"River in Egypt" by Megan Saunders

Silhouette of a small boat on a river at sunset. — Photo Credit: Gonzalo Pedroviejo Gomez, obtained and licensed through Unsplash.

River in Egypt

There is a turquoise-colored china hutch in the corner of my office that holds some of my favorite trinkets and mementos. Two of these items — glass quartz turtles — live side-by-side on the top glass shelf, staring into the opposite corner of the room with small eyes that look like they were dotted on with a black marker. They probably were.

The bigger turtle is about six inches in length and heavier than it looks. My father brought it home for me when I was 9 years old, a souvenir from a store that sold nothing but polished rocks and random things made from polished rocks. It felt like a grown-up present, something to be displayed. As a child, this meant it lived on a wallpapered shelf next to my teddy bear lamp.

A few months later, my dad went back to that rock shop (the man had a problem) and brought home an identical but smaller quartz turtle. “Now the daddy turtle has a baby turtle,” he said. It was so unlike him, this vulnerability and softness, that even at my young age I understood we were having “a moment.” I put that turtle next to its larger counterpart near the lamp, and today it enjoys an upgraded living situation in the turquoise hutch alongside its daddy, slightly behind but always nearby.

The turtles sit in front of a small toy guitar with a picture of a cartoon cowboy instead of strings. When you wind the little handle on its side, it toots out “Red River Valley.” It was my grandmother’s, my dad’s mom. The cartoon cowboy grins expectantly at the turtles, but they stare ahead, too heavy to dance even if they wanted to.

The middle shelf of that hutch holds college paraphernalia and a framed black and white picture of three cows wearing dresses. On the bottom left shelf there is a small walnut box. It used to be my grandfather’s, sitting on his dresser and holding the tarnished rings only old men wear, but it didn’t make the trip when he was moved to the retirement home, so I adopted it. The hinges are loose and there is a deep crack in the lid, forcing me to hold the box together when I open it, which I don’t do very often.

Inside the walnut box are 31 years of pain. Not all the objects inside are painful, but even the happy memories evoke such a wistfulness that they bleed into the edges of my heartache like water seeping into a photo. There are letters, some written on silly birthday cards and others written from county jail, each in my mother’s loopy, elegant cursive — the same cursive that is now tattooed onto my wrist.

There is an embroidered handkerchief, a few photos, and a small wooden cross. There is also a cell phone. I ended up with the phone during a very sad game of emotional hot potato — my dad passing it off to my brother to find a password of some sort, and my brother lending it to me to take a final pass through my mother’s personal life. I never gave it back, and no one ever asked. I guess there isn’t much use for a dead woman’s cell phone.

I’m sure the battery on that phone is dead, but if I charged it for just a few minutes, I could pull up her last message from December 30, 2018. That afternoon, she sent my father an alcohol-fueled final statement: “I know that I am gone.”

Chances are, her phone made an untimely autocorrect, changing “done” to “gone,” but both led to the same result. My mom was alone in her bed — the one she’d shared with my father for 30 years — when she committed suicide. It was the afternoon, an otherwise uneventful weekday, and outside, the world continued its business, uninterrupted. The western Kansas wind forced itself into every crevice, whistling before the pull of the trigger, and it likely never paused in the moments after. The bare branches of cottonwood trees still swayed against a backdrop of winter wheat fields, lying dormant until the spring. The Christmas tree lights still blinked as the room at the end of the hall was changed forever.

Inside the walnut box are 31 years of pain. Not all the objects inside are painful, but even the happy memories evoke such a wistfulness that they bleed into the edges of my heartache like water seeping into a photo.

What experts would call “grief” or “trauma,” I prefer a more flat-billed word like “decimated,” or perhaps the more poignant “fucked.” We’re not supposed to say, “committed suicide” anymore; I believe the correct phrase is “died by suicide.” So much effort goes into protecting the motives or context of those final moments of action. I understand that we have the right to throw a sweater over our pain when it threatens to freeze our bones, but you can call it “caught a bus” or “strapped on a jet pack,” I don’t care — she is dead. She chose to be dead, and fragility gets me nowhere.

Death comes with many clichés from well-meaning people, or perhaps via the self-help books you buy with good intentions but place at the bottom of your “to be read” pile. The most common refrain of the grief-adjacent are the stages of grief — anger, depression, denial, anger, and bargaining — in whatever order is currently trending in psychological circles. Most of them make sense and require little explanation at the various points in a grief journey.

