THIRTY-THREE Epiphany
W e didn’t move into a hotel. Ever.
Roman and I had talked about the plan on the night after the flood, when he asked us to stay with him. I’d been clear then that I was grateful and happy to accept the offer, but I expected that Wyatt and I would relocate to the bed and breakfast as soon as the insurance stuff was settled. He’d said we were welcome for as long as we wanted to stay, but he also agreed with my B too many of my choices, too many of my reactions, were formed because of or in defiance of how I’d been raised. Erasing her was impossible because she was in so much of me. Until I really dealt with all that, I’d never be free of her.
I needed to be free of her. I needed to be able to embrace what I had with Roman, what I was building in Bluster, without fear of losing it or suspicion that I didn’t deserve it. I needed to learn to trust myself so I could trust the people I loved. I needed my mother’s bitter voice out of my head.
But how does one reckon with a ghost? Or the demons the ghost has left behind?
With a lot of therapy. Which would take a lot of time. Even finding a therapist accepting new clients was going to be a process. So, at least to start, I had to find DIY ways of dealing with my mother. This was my first step.
I’m not really sure why going to the cemetery was the step I’d thought of. I guess I had some things I wanted to say to her, and the cemetery was where she was.
The Bluster cemetery is both humble and historic. It started out before Bluster was a town, as a few graves on a hill, under a big blue oak. Since then, it’s been the primary burial site for most of the people who lived in and around town. Bluster has never grown into much more than a village, so it’s rarely had many people to bury in any given year. Even so, it’s been around for a long time, and there have been a few times of sickness over those long years. Now the cemetery is hundreds of graves scattered over a few hills and the valleys between them, some under blue oaks and others with only the sky as their canopy.
There are no giant markers, no sculptures of angels or family crypts. Just plain stones and crosses, their styles changing slightly over time, but still similar, with names and dates and usually a short sentiment: Beloved wife and mother or He loved the ocean or Delivered into the Lord’s loving hands .
Though I’d driven or ridden past it thousands of times, I’d never stepped foot in that cemetery until the day I left Jessie sketching on the bench. No one who’d died when I was growing up had been close enough to my mother or to me to warrant her attending their funeral or allowing me to attend.
The first and only funeral I’d ever been to was Micah’s.
I didn’t know where my mother was buried, but I did know that the custom is to bury people chronologically, leaving room for a spouse to be put to rest beside them, if the couple paid for that, but otherwise simply moving along a line until the line reached the cemetery border, and then following the next line in the opposite direction. So finding someone isn’t too difficult if you know when they died.
I came to Carla and Gabriel’s graves first. Side by side. Their markers weren’t ostentatious, but they were among the most elaborate in this part of the cemetery. Rose-colored marble, polished, with flowers etched into the corners. A brass vase for flowers was set in each, and each held a pretty silk arrangement of blue peonies, Carla’s favorite flower.
Carla’s stone read Carla Graciela Mejia Mendoza . Beloved wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend. Beneath her dates (she was forty when she died), was a sentence in Spanish: Cuando hay amor, la vide es eterna .
I remembered enough high-school Spanish to translate: When there is love, life is eternal.
Gabriel’s marker was identical to his mother’s except for the words and the birth date. His read Gabriel Ramon Mendoza-Mejia. Adored son. Tu luz brillará por siempre .
Your light will shine forever.
Gabriel had been twelve. He would have been twenty if he’d lived.
There was an empty space on Gabriel’s other side; Roman must have bought that for himself when he bought the plots for his wife and child.
I stood before those graves for quite a while, honoring the young family I’d known. Roman’s love for Carla and Gabriel didn’t threaten me. I wasn’t jealous. I understood. He wouldn’t be the man I loved if his love for Carla wasn’t eternal.
As I stood there, I had a new thought: We actually don’t live only one life. We live a series of lives, each one shaped by our experiences, the people around us, our circumstances. We take the lessons with us from one to the next, but every time we make a change, or a change happens to us, is a fresh start. A new life.
That was what Roman meant when he’d said he’d closed the book on his life with Carla and Gabriel, and it was why he could love Carla as fervently as ever and still love me just as fervently, in the life he lived now. Our love was the story of a different book.
The lives I’d lived before this one—my life with my mother, my life with Micah, the brief lives I’d lived between—were not this life. I did not have to be—I was not—the same person who’d lived those lives. I was no longer my mother’s daughter. I was no longer Micah’s wife. I was Leo, and this life was in my hands.
I sent Carla and Gabriel a silent wish that they were together and happy, and I continued on my way.
I found my mother very near the end of the last line of graves. Though she’d died more than two years earlier, only four graves continued past hers, at the base of a hill. No trees nearby.
Her marker was plain granite and had nothing etched in the unpolished grey stone but her name and dates. No indication that she would be missed, or that she’d made an impact anywhere, only that she had lived and died.
That was fitting, I thought as I sat on the dry, golden grass before her stone. I supposed I was sitting on her casket and wondered what kind she’d been buried in. Polished walnut? Or plain pine? Had there been any kind of service? Who’d paid for her burial?
Again I was struck by the thought that she must have been lonely all her life. Even the most committed introvert needs some kind of human connection, some bond to center their existence and give reason and purpose to their life. Yet my mother had wanted no such thing, not even from her own child.
Something must have happened to her to make her so bitter, so constantly suspicious, so angry every day. In her eyes, every single person she’d encountered was trying to take advantage of her in some way. Nobody was good, nobody was kind, nobody was helpful. Everybody was working an angle. To have been so judgmental, she must have been judged terribly harshly.
It must have been exhausting to live that isolated, angry life every day.
As a child, I’d never considered that my mother might have been in tremendous pain, or at least had once been in such pain, to be the woman I’d known. I’d never wondered what had made her the way she was; I went from thinking I was either bad or stupid or both, unable to be good enough to deserve her love, to realizing that nothing I could ever do would make her love or even care for me and resenting, then hating, her for it.
Not once had I felt sympathy for her.
As the victim of her abuse and neglect, I knew it wasn’t my responsibility to feel sympathy or to identify the source of her pain. But as the woman sitting before her gravestone, I understood something crucial: finding sympathy for my mother wasn’t about my responsibility to her.
It was about me. What I needed.
That was the reckoning I had come here to find: understanding that my mother’s treatment of me had never been about me. It wasn’t my weakness, my insufficiency, my stupidity, my clumsiness, my badness, or any other thing she’d claimed about me.
My mother’s demons were her own. She’d set them on me, yes, but they were not mine. Maybe she’d done so because she had needed some kind of human connection, and all she’d had to share was suffering.
But since the night I’d left her, I’d been in control of my own life. She had no more control over me than I gave her. Only I could decide whether I kept her demons or cast them off.
I had kept them for far too long.
“Goodbye, Mother,” I said, the only words I’d spoken in the fifteen minutes or so I’d been sitting before her marker. “I hope you found some peace.”
As it turned out, that was all I had to say to her. I stood up, brushed my ass off, and headed back to the entrance.
I left my mother’s demons behind.