I guess this is just a place I go to be sad.
It was sudden, unexpected, without warning. There was no brace for emotional impact, no moment for it to sink in. She was gone before we knew she was gone. My mom died 24 days ago.
She was having a good day. It was wednesday, we had just come home from a week of Labor Day fun in Lake Chelan. She was doing pretty well all things considered, its been a hard year for her emotionally. Her brother committed suicide in February. Her beloved aunt died tragically from her injuries a week after a terrible car accident in March. Her dad died slowly but surely on Father’s day. She’s been coping with major depression backslides for 2 years. But over Labor Day, she was ok. We had tension at times, and I got frustrated with her alot, but we ate ice cream, swam at the beach, buried each other in the sand, and enjoyed one last taste of summer before Fall kicked in full swing, and the boys started their first day of school at their awesome new preschool. I called her up that morning to tell her how easy dropoff was, how happy they were to be there, how I had to beg them to come back to kiss me goodbye before they ran off to play. I spoke to her at 9:09am, for three whole minutes. I was happy, she sounded happy. She was banging around in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher, getting ready to run errands and go to the Y. She met with a window replacement guy at the house, got a bid for new windows, and left the house at a little after 11:30. At 11:39, for reasons we will never fully understand, her car crossed the center lane of a busy, historically fatal 2-lane highway, and she collided head-on with a double-bucket Cadman dump truck carrying loads of sand. Her car careened, flipped, rolled and came to rest farther down the highway. The truck caught fire, rolled, and burned for hours along a hillside, causing a major wildfire threat. It took 10 fire engines from 5 departments over 7 hours to contain before they could reopen the road.
My family drives on that road often, so when my sister heard about a truck fire/accident that closed the road, she sent a group text to me, my dad, and my mom. Dad and I both responded with thanks, but mom never saw the message. Her phone was in the floorboards of her crumpled car. She had died on impact from blunt force trauma. Dad, upon seeing Bridget’s text, sent a blast email to his work group at Microsoft notifying them about a bad accident nearby and to be cautious about their commutes home, and to plan to leave early if necessary. A few moments after hitting send, his Ring doorbell notification alarmed on his phone. He opened up the app and saw two state Troopers at his doorstep. He knew immediately. He asked, was it my wife? Was it Marian? They asked him to come meet him at home, and he disconnected. He left work in hysterics, in distress. It was in that moment when he was driving that I suddenly felt compelled to text and ask if they went to see that movie last night they were joking about going to see. And in some weird way, I was going to joke that mom didn’t want to see it but I did, and I’d take him to go see it tonight if he wanted, just me and him. He texted, Shannon are you home? Me: Yes... Him: Stay there.
He called me a few moments later, sobbing, and through his tears told me she had died in the accident. He told me to stay where I was, and that he was coming over. All I said was ‘okay’. Like this was some kind of weird, twisted joke, and I was waiting for a punchline. My kids were home, totally oblivious, and quietly playing on their kindles/watching tv. I snuck outside to the front porch, called Tyler and told him, with zero tone in my voice, and waited for dad. Tyler beat him home, said very little, and he knew he needed to go inside and keep the kids occupied, so he disappeared into the house. It must have been 30 minutes before dad finally pulled up. He had no details, just what he barely heard from the Ring camera. I asked if they were waiting for him back at the house, and he had no idea. We called around a bunch of phone numbers, whatever we could find online, and finally a dispatcher was able to patch us through to the Trooper at his house. They asked where he was, my address, and let us know they would be right over as quickly as possible. We sat on the tailgate of my truck in the driveway, waiting for the worst news of our lives. We talked about what we knew, where was she going, who had seen her last, and tried to piece together any semblance of an explanation.
When the troopers finally rolled up, my tears followed. I stared at their feet, trying to hear their words, their condolences, and the guidance about what to do next. I asked if she had her seatbelt on, as if somehow it mattered. I asked if she was still in the car when they found her. They said they weren’t able to answer that for me at this time, but I was certain they told me her seatbelt was on. I may have misunderstood, or maybe there was some confusion, but I left that conversation sure that her seat belt must have been on.
My head raced as I tried to come up with a way to tell my kids. I needed time, to collect my own emotions, to calm down a bit, and decided I would tell them tomorrow. Who needed to be informed? Who else already knew? My sister was on her way over to my house. She was in a meeting at work when she got the call. I can’t even imagine what was going through her head that whole drive over here.