The exception, if you ask me, is denial. Even if you don’t ask me, you must admit that the idea of a generally sane, fully capable adult grappling with the undeniable existence of death is a little … silly. Juvenile, even. Unhappy about it? Sure. Royally pissed? Absolutely. But in denial? That it never happened or was somehow a slight of hand, the afflicted hiding behind a corner waiting to pop out?

I’m no scientist, but if someone dies, it is commonly understood that they are dead. No college degree is necessary to process that information. Some may believe in ghosts, I suppose, and with that belief there may be some semblance of a question as to whether that person will return. And zombies, if that’s a core tenant of your belief system. But would you really want your loved one returning as a zombie? Seems messy.

Ghosts and zombies notwithstanding, dead is dead. It’s forever. It’s permanent. I’m not talking about an afterlife situation. As a card-carrying Person of Faith (I do have a card — for some reason my church’s business card has been in the bottom of my purse for eons), I believe in heaven, and that good souls go there when they die to await the arrival of their departed friends and family.

But here on Earth, that person is still dead. I don’t know what my mom is doing in heaven at this precise moment, but here on the planet which I currently reside, she is doing nothing. She is buried in the ground wearing the clothes I helped my dad select for her funeral and the necklace I gave her the day before she died, her hands now clasped and unmoving. At least, I assume. I never looked in the casket, couldn’t bring myself to do so. I initially considered it, to say goodbye, but my dad mentioned to the nice funeral home lady that “she didn’t look like herself, which makes sense, all things considering,” meaning (to me) it was a wonder she looked like herself at all. That sealed the deal for me. No, thank you. So she could be wearing a bathing suit and sunglasses for all I know, hands locked in a thumbs-up gesture, but that seems unlikely.

I don’t mean to be off-putting in my directness, but transparency is the key to understanding. What is there to deny? Anger, depression, eventual acceptance, even bargaining — those stages I understand as rational reactions to the death of a loved one. Why wouldn’t you be pissed off, sad, struggling to find meaning, perhaps all at the same time? But in my mind, denial implies a lack of belief or, at best, a suspicion of disbelief, and that I just cannot abide.

Or I couldn’t, at least until December 30, 2018. In the first days following my mom’s death, the initial shock could be interpreted as denial. Her death was so sudden, a nanosecond between living and not. In one instant, one loud pop, the inside of her mouth still wet and pink, expecting to continue being so, enveloping the short barrel of a gun held by a trembling hand with the same muscles as it would a popsicle. The rest of the body doesn’t know what’s coming. It’s a terrible, unnatural play being directed by a foggy, broken brain. That kind of shock can be easily understood.

But in my mind, denial implies a lack of belief or, at best, a suspicion of disbelief, and that I just cannot abide.

“It couldn’t have happened,” I would think. “I just talked to her yesterday afternoon.” Your mind frantically fumbles to make sense of the nonsensical. I recognized my quickly waning ability to say things like “my mom just told me,” or “Mom says to,” so I eagerly devoured every opportunity to relay a benign conversation I’d recently had with my mother.

“Oh, the mall’s New Year’s Day sale?” I’d say to a friend who dragged me out to lunch as a distraction. “My mom was just telling me the other day about a beautiful purse she found at last year’s sale.” My friend looked at her French fries in uncomfortable silence. “My mom just told me, my mom just told me,” I rolled the words around in my mind like a Life Saver.

But as those recent conversations petered out, I began the painful transition to “my mom used to tell me,” or “my mom would always.” Words like “used to” and “would always” hit me like a punch in the gut. There was a time so recently when those phrases would be in the present tense. She does and she says and she is going to. What in the hell happened?

She committed suicide, or, fine, died by suicide, that’s what happened, and she isn’t coming back. As those initial days passed and the numbness gave way to sharp, unrelenting pain, I slowly experienced my first pangs of denial. It wasn’t conscious, but more of an unavoidable, urgent plea from the basement of my brain. “If I can just be sad enough,” the basement whispered, “I will pass the test and she will come back.” Except, it wasn’t quite that linear. That sentence implies a cognizant, intentionally formed thought, laid out plainly and clearly with a beginning, middle, and end. In reality, it was a feeling. If I stub my toe, there is usually a nanosecond before the sting where I have time to think, “this is really going to hurt.” The thought of impending pain isn’t conscious, it just is. That’s how my denial began — it bloomed in a place I didn’t know to guard. By the time it was a current traveling through my body, it was too late to reign in.

