Jennifer

Loyal readers of the blog may think I’ve forgotten that I already wrote about calling the young man who killed my grandmother in a car accident, but this is a different grandmother and different phone call. 

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My mother should have realized by December ’87 that there was an important reason she had been losing weight for a year or so and had begun to have difficulty in keeping food down, but she refused various medical tests which she had previously vowed never to have again. By March ’89 she was diagnosed with untreatable stomach cancer. In April, May, and June pagan spirituality became increasingly important to her. The Goddess was going to save her. Also in that period of time she talked for hours on the phone with all kinds of people about the exciting connections she was making between things she heard on the radio about physics, observed about birds, saw in art shows, remembered learning about the native people of ___, etc. When I overheard snippets of those phone calls, I wondered: What would my experience be on the other end of the phone? Clearly, I would listen because she was (my sister / my daughter / my best friend from college from whom I hadn’t heard in 10 years), but would I be excited by the connections she was making or would I think she was crazy? Would I have any idea, on the other end of the phone, that this 5’ 7” tall woman now weighed 85 pounds?

My mother had read, and had asked us all to read, Bernie Siegel’s Love, Medicine, and Miracles. We weren’t supposed to think that she was going to die. This from a woman who had considered euphemisms to be way worse than many people consider swears – she never could respect people who said “make love” instead of “have sex” or “pass away” instead of “die”. (I know, I know, Bernie Siegel wasn’t suggesting we use euphemisms, but that we all live love and hope. Screw that.) Despite that, it was not too hard for us to tell those who asked how she really was. But my grandmother (her mother) didn’t ask any of us.

My mother asked for and we planned a big solstice celebration. Just as the sun would turn, would travel the other way, at the summer solstice; the Goddess was going to begin healing her then. We double-checked with the hospice worker who came to the house, “How long?” I didn’t really need to double-check. I was gaining 20, 30, 40 pounds and making a new life inside me, due to be born just after the solstice, she was losing 20, 30 pounds and … (no euphemisms, now). Her favorite creation myth had been the Wintu Indians’ story about how birth and death came to be, because the gods had first planned humans to experience neither one, but ended up with both: “They will know the gladness of birth. They will know the sorrow of death. And through these two things together people will come to know love.” (Take that, Bernie Siegel.) So I knew. But we really weren’t sure her mother knew.

So I called my grandmother. I haven’t been able to reconstruct the words I chose, but I suspect I thought that by focusing on the cycles my mother so appreciated, I could pretend I wasn’t using euphemisms. The conversation wasn’t quite as hard to have as it had been to anticipate – my grandmother did know. I learned then that there is no age after which it becomes easier to lose a child. (Or if there is, it isn’t age 88.)

We had the solstice celebration. My mother died four days later. Three days after that I had a terrifyingly brief labor and m’hija, La Chica, was born.