Confessions of a Middle-Aged Orphan

By Dawn Leonard Tripp

My mother is dead, but I cannot cry.

I see my sisters’ red eyes. I watch my brothers struggle to breathe through their pain. But I feel numb. My eyes are dry and my breath is mechanical. I wonder what is wrong with me.

I am only one year shy of my 40th birthday.

August 5, 1997, was a whirlwind of laundry and packing for me in my Phoenix-area home. It had been less than three months since I had quit my job as a stressed-out computer programmer to try my hand as a stay-at-home mom. Now we were getting ready to take our toddler, Joe, on a trip to San Diego. It was about 5 p.m. when I sat down to put my feet up and rest a moment before starting dinner.

And then the phone rang.

It had been ringing all day, and I was tired of saying, “We’re not interested. Please take our number off your call list.” But maybe this call was different. Maybe it was my husband. So I schlepped from my comfy chair to the kitchen, picked up the phone and answered flatly, “Hello.” (If it was a telemarketer, I wanted to start off with the right tone.)

But it wasn’t a salesman. And it wasn’t Greg. It was my dad, and before he finished his first sentence, I could tell something was wrong.

I think maybe I can use visualization to get in touch with my grief. For all my self-doubt, I feel it must be there. I loved my mother.

I darken the bedroom—no light but one candle. I turn on the Carlos Nakai CD. The wooden flute sounds like wind over the desert, like water in a canyon. I lie down on my bed, flat on my back, and wait. This is what has worked in the past, to heal past wounds.

I wait. But all I see is the darkness, the flicker of candlelight on my ceiling. The music, normally cathartic, haunts me.

You read about it. You know it. But until it happens to you, you just don’t get how quickly your world can be turned upside down.

My mother was dead.

It was a freak accident at the bottom of their driveway. She was crushed by their own RV as they prepared to go for an afternoon drive. And dad saw it all. In fact, we’re lucky we didn’t lose them both, because he remembers the white rush of the behemoth just inches past his own body.

Considering what he had to see, I’m sure he’s wished many times that it had taken him, too. But it didn’t, and we’ve all muddled through as best we could.

The hardest part for me has been reconciling myself to the fact that she is gone.

Mom always said she’d live to be 100. She would outlive Dad, and she designed their retirement home with extra wide doors because she knew that someday she would be wheelchair bound. What reason did I have to doubt her? She was mom.

Dad, he is so full of bullshit; we’ve always learned to take what he says with a healthy dose of skepticism. But Mom was our rock. She didn’t have a lot to say, so her words carried more weight.

This isn’t working as it has in the past. No progressive vision comes to me, stays with me. Only glimpses, like snapshots. I see myself as a little girl, maybe 3 or 4 years old, sitting in Momma’s lap. She is stroking my hair, and I am nestling into her soft robe. I am a little girl, but she is the mother I knew at the last—67 years old.

It’s been six years since we scattered Mom’s ashes under a gnarly old Ponderosa pine on Arizona’s Mogollon Rim. I don’t think of her as often perhaps, but when I do, it’s just as deeply.

Hugh LeonardIn this treasured photo from 1959, the author’s mother gives her a bath.

Some months after her death, my confused grief morphed into depression, and I’ve tangled with that off and on ever since.

I listen to the interview I recorded two years before she died, with a lot of questions about her and dad, about her parents and grandparents. Names. Dates. Places. It’s not much. If I had known then what I know now, I might have asked different questions. How did she feel about things? What kept her going every day? What were her hopes and fears?

At the time I taped that less-than-one-hour interview, Mom was “only” 65 years old. I wasn’t conscious of my bias at the time, but I figured I had another 30 years or more to get to know her better. I’ll pay for that miscalculation for the rest of my life.

That’s all the further visualization is taking me this time. Just little me sitting on my mother’s old lap.