It has been three years since my mother died. This is what I wrote when I picked up her ashes:

Eulogy

I miss her, every minute of every day, but the grief is more diffuse, shot through with flashes of regret and bewilderment. I don’t know why she died, but she would say: why do you care? Knowing won’t change anything. 

Nevertheless, I wish she had remained alive long enough to visit Ireland, even if she resented my efforts to make her dreams come true. I wish she could see my kids graduate from college, although she officially did not approve of higher education. I wish that she could be here for even just a little while, making fun of me, telling scary stories and drinking Diet Coke.

More than anything, I wish that I could hear her voice again. But although she had a towering personality, she was shy of the camera. There are no film or video recordings, and only a few snapshots of us together.

On her last visit to New York she wanted to go through the box of family photographs. She wanted to tell me the names and stories, promised that I could write it all down. But we ran out of time. Now she is just another face in that box. The people in the photographs are all gone.

I’m the only living person who remembers this day at Point Defiance:

 

Campus Family Weekend has arrived once again! We rented a minivan and filled it with Sonja (one of the youngsters who lived in our house during the college field work term, who has a freshman sister to visit), and Sara and Allan, friends from Portland by way of London. They, miraculously, have a freshman daughter living in the dorm room across from our senior son.

It is my lifelong assigned job to entertain the driver with stories, which are of course entertaining, albeit sometimes problematic. Car rides, especially long tours down country roads, tend to bring out my more macabre reminiscences. All of these people have known me for years, but I doubt they are ready for the words that will tumble out of my mouth. I’m never talkative at dinner parties, but put me in a rattling metal death pod and gosh, do I have a lot to say.

Road trip – buckle up!

 

The thirtieth anniversary of the car accident happened in August and, for the first time, I didn’t notice.

When I realized that my internal calendar had not prompted the usual torrent of memories, I didn’t feel relieved, better, healed. I just felt a different kind of confused bereavement: experiencing the anniversary was painful, but losing the anniversary is a different kind of grief. I don’t want to forget that day. It is too important, I’m the only witness, and the anniversary was the only time I allowed myself to remember.

If I concentrate, the facts are still there to be recited, and I still have panic attacks. But I rarely allow myself to talk about it, think about it, dream about it. This causes practical problems: during a recent oncology appointment a new doctor wanted to know why the scans showed historic evidence of five broken ribs, and I just stared at her, perplexed.

Though I guess I didn’t know that five ribs were broken. Some ribs, obviously, since my heart was damaged, but an indeterminate number. In 1988 I didn’t care about the broken bones, the smashed joints, the eyelid slashed open. I didn’t even understand that a fractured pelvis was significant until the fact complicated my first pregnancy.

The photographs of the accident site and our broken bodies are grotesque but not detailed, the immediate aftermath was too chaotic to keep track of all the injuries, and mine were trivial compared to the other people hurt that day.

The physical injuries were in fact minor compared to the rest of it. The accident took away our health, but also our youth, our optimism, our futures. We all survived, but thirty years ago that was not much solace.

Looking back I can see that I was one person before August 1, 1988, and an entirely different person after. Without the accident I might never have had the rage to leave home, the practical knowledge required to navigate the larger world, or the money to pay for the journey. The accident took away everything I cared about, but it also catapulted me into the life I have now.

Time might not heal all wounds: some will get worse. But the edges of this trauma are eroding. I can feel the fuzz in my brain, taking over the places where I used to store the metallic smells and sounds from that day.

Thirty years is a long time to carry the memory of broken glass and blood.