NINE Grief & Relief
“ C an we get a dog?”
We were sitting behind the cabin that evening, in the area my mother and I had called the ‘back yard,’ though it was just a bit of green space among the paved paths to the guest cottages. But it was where the brick fire pit was, as well as a few picnic tables and Adirondack chairs. We were sitting on two of the chairs, with plastic dinnerware on our laps, holding steak, grilled corn on the cob, and spinach and strawberry salad.
It was a lovely summer evening in the redwood forest. Already cool enough that the heat from the pit was a comfort.
It really hit me then, how beautiful this place is, and how over the years I’d forgotten the power of that beauty.
We’d arrived only two days earlier. It was too early yet to be through the ‘homecoming’ stage, and surely I had obstacles to face which hadn’t yet emerged. But a new voice had piped up in my head, and she wanted to know why the hell I’d stayed away so long.
The answer was obvious and took only two words: my mother. I hadn’t been so swept up in nostalgia that I’d forgotten how miserable I was when I’d lived here before. I’d left because I’d had to, and I’d stayed away for the same reason. My mother had died not even three years before, and I’d learned of it months thereafter.
My opportunity to reclaim a place I’d loved wasn’t much older than my return. I’d come back when I was able.
But in my years away, I had absolutely forgotten one thing: how much of this place I’d loved. Dear friends, good people, and a gorgeous slice of world. All of that had been swept away by my escape from one woman.
When Wyatt asked about a dog, I was drinking a beer from the six-pack I’d bought at the market, and I’m still impressed that I didn’t choke to death right there and then.
Micah was very allergic to pet dander—like, he got wheezy and puffy if we were in the back yard and the wind blew over from our next-door neighbor’s yard, where they had two German Shepherds—so the only pets we’d ever had were an ill-advised birthday gift of a ten-gallon tank and a few tetras when Wyatt turned ten. We’d had to replace the tetras a few times over the next few months, until we decided that Wyatt’s room was a fish-killing zone.
We’d gotten him the fish because he’d wanted a pet so badly, and we couldn’t get him the puppy and/or kitten he’d been begging for. He had not appreciated the fish. I’m not saying he set out to murder them with malice aforethought, but his motivation for taking care of the tank was not life-sustaining.
He’d stopped asking for pets after the fish debacle. That he was asking now suggested something big, and it caused me both relief and grief. It meant that he was looking ahead to a life without his father and realizing there were things he might have because Micah was gone.
I strove to bury all that emotional turmoil and answer him as if it was just a simple question.
I’d always wanted a pet, too. I hadn’t grown up with any, either, but my mother wasn’t allergic. She simply didn’t like having to take care of anything. It didn’t matter what—pets, plants, cars, motels.
Daughters.
“I don’t know, bud. We’re not that far off the highway, and people drive that road a lot faster than they should. There’s no fence here, and I won’t chain a dog.”
“Could we put in a fence, just around our cabin, maybe? Or maybe a dog run?”
I gave him the respect to consider his question. “I think fencing is expensive, and we don’t have any extra money right now. We have to focus on fixing this place up, so we can decide what our future looks like. I’m worried, too, about a dog or a cat being in the way of all the work we have to do, and maybe getting hurt.” His sweet face had sagged with disappointment. I reached over and gave his bare knee a squeeze. His legs were already hairy like his dad’s. “But I’d really like a pet, too, so let’s start keeping an eye out at the rescue places, and do some research, so when we’re in a good place to have one, we’re ready to bring one home. Okay?”
His sigh was heavy and despondent, but he nodded. “I hate when you make sense.”
I laughed and gave his knee a little tickle before I let it go. “Then you must feel a lot of hate, because I am full of sense.”
“Go ahead and tell yourself that if it helps you get through your day.”
“You little twerp!” I told him with exaggerated offense. “You know, I had a surprise planned for you tonight, but I’m not so sure somebody so snarky deserves a surprise.”
“Is it a puppy?” he asked with an impudent smirk. “’Cause I deserve a puppy.”
