Subject: A Horse with No Name, Part 1
CW: Death, Grief
I’m in Tecopa, CA, just southeast of Death Valley proper. According to the census, at least a hundred people live here, but it’s hard to believe there are more than thirty. Apart from the vastness and the isolation and the beauty, the main feature of the place is its natural hot springs. Tita and I go to the bathhouse twice a day. We’re staying at a friend’s mom’s house out here, otherwise we’d never know this town existed. Each morning we get up, have coffee and fresh fruit on the screened porch of Vicki’s house, then drive the 5 minutes to the bathhouse for our morning soak. In March, it’s not too hot. We can be leisurely about our timing, taking the morning slowly. The highs are only in the low 80s. We return to soak every evening after sunset.
Somehow, every person I’ve talked to at the bathhouse (or, to be more accurate, every person who has talked to me—I haven’t been trying to talk to anyone) is there, in some roundabout way, due to a mother dying. I, too, am there because my mom is dead. The sample size is admittedly small. Only two people actually talk to me in all my visits. The majority of the people at the bathhouse are older Korean women, and the language barrier is one of the best aspects.
Easter and her husband have driven here from Portland, where they live just 20 blocks away from me. Her husband’s parents both just died within a month of one another, and now they’re on a road trip to Arizona. Easter’s parents died years ago. She looks at me and pauses.
“You probably don’t need anyone to tell you this, but it takes a very long time for things to go back to normal after you lose your mom.” She pauses again, then says, “Actually, I’m not sure they ever go back to normal. You just get used to it.”
Easter also had a complicated relationship with her mom. She was also surprised by the depth of her grief, and the way it knocked her completely sideways. The conversation turns back to Death Valley. She and her husband have been many times before. They have a pop-up camper, and they can go anywhere. We tell her where we’re planning to go while we’re there, and she tells us very earnestly that Zabriskie Point is for wankers. Later on, when we’re at the top of Dante’s point, we will conclude that Easter was right: Zabriskie Point is indeed for wankers.
I’m in Death Valley and my mom is dead. My mom is dead, and Death Valley is very much alive. I haven’t spent a lot of time in deserts, but I’ve watched a lot of nature specials, so I know, in a distant, bookish way that life is all around us, even if it looks sparse and uninhabitable.
Actually, the last time (and only other time) I was in Death Valley, I was with my mom. I was 9 or 10, and we were on a road trip with her husband at the time, who may or may not have been named Ron. It sounds bad, not remembering my step-dad’s name, but he was never really my step-dad. He was just a guy that my mom was with for a while, until she wasn’t. There was a guy named Ron, and if this wasn’t him, then Ron was the guy that came after. My whole memory of that time period is remarkably shoddy. I don’t even remember the destination of the road trip—Death Valley was not it. I think we may have been going to Sea World. Somehow, the only part of the trip I remember, though, is Death Valley. That, and the guy that might have been Ron had a dog named Panda.
I got overheated in the car and we stopped and bought a bag of ice. I remember sucking on ice cube after ice cube, rubbing them all over my face and arms and legs. At one point, I had to get out and pee on the side of the road. In the spot near where I was crouched, I saw the fuzziest looking cactus. Being young and curious and ready to adopt anything furry, I decided to lightly pet the cactus, and wound up with hair-fine spines in my hand for the rest of the drive. I finally got them out by letting Elmer’s glue dry on my skin, then peeling it off. I can’t recall, but that must have been my mom’s idea.
She was quite smart. I think that might surprise people who only knew her in a cursory way, or just knew of her. It surprises people because she made a lot of very, very dumb choices throughout her life. But being smart and being good at living in this world are not remotely the same thing.
I’ve heard a lot of people describe the desert as empty, dead, and barren. I suppose in the rain-soaked Pacific Northwest, a yellow plant is a dead plant, since there’s not really any excuse for being dry. Here, yellow is the color of survival, of holding on. I’ve seen about as many different animals here, if not more, than I do in my daily life in Portland. Jackrabbits, desert mice, a ground squirrel, quail, a coyote, bats, ravens, vultures, bees, two types of lizards, a goose. Perhaps what people mean by barren is that it’s not a good habitat for humans, but even that’s not quite true. This whole area has been tribal land for centuries. The Paiute and Timbisha Shoshone tribes lived, and thrived, in the Death Valley region even before it was possible to haul in water from other, more precipitant places.
I’m writing about it like I’m an expert in desert living, which I most certainly am not. My only other desert experience was when my friend Kayta and I were itinerant WWOOFers, and homesteaded a chicken farm in southern Arizona for a little over a month. I am a desert novice, but the landscape has already wooed me.
Although the desert does not seem dead to me, it feels like a suitable place for grief. Everything is so vast. The sky stretches on and on as does the flat land beneath, and all around, shrouded in the blue of distance, mountains. There’s space enough for the biggest feeling you can conceive of, and then some. It is okay to be nearly empty here, dried out and waiting. The rains will come eventually, the desert says. Sometimes, flowers go years without blooming, it tells me.
Metaphors make more sense that literal reality, which does not make any sense at all.
