that you weren’t ready for her to go and would immediately feel guilty. You knew you didn’t have the right to wish she was still there, not with how sick she was.
You argued with her. You listened for her to tell you what to do. You confided your fears and sometimes your secrets. You found you could almost touch her when you were in the garden, up to your elbows in dirt, and you let the weeds grow after that hurt too much. It felt like you lost her again and again, and every time, the pain threatened to overtake you.
You submerged your face in water, buried it in a pillow, took your car on the interstate, and you screamed. You roared the pain out in howls and shrieks of despair, letting the depth, the feathers, the traffic muffle the madness while you bared the rawest part of you in something that felt like action. You lost your voice; your throat was so ravaged you could only whisper. You lied when you had to explain why. You repeated the experiment. None of it brought her back.
Sometimes you were angrier than you were sad. On those days the memories of the bad seeped into your mind, corroding what little peace you had. You shouted, accused, confronted, said all the things you wouldn’t have dared when you were within her reach. Her end of the conversation was static, and you wondered if she remembered to press the button. You laughed despite yourself and imagined yelling instructions to her through the device on how to operate a walkie-talkie. “No, hold the button the whole time!”
You sullenly told God that He had better be taking care of her, because she sincerely loved and followed Him her whole life, and it would be crap if He didn’t keep His end of the bargain. You waited for lightning, for Mama to tell you it’s blasphemy to talk like that, but there is radio silence when you are in the deep, and you have to swim toward the light to be able to reach the signal again.
Now, it seems, grief has loosened the reins. It doesn’t sweep you away into senselessness, and when it does visit, it comes quietly. Mama stops in every now and then, and the memory of her comes more often than that, but they aren’t all you can see in front of you anymore.
You know it’s probably best to keep all this to yourself, but you don’t. You tell your therapist you’re writing an essay about the conversations you have with your mom. He says it’s a therapy tool, a healthy way to work through grief. You feel less unstable, but not at all like you’ve worked “through” anything. While writing the essay, you take a break to scroll through your social media feed and see a post from a page called Sistas in Zion,
You sit in silence, feeling a chill go through you and allowing what you read to sink in. You can hear an echo from the past, one that makes your throat tighten, and your eyes start to stream as Mama whispers, “I am so proud of you. Keep going.”