I threw the wadded-up butcher paper at him.
SUNSET WAS APPROACHING , and that was part of my little surprise, so we rinsed the dishes and cooled the pit, but we left the rest of the cleanup for later. Then I told Wyatt to put his hiking boots on, get his waterproof slicker, and meet me at the car. When he complained that it was nearly dark and too late for a hike, I told him to shut up and mind his mother.
I therefore got a deeply skeptical and slightly grumpy teenager for a front-seat companion.
But about ten minutes later, when I turned west onto a narrow paved lane cut through the forest, Wyatt sat up higher in his seat. “Are we going to the beach?”
On the way to Bluster, we’d stopped at a couple of vista points and had lunch at one that had a little picnic spot overlooking the beach, but driving the U-Haul and towing the Golf had made it impossible for us to stop often or stay long when we found a place to stop. My son had seen the ocean for the first time in his life only a few days ago, and he still had not stepped foot on a beach. I meant to rectify that.
This night was pretty clear, with scattered clouds and no fog. Those were the exception, not the rule, around these parts. The sunset promised to be spectacular.
I parked in a lot overlooking Laguna Creek Beach. It’s a thoroughly developed park area, with lots of visitor services, but it was late enough that we were basically alone. There was one other car parked a few spaces down, but I didn’t see anybody around who might have arrived in it. They were probably down on the beach.
“I’ve got a better place than this in mind,” I told Wyatt. “But it’s farther along—about a mile hike down to the beach. Or we can stay here, go sit on that bench over there. We’ll see the sunset from either place.”
“I want the beach!” He was already getting out of the car. Feeling pretty good about myself, I got out and joined him.
Wyatt’s head swiveled in every direction as we walked along the edge of the bluff. I found myself looking in the same directions, seeing things I’d grown up seeing and, again, realizing how much I’d missed of my home world. It made me wonder: had I appreciated all this remarkable beauty as a kid?
I don’t think I had. I think I took it for granted as simply the way the world looked. I think I took a lot of things—good and bad—for granted as simply the way things were. Maybe that’s the lot of childhood. When we’re young, we don’t realize that other people are living completely different lives in completely different environments. We don’t know that the natural beauty around us is unusual. And some of us don’t understand that other kids have parents who are good to them always, and not only when there are outsiders around to see.
Even when we’re taught in school about different cultures, those are things that happen and people who live in books and educational videos. Maybe even children who are privileged enough to travel widely in their youth see different worlds as if they are Disney World, provided for their vacation amusements.
I don’t know about that. I was never more than fifty miles from Bluster until I left it entirely. All I had known of the world was this corner. Since I’d returned, I was hit again and again by the understanding of how much I’d lost—how much I’d failed to love sufficiently when it was in my life, and how much my memories had been throttled by the things I’d escaped.
I was also realizing that I’d failed my kid. Not because I wasn’t good to him always, anywhere, but because I’d never tried to expand his understanding of the world. This move west was Wyatt’s first in-person exposure to a lot of different environments.
Micah and I had done a little bit of traveling with Wyatt, but not enough. Part of that was not my fault: Micah was terrified of flying (ironic that someone who’d had no qualms about scaling the sides of mountains, sometimes without even a bit of rope to secure him, could not manage to walk down a jetway and step onto a jet, but true nonetheless). So we did outdoorsy road trips and never got more than about two hundred miles from home. But I’d never suggested other kinds of road trips or even a mother-son trip on a plane. Such ideas simply hadn’t occurred to me. I’d been content to follow Micah’s lead.
To be completely honest, my feelings about my relationship with Micah were starting to become even more complicated than his sudden death followed by the financial ruin caused by his bad, and secret, decisions had already caused them to be.
I was beginning to realize that maybe Micah had been as controlling as my mother. He’d simply wrapped it in a vastly more pleasant, gentle, smiling package so that I hadn’t realized how much I’d been manipulated. And it was so much deeper than taking only vacations Micah wanted to take.