I have struggled with what to say, to write, about my mother’s death, because everything I write is fragmented and full of contradictions. I am forced to acknowledge perhaps that is what death does, it cleaves. Cleave is a contronym—to cleave can mean either to split or to adhere. I am left with fragments that only make sense together, all at odds with one another.
1a. Nothing has changed.
My life is almost entirely the same. One day a week, instead of driving up to Vancouver to have lunch and go to the grocery store, I stay home and work, the same as I do every other day. My phone buzzes slightly less often. My mom’s cats are temporarily living in my office. They lived temporarily at our house once before, when she was alive, so even this isn’t totally unprecedented.
1b. Nothing will ever be the same again.
I have lived through things that have changed my life, most recently, the pandemic, and through it all, I feel more or less myself. This thing, this death, it feels like a kind of alchemy. I am translated by this experience. I keep forgetting words. I keep forgetting what I’m doing. Nothing seems to make sense anymore. I can barely stand to be around other people, in part because
2a. WHY AREN’T WE TALKING ABOUT MY MOTHER’S DEATH?
Whenever I am with anyone, doing anything, there is a place in the back of my mind that is perpetually screaming, and it would like to know how we can even be talking about ____, hasn’t anyone noticed that my mom is dead? I do not want to be distracted or entertained. I do not want to let life rush in and fill the hole that death has left. It seems absurd and impossible to do anything, to say anything else.
2b. I don’t want to talk about it.
I do not want to talk about my mother’s death. I do not want to have anyone, wide-eyed with sympathy and active-listening-face ask me “how are you holding up?” with that tone. How do you think I am holding up? I am not doing fine. I am not well. The only things that feel right, the only things that help, are writing and nature. Nature is vast and indifferent. Writing is something else. I am alone but not-alone. There is room for every contradiction. Time passes and I can empty myself out and enter a sort of equilibrium which is currently the space I most like to be in.
3a. Death is a tragedy.
A week before she died, my mom had a birthday party for her cat, Seymour. She invited all the neighbor kids (and their parents) and served cupcakes and ice cream and had cat-themed party favors. She was doing better than she had been in a decade, maybe more. She texted me hopefully, just a few days before she died, that she was finally starting to make friends, and she was looking forward to summer.
Her death was completely unexpected. I didn’t answer her very last phone call to me, which was at 7pm, because I was irritated with her. She was found unconscious in her apartment at 2:30am that same night. Her neighbor, and after, the paramedics, performed CPR on her for over 20 minutes and managed to “bring her back.” I don’t know why. I had to give consent to take her off life support. Tita and I got to watch her die for 9 hours of horrible seizures in a crowded E.R.
I have aphantasia, which means that I can’t visualize images in my head. Every once in a while, rarely, I will be able to visualize something, although I don’t have control over it. I can’t pick what I visualize, or when. I keep seeing my mom’s dying face, contorted with seizures, over and over again. It’s the only visual my brain has made in the past month and it shows it to my several times a day most days. I did not know I was afraid of death before.
3b. Death is a farce.
The day before my mom died, she accidentally butt-dialed me, and left me a two minute long message of her breathing heavily and cursing at her cat. I’m not sure why, but when I listened to it, my first thought was, “Imagine how stupid it would be if this was the last message I had from my mom.” I didn’t have any reason to expect it would be, it just seemed like it was such a horrible memento that it was funny in a morbid, not-funny way. On Saturday, my mom was dead and that was the last message I had left from her.
The funeral director at the first funeral home I called was named Igor. That felt too on the nose. The second funeral home, the one I decided to pick, sent me a file (with all my paperwork to fill out) named “How Do You Want to Say Goodbye.pdf”. There’s actually nothing I can say about this document that comes near to the experience of just reading the damn thing:
- Obtain one lock of hair of my loved one prior to cremation or burial.
- Obtain one thumbprint of my loved one prior to cremation or burial.
- Obtain complete fingerprints or several locks of hair.
- Obtain DNA Specimens or Pacemaker/Medical Device for Return.
- Obtain gold crowns by pathologist assistant.
- Keep it simple and email me one digital photo of my loved one as they are.
- Identification viewing for 30 minutes.
- Our family would like to bathe, dress and say goodbye to our loved one.
- View my loved one prior to cremation and accompany them to witness their placement into the crematory (witness cremation).
- Dress my loved one in the clothing we have gathered for him/her.
- Rush Cremation. Place my loved one in front of the scheduling line and complete the cremation within 3 days after receiving the Cremation Permit.
- Autopsy Repair when any type of viewing or family handling of your loved is involved, we must take the steps to repair the autopsy surgical procedure. This fee is in addition and added to the account charges automatically when needed.
- Private or Community gathering to say goodbye and view for up to 2 hours with embalming, dressing, viewing in a complimentary rental paulownia wood and bamboo open-top casket. (Upgrade to rental cherry casket for $2995 all inclusive).
For the record, a lock of hair costs $95, and removing your loved one’s gold crows will put you out at least $300.
Last week a had a dream—an actual dream, not the figurative kind. I was writing an experimental fanfiction/personal essay hybrid for the New York Times, and it was titled “Harry Potter and the Inappropriate Commodification of my Mother’s Death.” I only remember the first line of it: “The only constant in Harry’s life was death.”