If I could just get ahead of the reality, prove to the universe or God or whoever would listen that I deserved to have my mom here, it could all be undone, surely. This thought, this denial, zipped through me without my consent, asserting itself as a fact instead of an option: This is reversible.

Even then, rationally, I knew this was not the case. I had been in her apartment, felt the heaviness of her absence and buried myself in the smell of her clothes in the closet. Maybe I hadn’t seen the body in the casket, but I had certainly seen the casket, watched my brother and his fellow pallbearers carry it past me, and I had absolutely felt the finality of that loss.

And yet.

When I was younger and my mom would enter one of many rehab programs for her alcoholism, I felt a condensed version of this absence. She was physically gone, far from home for extended periods of time, but if she would just try hard enough, if she would want sobriety badly enough, she could come home and rejoin the family, shiny, new, and sober. All she had to do was choose our family instead of her pain. It should be such an easy choice; give up the bad and embrace the good.

If that were the case, if it were an easy choice, sobriety wouldn’t have eluded my mother for most of her life. If the “shoulds” ran the world, an uncle wouldn’t have taken advantage of opportunities to be alone with my mother, then just a small girl. When she confided in her own mother, what is good and right should have won. The good should have been listened to and cared for, not chastised for making trouble and retraumatized over and over again, only stopping when my mother and her family moved away.

In a “should” world, the little girl, in all her goodness, would have been embraced and safe. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” some philosopher says, and boy, did evil triumph. Good was just a child, and the big people around her did nothing. It never stood a chance.

If it was possible just to try or choose your way out of life’s bad muck, there would be a lot more muddy boots left behind as their owners fled onto solid ground. She did choose, she chose us time and time again, but her boots wouldn’t come loose from that damn muck, no matter how she tried or pulled.

I watched my parents’ marriage, which looked so joyous and hopeful in the decades-old photos, disintegrate, the hope draining from my dad’s face, one relapse at a time. Just like I can’t love her out of the grave, she couldn’t love herself out of her heartbreak. If my love and brokenness could redeem her, that casket would have been sold to someone else, and those turtles wouldn’t share a hutch with a box of sad memories.

If I could bring my mom back, I would, no matter how selfish it is. My faith leads me to believe she is living it up in heaven, no trace of the heartache that constantly nipped at her heels here on Earth. Maybe she doesn’t even have a recollection of it happening — I like to imagine her as the carefree young girl she never had the chance to be, free from the clutches of greedy men and other adults who couldn’t be bothered. Yet, she remembers me. She doesn’t mourn me, because to her, my absence is just momentary. I stepped out for the metaphorical gallon of milk, and I’ll be popping back in the pearl-encrusted front door of heaven at any time. She’ll hug me like no time has passed at all, this woman who is both my mother and wide-eyed child and say, “Oh good, you’re back. Did you see on Facebook that your cousin is getting married?”

Good was just a child, and the big people around her did nothing. It never stood a chance.

Yes, I believe I will see her again one day, but it isn’t soon enough. I would still bring her back, kicking and screaming. I would conjure her in whatever form she would take, soaking in that denial like a warm lavender bath, making myself drowsy with the possibility of her presence and the impossible mental gymnastics in my head. I would love and hurt and despair and grapple and plead until my face was submerged underwater. I would hold my breath like an impertinent child and demand her appearance, clenching my body tightly like one giant fist.

Soon after she died, I had a dream that I was sitting outside of a restaurant — the old-timey pseudo-fancy kind with a vinyl overhang — with my nose in my phone, waiting for my husband and daughters to arrive. Suddenly, my mom strolls up, grinning silently as she waits for me to catch her eye. Instead, I first catch her scent and look up in disbelief, standing abruptly. “How are you here?” I ask, which seems like a fair question. “Wait, let me get the girls, they’ll be so excited to see you!” My eyes darted down the sidewalk frantically to find my daughters. She laughs like that is exactly what she expected me to say.

“Boy, do I have a story for you,” she says. “It will all make sense in a moment.”

I still don’t understand denial, but I am forced to reckon with its existence. Homemade is always better than store bought, but sometimes you don’t have a choice — if there is no hope on your own horizon, false hope will do in a pinch. There is room in this hutch for both.