Just Like Heaven

When I was a child of ten or eleven, I would lie awake in my bed at night and force myself to imagine the death of my parents. It wouldn’t take much time or thought to obliterate myself into a thousand ragged shards of despair. I’d get myself into such a state of hyperventilation, sobbing so hard into my pillow, that I was sure they’d hear me from their room down the hall.  I connect the memory of these sessions with an image that I’ve written about in poetry before: I see my parents hover above my bed, then begin floating away from me, silently as astronauts “in the drift from ship.” I can still see them in this state if I close my eyes and recall, if not in a visceral way anymore, at least intellectually, the monstrous, continuous grief that would always follow. How would I ever live on the earth, in my body, in time or space without them? It couldn’t be possible. If they died, I would die. I loved them both that much. Of course I did. They, and my sister, were my entire world. There was no real reason for these flights of self-flagellation. My parents were, at least as far as I knew, healthy. Then again, I’ve always had a morbid streak. Just look at my poetry and you’ll see.

I’ve always focused the memory on their movement, the slow-motion loss of them. But it occurs to me now with some surprise that the more interesting part of this metaphor is that I, their child, am the ship. It never occurred to me that rather than (or at least in addition to) being the force acted upon by loss and grief (even imagined), I was actually the engine, the moving, maneuvering vehicle, the base camp.

I was the safety away from which they drifted. 

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

I understand this a little better now.

My oldest child, my son, moved out of our family home and into his college dorm room three weeks ago. His sister, just two years younger, belts pop songs and jazz standards from the shower without worrying now about disturbing him. She will be gone soon, too, and my husband and I will be left behind.  In the metaphor everyone uses for this time, he and I are the parent birds who coax, then push their offspring out of the nest, trusting they will open their wings and fly away into their own adult life. But maybe what really happens is that the ship-children punch in a code, open the airlocks and initiate the severing— untethering their astronaut parents who float there, dumbfounded, for who knows how long, then ignite the booster rockets and head for deep space. 

Don’t misunderstand: this new metaphor does not feel more comforting even as it makes somewhat more sense to me. Space is cold and vast. We can only hope we’ll eventually drift far enough to clump together with other floating, dumbfounded parents.

Photo by Bill Jelen on Unsplash

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There was also a time–a long series of years– when I could not imagine missing my mother when she died. I could conjure other feelings: anger, disappointment. Relief, definitely. But grief? No. 

When that specific feeling began is hazy, but it certainly held me hard by the time I was in my third year of college, the year she and my father divorced, the year before I would find out precisely how it would feel to lose one of them.  Also hazy is the knowledge of exactly when she started needing an entire bottle of wine to sleep at night. When she became an active alcoholic. I don’t think I would have described it that way when I was in high school, though surely, I realized there was deep dysfunction in our house around alcohol use. My sister will be able to check my memories of this time, will be able to place things into a more accurate timeline. Her mind retains specifics in a way mine does not. For me, things run together: a wine glass thrown, a brandy snifter half-filled with the sticky, orange-scented Grand Marinier Mom loved whipped across the room, a basket of pennies hucked at my father’s head, leaving circular imprints on the wall behind his nightstand. The fancy restaurant dinners where they ordered luxurious meals and drank and drank and closed the place down, then drove us home over the Tappan Zee Bridge in the frigid winter, (“Dad, can you please close the window? We’re freezing.”), with our mother hanging her head outside the car to keep from vomiting. The night, my sister reminds me, that our mother left our father, made us pack our bags and get in the car and head to her sister’s house. I don’t know how long we were there before we went home. I have no memory of this at all. 

There was also just the “normal” drinking they did that didn’t (to my knowledge) include small violences or would-be catastrophes. Saturday nights at the kitchen table with my aunt and uncle draining bottle after bottle while Billy Joel albums played and we cousins were left to our devices, staying up all hours. My sister would sneak the dregs of their glasses or a sip from the plastic spout of a box of Franzia Chardonnay. Sunday morning, all the dead soldiers would be lined up/laid out: four or five bottles of wine, half-full bottles of Amaretto di Saronno, Grand Marinier, or Sambuca di Saronno, the anise liqueur my father only brought out, it seemed, at the end of a very long night of drink to accompany an espresso, maybe. Then he would get affectionate and philosophical with us, happy to chat and emote and say “I love you, Sheil” not in response, for a change, though certainly prompted by all that licorice-liquid courage. God that’s sad when I think about it. 

