On June 24 my mother passed. My sisters and I held her hands and read her poems. We listened to all her favorite songs and told her how much we loved her. The last moments of her life were surrounded in the deep unwavering love she taught us.
We grieve the enormous loss. We feel an indescribable sadness. But we also smirk and giggle. We remember the triumphs, tricks and the miscalculations — of which there were many. All met with a belly laugh.
One of the most beautiful parts of losing someone is our human instinct to engrain the memories we have by sharing them.
I’ll start. “Can’t we just try?”
The year is 94 the car a ploymoth minivan. Maroon inside and out. Two bench seats, trunk full of duffels and my mom’s coffee pot stacked on top. It wasn’t that her coffee pot was particularly fancy, a standard issue Mr Coffee, it started white but was a well used tan by now. A simple machine but she wouldn’t risk not having it.
The Plymouth’s tires straddled the white line playing a sort of chicken with a freeway split. We as a family, chanted together, “Cheyenne, Denver’s. Denver, Cheyenne. Cheyenne, Denver. Denver, Cheyenne.”
See there was a massive flood somewhere between the middle of Nebraska and the cabin we had reserved in Rocky Mountain national park. At a gas fill up we learned parts of the interstate closed but didn’t learn enough to know exactly which parts. So we had to decide which path to take, we had to guess which direction would best get us around the flooded roadway.
To this day I don’t remember which direction we went. I don’t even remember much from the vacation itself. But what Ill never forget is this moment and the feeling. Not just the embrace of uncertainty but the celebration of it.
What mattered most was the energy of possibility. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if…” the details and logistics, we’d sort all of this out at 80 MPH flying down the freeway chasing a dream and making memories.
I miss my mom in ways I can’t even begin to describe and I know somewhere in the infinite she belly laughs every time she hears me say “Can’t we just try?”
There’s a childlike giggle that happens to me when whiskey mixes with sand, climbing, shooting stars and dirty jokes. The nip of the fall night held at bay with a puffy coat and a hip flask. Fall is a time for change, a time of growth—but I’m in no rush here.
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#getoutstayout #climbing #wadirum
@cluch making that surface interval look like time well spent. Quick jump to the Red Sea for the holiday to work through our open water SCUBA course.
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#getoutstayout #scubadiving #redsea
