Dancing With My Mother

She died at 39. Hit by a car at night while walking home from visiting with her mother. It was winter in Australia and she was wearing a black pea coat and dark pants. It was at the crest of a hill and the driver didn’t see her until it was too late.

The order of events is lost to me. She was in a coma at the hospital for a day, or two. She had no ID on her so the family wasn’t called until she had already died. My uncle, the oldest son of that family of seven siblings, went to the morgue to identify the body.

Here in the States, where I’d come to live with my father, it was the night of a block party when the phone call came. I’d happened to go back to the house to use the bathroom. When I walked in the phone was ringing. It was my paternal grandfather calling from Australia. He asked me to go and fetch my father, which I did.

“Go walk Caroline home” was the first thing he said to me after hanging up the phone. I’d had a friend at the party with me. I did as I was told though I knew something was terribly wrong.  

“Sit down, Tonia.”

I chose to stand. I knew it was bad as my sister was sitting in an armchair in the living room with two rivers of black mascara running down her cheeks.

“I have some terrible news. There’s been an accident in Australia. Your mother has died.”

My first instinct was to laugh. And so I walked away as that seemed the most inappropriate reaction to have at that very moment. I went into the bathroom and just sat, and stared at the wall. I had no idea how to react. There was no instinctive surge of grief. I hadn’t seen my mother in over two years, and life with her had been horrific during the last seven years I had been with her.

Finally, a knock on the door beckoned me out. A hug from my stepmother, and then my father, and then goodnights all around as it was late and I was just 14.

I’m sure I spoke with family on the phone in the days that followed. There was a brief discussion about my sister and I going to Australia for the funeral but there was not enough money to afford such an expensive undertaking. All I remember is walking around in a fog. A few weeks after she was buried, two letters arrived. Each was from one of my mother’s closest friends. Sue wrote about the funeral, about the blue sky with puffy white clouds, and how cold it had been, and how the man who hit my mother had attended, and that he was a family man who was devastated by the accident. Yvonne, who did not go to the funeral, wrote more personal notes to both my sister and me, trying to steady us both.

And that was all. My mother was dead, and I had yet to cry.

Thus began a dance that has carried her with me through the years. As I moved forward in time, I pulled her back into her life, back into whatever moment in time at which I’d arrived, trying to see what it felt like to be there, what it may have been like for her.

At 19 she was married. At 25 she was the mother of two infant children, and was a world traveler, a nurse, and an actress. At 28 her marriage fell apart. She was back in Australia, living in a flat in Bondi Beach with her two daughters and a roommate. She attended acting classes, and worked as a nurse, and was having the time of her life. At 30 she was officially divorced and had met another man, and was living with him, descending slowly into a world of drugs and violence. At 33 she had a hysterectomy, and the loss of her self became complete. At 37 she lost both her children, first me and then my sister, sent to live with our father, but she kept her man. At 39 she was dead.

All through those years as I charted her course along with mine, I was able to keep her with me, to learn what it felt like to be standing at a particular place in life and to try to understand the choices that she made.

All through those years, I found her in funny ways. At first it was in fantasy, in thinking that perhaps she was not yet dead, that it had been a mistake and that she would some day just show up. Or seeing someone on the street from behind who could be mistaken for her and wanting to chase them down so that I could know.

Then it was in dreams, the most profound one being the night that the adult me met both my mother and the child I had once been in the same place and we visited. That was all. We just visited, and I awoke with a heart that was breaking open in a new way.

I did visit Australia, and her grave, when I was 22 and then again when I was 32. Both times I hungrily sought out stories of my mother, wanting everyone who had known her to give me their piece of her. And each one did in the ways that they could.

In 1997, when Princess Diana died, I watched her funeral on TV. Seeing those two children walking behind their mother’s casket finally allowed me to mourn, deeply and profoundly, the loss of my own mother.

Over the years, the dance has become less frantic, I could let her go for greater lengths of time. She was with me when I called, always, and yet my need for that lessened as I moved further into the adulthood of my own life.

And now I stand on the brink of 40. I must say goodbye to her in a new way as there are no more landmarks from her life that I can apply to my own. Our dance has changed for now I am the one who must take the lead.