Photo by Christian Bowen on Unsplash

By the time I got to college, I understood enough about the grip alcohol held on my family that I made my friends promise to keep an eye on me at parties. “Please, don’t let me hurt you,” I can remember saying at one point.  And then also, “Please, don’t tell my mother I’m here if she calls.” Thank God there was no such thing as texting in the early 1990s. I shudder to imagine what it would have felt like for her to have access to an unfettered open channel to me. Caustic missives pinging to be read, exploding onto my screen day and night. Where is the block button?!

No, I was spared by there being only a payphone in the hallway of the dorm. Why was she calling? Was it something my father said or did? Something about my sister, perennially on her shit list? “Sheila,” she slurred wetly into the receiver, “You are a terrible, disappointment of a daughter. I wish I had never had you.” 

Eventually I learned to discern her state of mind in the first ten seconds of a call. Eventually, I learned to say things like “I love you, Mom, but I will not let you talk to me this way,” and hang up. The last time I remember doing so, I was 8 months pregnant with my son. “I love you, Mom, but you will not be in your grandson’s life if you cannot take responsibility for your words and actions.”

The rope that secured my mother to the ship of me strained and split and frayed over many years of drifting inside the orbit of her alcoholism. Eventually, I didn’t even need a sharp implement to complete the severing–just a quick flick of my middle finger against the radiation-bleached fibers. I’m calling it a rope, but we know because of the metaphor that it was also a life-support line. There wasn’t even the satisfaction of slamming a phone receiver into the cradle. Just the strong, sure quiet created by pressing “end call.” 

Photo by Kostiantyn Li on Unsplash

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My mother has been dead for three years and I miss her exponentially more than I ever imagined I would or could. It’s nothing like I thought it would be. Neither was losing my father 35 years ago. Try as my child-self might have to prepare herself for the full, final severing, there is no such thing as prepared. Grief is materially different when it actually arrives than whatever we have imagined it to be. Ten-year-old Sheila choked on sobs regularly at bedtime, alone, in the dark. 53-year-old Sheila sobs erratically, unexpectedly, sometimes while laughing, sometimes alone, but always supported by the care of family who loved and miss Mom, too. 

I wonder if part of why I imagined my parents as astronauts hovering above my bed in death was because of my Catholic schooling. I was raised to believe in guardian angels who come from a place called Heaven where souls continued in some recognizable form. Or maybe not Heaven but Purgatory. Seems like souls would certainly “hover” as I’ve described it, there. I tend not to believe in any of this stuff, though Mom surely did right up to her death. She was comforted by it and that comforts me. Still, I appreciate that even though I am a grown woman, people try to comfort me as if I were a child. They say things like, “Your mother is surely watching over you,” or “She is looking down from Heaven and smiling.” Even in my cynicism, I can welcome this. I can pause from writing to look up at the exposed ductwork in the coffee shop my son calls “bougie,” or out the window at the white clouds piled like clean laundry against the almost-Autumn sky to search for her where they said she would be. 

Photo by Roman Petrov on Unsplash

And when I do, she comes to me not as light or an embodied form with halo or wings, but–and I swear this just now happened as I was writing this paragraph about a Heaven I don’t believe in!–as a 1980’s pop song from my teenage years. “Just Like Heaven,” by The Cure, is playing in the cafe and my attention has split just enough from the words on the page to let it filter in. I am both shocked and delighted to find her here, hovering above me like a strange astronaut or angel. Either way I’m laughing and crying in public, both alone and surrounded by strangers who have surely loved and lost their own. I am re-tethered, unsevered, and so grateful to be able to say, after everything and with my whole heart, I miss you, Mom.