Fragments

Four months after my mom's death

I’m still in shock that I’m here.

Pokegama Lake, in my gone mother’s manufactured home where she lived for the last ten years of her life.

I realized this morning that I’ve actually lived in three small towns in the past four years—me, who once firmly believed cities are the only place to be.

I think I’m starting to feel that way, again—but I’m adrift in the world, having decided to leave behind, at least for the time being, our house in Colorado.

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I found a note in a stack of my mom’s papers yesterday:

@ginger

Who is she?

Why does she want to come here?

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We were sort of arguing when she died.

“Sort of” because we’d just had a good visit, only three days before her heart attack. I was in Minnesota (well, a couple of hours away, in Wisconsin) for another family member’s funeral. She was upset that I was only “squeezing her in” for one day of the three-day weekend. But she seemed to get over it; she was in a good mood when I came to see her that Sunday. I took her to lunch. We played pull tabs. I got impatient when she just wanted to keep playing and playing, until we’d spent all our cash and lost any dollars we won back, but I gave no indication. As I always did, I let her keep ordering more because it made her happy. Sometimes, she’d pull the tab back a little bit and see a red line, meaning “winner”—and she’d let me pull that one the rest of the way.

I flew back to Colorado the next morning. Two days later, I was at a terminal in DIA waiting for a last-minute flight, praying to no one in particular that she’d pull through. That the three stents that the University of Minnesota heart doctors placed in her arteries would keep her alive.

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“Sort of”, also, because even though we’d had a few strained conversations in the time leading up to her death, we’d also agreed to try therapy. They weren’t the kind of arguments where you hit a dead end, and resolve to stop talking. They were the kind of arguments that could, maybe, should everyone keep living, lead to things getting better.

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This year’s been swallowed by her death. What was I even doing before June 11th?

Freelancing and trying to find more work. Trying to write. Waiting until things “calmed down”. Things have not remotely calmed down, and instead, we’ve been catapulted into new levels of stress.

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I don’t know if we can stay here. The sink’s backed up, the toilet is (slowly, very slowly) sinking into the unlevel subfloor, and her washer is broken (”no spin”, according to the invoice in which a plumber charged her $100 to tell her that).

Yesterday, I sprayed myself with cooking oil instead of bug spray.

This feels like a warning sign of something. What, I don’t know.

It was also objectively funny.

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I’m here because, overwhelmed with grief and the urge to be closer to my family, I got a job in Minnesota. And since we have to pay the lot rent on this place until we can sell it, anyway, it’s essentially “free”, in the sense of no additional cost.

I’m here, now, to save money.

I’m here, too, to sort through her things, which I’ve been doing all week. Her antiques, her clothes, her crafts, her junk mail. Yesterday, I scrubbed the bathroom top to bottom, and it took me right back to 2020—when I did the same thing at my dad’s house, after he passed.

I’m here because I couldn’t stand still anymore.

I still don’t know if it’s a mistake.