I’d thought our finances were combined—joint bank accounts, joint investment accounts, everything but our work-connected accounts together. But that had not been the case. He’d put most of the money I’d thought we were investing jointly into his own accounts—which I hadn’t even known he’d had. And then he’d lost it all.
The house? Not in my name. Sixteen years of marriage, and I wasn’t the owner of the house I’d lived in all that time. I’d known it, I’d mentioned it a few times, he’d said of course, we should certainly do that. But it never happened, and I eventually stopped bringing it up—I stopped even thinking about it. In my head, it became one of those things that clearly wasn’t as important as I thought it was.
So he’d been able to leverage the house straight into the ground while he invested in crazy get-rich-quick schemes and leave his wife and child homeless when he died.
When he died recklessly, climbing a hundred-foot-cliff face without safety gear.
Now I’m an intelligent, educated, adult person. I realize that I should have been involved enough in our finances to at least understand that the things I could see did not square up right. But I think, despite my intelligent, educated adult status, I want to blame my childhood for that. I’d been trained from the cradle to defer, to keep the waters as still as I possibly could. To assume that there was always a power in any relationship and that the power was never me.
I left my first life to escape that powerlessness, but it took the complete destruction of my second life for me to finally begin to break the patterns of thought that had made me powerless.
“Mom?” Wyatt asked, and I snapped out of my head.
He was stopped in the middle of the narrow trail, frowning at me. Sunset was coming on soon; he was suffused by golden light, like a Renaissance painting of a saint.
“Yeah?” I tried to sound like I hadn’t spent the past however many minutes of this hike self-flagellating for being a weak-ass little girl well into my thirties. Some role model I was.
Wyatt wasn’t buying my ruse. “Are you okay? I’ve asked like four questions, and you’re blowing me off.”
“Sorry, bud. Didn’t mean to blow you off. I guess I sort of fell into a brain hole. What’s up?”
“I should ask you that. What hole did you fall into?”
Well, wasn’t that a crossroads. I could give him some bullshit answer, say I was thinking about the work we had to do at the Sea-Mist. Or I could tell him the truth—or at least as much of the truth as I could tell him without shitting on his dead father. Which was the good-mother choice? Bullshit, or hard truth?
“Welp. I was thinking about all the ways I fucked up that got us into so much trouble when Dad died.”
His face took on that far too old, man-of-the-house look, and I wasn’t surprised when he said, “You didn’t mess up, Mom. You did the best you could when everything was terrible.”
I reached out and grabbed his hand. As we continued forward, squeezed side-by-side on the narrow path, I explained, “What I did wrong was let your dad control a lot of important things about our life. Like finances. He made a lot more money than me, he already owned the house, he was a little older, and ...” I stopped, having second thoughts about choosing the hard truth over the bullshit, but I was too far along now to go back. “And I think I didn’t know that I deserved to be part of all that. I think I met him before I’d recovered enough from the way I was raised to know I deserved to have a say. That’s not Dad’s fault, that’s my fault.” I tacked on a stupid, self-deprecating little titter and added, “Anyway, that’s my brain hole tonight.”
We walked along in quiet, hand in hand, for a few minutes. And then my fifteen-year-old son asked me, “Aren’t you still doing it? Like, right now?”
At first, I didn’t see his meaning. “Doing what?”
“Telling yourself you don’t deserve to have a say?” When I gave him the confused look that question deserved, he clarified and just about knocked me backward with his insight. “I guess it’s your job to try to hide the bad stuff Dad did from me—or you think it’s your job, anyway—so I probably don’t know everything, but we lost our home because Dad took out a big loan on it so he could give it to Uncle Chaz for his video-game climbing gym idea, right? And he did all that without talking you about it or even telling you it happened, right?”
That was, in fact, a fuller understanding of things than I’d realized he had, yes. “Right. That’s pretty close to the facts.”
“How is that your fault when you didn’t even know it happened? Dad should have told you.”
I was really regretting not taking the bullshit route. “I share some responsibility because I didn’t push enough early in our marriage for him to consult with me, when he put it off I let him and eventually stopped asking. That established a pattern where he didn’t feel like he had to.”
