Person on the Page

On the day Mother arrived, I went to the post office.  Michigan was in the midst of its winter deep freeze, temperatures below zero day after day. Ice patched the roads.

Until now, Mother had always refused to visit. Two years ago, I moved here to the outskirts of Ann Arbor. I came to pursue the if onlys and what ifs I had coddled in my heart for so long.  Mother could not forgive me for leaving my hometown in Maryland where generations of her family and she and I had always lived.  A good daughter obeys. She is satisfied with things as they are.  She stays home. A good daughter does nothing to upset her mother. 

A long line of people waited ahead of me in the post office that day.  They shifted from leg to leg, unzipped coats, held their packages and envelopes, waited. I stood bundled in the down jacket that I had bought long ago and was so glad I had brought to Michigan with me.  The last time I saw Mother was on a winter day like this, a few months before I moved here. She sat in the rocking chair in the family room of my house in Maryland, as she always did when she visited. She was several inches shorter than she had been when I was a child.  As she sat, her feet hung in the air far above the floor. She could have been mistaken for a child. Her hair was thin, but not gray. People in her family do not have gray hair, she always said.  She was crook-necked from osteoporosis and had the low-slung belly pouch that her own mother had before her. 

Like many daughters, I suppose, I never lived up to my mother’s expectations.  She could never simply accept me.  I always knew this, but I learned it more concretely as she aged. During the past few years, Mother had episodes during which, when she talked to me, she seemed to forget that I was her daughter, seemed to mistake me for one of her friends from church or one of her sisters.  Or perhaps with age she just became brutally honest.  She talked about me as if I were not there.  You know, she said, pointing her arthritic index finger at me, my daughter is an ungrateful bitch.  And after I took such good care of her when she was a child.  This comment was always accompanied by a look of distaste, as if she had just taken a gulp of iodine.  

And I admit it.  I am a terrible daughter.

At the post office, it was finally my turn in line.  I handed the clerk the card that had been placed in my mailbox notifying me of a package ready for pick-up.  She went into the back room to get it.  While waiting, I thought about Mother’s response when I first encouraged her to visit me in Michigan. Here where, right or wrong, I had decided to make a life for myself.  I wanted her to see me happy.

“But how would I get there?” she had argued on the phone.

“Someone will drive you here.  It’s only seven hours.”
 “Only seven hours? That’s too long.  I’m not up to it.”  Mother still had her driver’s license, but she hadn’t driven her car in almost a year because she sometimes became confused on the roads.  Family and friends offered to drive her to Michigan to visit me.  They wanted her to see that I was all right, that I had made a good life for myself, by myself.  I encouraged, but she gave me the same non-excuses: too far, too hard, too strange.  Until now.

The clerk returned from the back room of the post office with the package. On the sides of the box were stuck-on labels with red letters reading “Cremated Remains.” Expressionless, the clerk instructed me to sign for it. The woman in line behind me cleared her throat awkwardly, revealing her discomfort.  Here I was, a daughter who did not attend her mother’s funeral in Maryland, insisting instead on having her body burned and its ashes sent in a cardboard box through the postal system.  The room became quiet.  I was sure everyone’s eyes were on me.  A terrible daughter.  

The package felt warm in my hands.  Warm and surprisingly heavy.  I carried it to the car.   Carefully, gently, over the patches of ice, I drove Mother home.