The troopers gave us her wallet, which they were able to use to ID her body and confirm who she was, and notify my dad. Her purse had spilled all over the crash site, along with library books for the boys, her gym bag, her typical always-in-stock box of car-kleenex and water bottles for her passengers. I felt strongly compelled to see the crash site, see her car, not necessarily her body because I wasn’t sure what that might entail, but I needed more information. What the fuck happened.
Dad was instead obsessed with what he could control. The other driver. Was he ok? Can we meet him? Is there anything we can do for him? Dad’s focus was locked on the driver, and he was drawn to him for the next two weeks. We tried to relay to dad that liability and privacy needed to keep him away for now.
As we often tend to do when someone dies, we planned to gather at Grandpa Ken’s/Aunt Kathy’s house just a few minutes away from me. We sat outside in the cool fall air while they passed around some Costco pizza, the thought of eating made my stomach rip apart, and mulled through our emotions. Folks started spewing supportive phrases at me, looking to me with pity in their eyes, holding me tightly that they knew my pain and suffering, and all I could do was stand there and absorb it, since very little of the reality had actually worked its way under my skin and into my mind and heart. The idea of losing her was just starting to surface, what would life look like without mom? I had literally never really pictured it, not now, not like this. We imagined life without dad, what we would do to help mom long term. I tried to keep it lighthearted and do whatever I could to share information, gather my feelings, and lean on my loved ones when I needed to sob when the waves overcame me.
That evening I knew sleep was going to be difficult, so I took something to help and tried to clear my mind as best I could, but it felt useless. I woke sometime around 3am and started scouring the internet for news and articles about the accident. The driver’s name was released, and reading mom’s name over and over made me feel like there was some terrible secret I was being let in on, and that everyone else knew before me. I felt cheated, blindsided, confused. We had just talked. She was having a good day. She should be here. What the fuck happened.
The next days were a chaotic blur of appointments, visits from pastors and meetings with florists and calling caterers and sorting through a lifetime of pictures and standing in rooms filled with her treasured things and trying to sort out how to process this absurd new truth. There is no possible way to do all of this, and feel it all, without bursting into an emotional ball of fire and self-destructing. My mind was closed, and my heart was weak. I felt very little of the misery all at once. Just trickles would filter in and consume me, but only enough to get me through the dark moment and then fade away again, threatening to come back without warning. I still, I think fortunately, feel only pieces of it. Like I have a very thick, very protective filter around me right now, in the form of my children, my husband, my home, that is bandaging my wound before it sees the light of day. Yet when I leave their presence and emerge from my home, I feel like i’m wearing my open wound out in the open, vulnerable to the world to see and remark and pity and pause for a moment to acknowledge, but carry on the way we all must. The carrying on, that is the most disturbing part of all. That we still need to eat, and sleep, and work, do our chores and tend to our lives to stay here and keep living. Even though we’re upside down and inside out, something keeps us ticking like we always have. Out of muscle memory or habit or even for the cathartic monotony of the familiar, to scratch the itch of the the before- feeling.
Somehow next week will be a month already without having a mom on earth. I don’t understand that measurement of time, it does not translate at all with what I have ever known about time. Somehow soon it will be the holidays, and we will be navigating a new set of firsts that we never, ever imagined coping with. Trying to support my dad, keep the lines of communication open with my kids, trying to keep love in the front of my mind, and celebrate my marriage with my husband, to let this draw us closer together rather than let my closing heart pull me away... those are my challenges, my choices, my decisions for now. It is all I feel that I can control. Otherwise, the same truths still stand firmly in my mind; that life is painfully and tragically short; that we must do what we can with what we have where we are, to live the fullest lives we can and leave no room for regret in the afterlife; and to communicate to everyone we love in our lives as best as we can, so that everyone knows how loved, appreciated, admired, and special we all are to each other. The impacts we have on each other here in these lives, the connections we make, should be recognized fully and often so we can always live in the front of our seats with a sharp perspective of what we have while we have it. Because this loss has reminded me of the morbid reality my dad preached at every opportunity since i was a kid, that life can be taken away in the blink of an eye, and one of the greatest things we can leave behind is to be sorely and painfully missed by all the lives we loved before.