“But you were married . That right there should mean he had to. And you never told him you didn’t want to know, right?”
“No, I wanted to know. My point to you is that I should have kept pushing. It’s important to make sure your partner communicates with you. It’s important not to give up because you’re getting ignored.”
“And it’s important not to ignore your partner!” my child insisted. “Mom, you’re blaming yourself for letting Dad treat you bad instead of blaming Dad for treating you bad. That is severely messed up.” He dropped my hand suddenly and stomped off ahead, like he was angry.
“Wyatt, wait!” I hurried after him, but when I reached out to touch his shoulder, he shook me off and spun around. He was crying.
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry—”
“STOP APOLOGIZING!” he shouted through tears growing into sobs. “I’m so mad! I’m so mad at him! We lost everything! He didn’t care enough about us to be safe on the cliff, and he didn’t care enough about us to make sure we were safe if something happened. I loved him so much, and he didn’t care!”
“Wyatt! No!” I grabbed him and pushed past his angry resistance to pull him into my arms. Once he was there, he clung to me, sobbing against my neck. I held him and simply loved him while his storm raged.
When I felt the first signs of calm slipping into his limbs, I began to talk, keeping my voice gentle and soft. “I’m angry, too. But I know your dad loved us. Just as much as we loved him. I know this in my bones.” Now I was crying too—for my son, for the love I’d lost, for the wreckage of the life we’d made. “He was reckless, but it wasn’t because he didn’t care. He was controlling, but it wasn’t because he didn’t care. We are all shaped by way we’re raised and the lives we live. Dad was doing the best he knew to do.”
I leaned back and lifted his face in my hands. “We can love him and grieve and be furious with him, too. We can miss him and also wish he was here so we could punch him in the nose.”
For that last bit, I was rewarded with a soggy laugh and some sniffles as Wyatt got his emotions reined in.
He swiped at my jacket. “I got you snotty.”
I laughed heartily. “Son, that is the least of the disgusting things you have doused me with in your lifetime, trust me.” When he snickered wetly, I smooshed his beloved face between my hands. “I love you, Wyatt John Henry. You are the best thing that will ever happen in my life—and your dad felt the same way. We talked all the time about how we couldn’t believe we made someone so amazing. I want you to be exactly the person you want to be—as brave, as gentle, as assertive, as compassionate, as bold, as careful, as you want to be. I want you to make a life you value and fill it with people who value you for the amazement you are.”
With a sigh and a swipe of his eyes, Wyatt nodded. He said, “I wish you had a mom like I have.”
Well ... I obviously dissolved into sobs at once. He wrapped me up and held me, this time, as I snotted him right back.
I noticed a change in the light and looked over Wyatt’s shoulder toward the beach. Sunset was moments away.
“Hey.” I leaned back. “Look.”
Wyatt turned and looked.
We’d hiked to Hidden Beach. Like most of the Northern California coastline, craggy rock formations dot the water just off the beach and the surf crashes over and around them, especially during times of high tide. At some points along the coast are rocks with features so distinctive they’ve earned their own name—Elephant Rock, Goat Rock, Collapsed Arch Rock, and so on.
Hidden Beach has False Klamath Rock, which is mainly impressive for its size and use by native birds as a rookery. But the rock I’d brought Wyatt to see, my favorite rock at this, my favorite beach, doesn’t have a name. Most of the people I know call it ‘Slot Rock,’ but you won’t find that if you google.
It’s a medium-size rock in the surf with a slot about six feet deep and a foot or so wide—estimating from the beach; I’ve never swum out there to measure it—in the top. Probably some kind of erosion pattern. If at sunset you stand in the right place on the beach, the place I’d led Wyatt to, the sun will set right in that slot and wrap the rock with light and color.
Alone together on Hidden Beach, tears drying on our cheeks, my son and I stood arm in arm and watched the sun set in Slot Rock.
“I don’t ever want to leave here,” Wyatt murmured, his voice full of awe and sorrow.
“Then we won’t.”