Mothers in Arms

A week before Al-Quaeda planes slammed into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington and a pasture in Pennsylvania, my daughter Jenny turned fourteen in Taos.

Jenny was a late-summer hollyhock, exploding with life. She was keeping the rhythm with dread locked musicians at the hot springs, formulating passionate opinions on censorship, on multi-national corporations, on world peace. She lined her eyes with kohl, plastered the door to her bedroom with activist bumper stickers and decals of sacred symbols. All night long, she kept the Hanuman Chaleesa playing softly on her stereo, so that the prayer would thread through her unconscious without end. She made me sit at the kitchen table with headphones and listen to anti-war hip-hop songs, to convince me that not all rap was violent.

She told me I was holding her too tightly, that my love was smothering her, that it was time to let her go.

Six weeks later, she was dead. In an ecstatic rush of God-love and brain chemistry, she drove my car over U.S Hill at midnight on the eve of All Soul’s Day under an almost full moon and disappeared.

When the police came to my door the next day to tell me they had found her, I leapt from my chair with relief. “Oh, good,” I said. “Take me to her.” I grabbed my jacket and stepped out onto the portal. The two young officers glanced at each other, then looked down. “Where is she?” I demanded.

“She’s passed away,” they answered.

In that instant, a horizontal tube opened from my belly and sucked me zooming through space. Sparks flew and I saw nothing but blinding light. My face pressed into the cold cement floor, I screamed for my mother. “Where is my mother?”

“I am here,“ she said. “I am holding you.” Slowly I fell back into my body and into my mother’s arms, which had been wrapped around me all along.

Then I stood up and followed the police to the Rivera’s to identify the gently curved body of my blossoming woman child as she lay, eyes half closed, mouth slightly parted as if swooning in some gentle ecstasy. “Go with the angels, my love,” I told her, and I kissed her curly black and bleach-blond and purple dyed curls. I zipped up her hooded blue sweatshirt against the cold of death and I touched her naked feet as a devotee touches the feet of the guru.

Against all natural impulses, I let my baby go. When all I wanted was to steal her back from Yama’s hungry mouth, I made the instantaneous sacrifice. I knew she was not mine to grasp. I knew my grasping would be a disservice to her on the journey was about to take. When everything in me was screaming NO, I whispered, “yes.”

And in that unfolding of my fist, I suddenly found myself holding hands with an expansive circle of women I didn’t know but who knew me. Women all over the world, especially in Africa and the Middle East, whose families were even at that moment being torn from their arms by war, by war being waged by my own people, by the people my own dead daughter had recently begun to understand and to challenge and to taunt. Women whose loved ones were dying one by one, two by ten, daily all around them and inside them. Women who witnessed bloody bodies and body parts hurtling through space which only moments before had belonged to children and to husbands to whom they had just handed bowls of soup they had made from lentils and rice, carrots and onions, served with a round flat bread.

And I was grateful. Unspeakably grateful for my warm sturdy house and my carved sleigh bed, for my clean kitchen and the silver poplars dropping the last of their leaves across the face of my dead daughter’s trampoline in the yard, for my lover on the all-night plane from the South Pacific flying home to hold me in his arms, hold me while I screamed in the night, hold me when I woke to remember she was dead and wept with the first breath of morning.

In the gentle beauty of my loss, I saw that gratitude was my responsibility and I accepted it. I was part of a vast web of grieving mothers, but I was one of the lucky ones. I was safe, well-fed, well-loved. I would use the space this afforded in my heart. I would use it wisely. I would grieve for their babies too. And I do.