The End.

It’s not unusual for stories to start at the end, you know. It’s fairly common, in fact, for detective novels to begin after a crime has been committed. Yes, I know it’s not the real end of the story, because that comes when the crime is solved, right? Still, the discovery of the crime aka murder does trigger the image of a life that is over. The whole novel then consists of the tracking down of the elements leading to the tragic event. Going backward in time. How did that horrible event come to pass?

I have to say, starting at the end brings to mind a pair of Latin American writers. 

One, the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, created a protagonist who goes back to his roots, one who carries past selves, along inside his present life. Very complex and adorned with Baroque motifs, far beyond my humble capacity to write. Carpentier did a lot of time travel, traveling back both in time and in geography - like up the Orinoco River in The Lost Steps, Los pasos perdidos - in his writing. There’s no way I’d try to compete with him. He was Cuban, Russian, and French, and really well educated. No, there would be no comparison. Plus, I think he was also a musicologist and I couldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole.

The other writer, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, wrote a slender novel about two brothers who killed their sister’s bridegroom. The narrator explains why and how they did it, forcing readers to try to disbelieve the death that was announced in the first sentence. A brilliant little book, and a story nobody should try to copy. It would be so flat by comparison. I am honest enough not to think I’m a García Márquez. I mean, telling you the whole plot on the first page, and then telling why it all happened? Writing that took guts.

This is not going to be easy. 

Maybe it’s more about what we decide to do with that end, if we decide to make it the first step in our story. It’s a point of departure and we have to decide if we’re going to depart toward the past or into the future. Do we want to understand what led up to the end or do we want to use that end to drive the nails in the coffin of what happened previously? Do we need to know why and remember, or do we need to make something new in place of the old and forget?

I am clearly on the fence about this.

I have an ending to start off my story, a perfect little ending (or maybe it’s a big one), and because this is my story, I can go either way, back or forward. Still, I’m stuck in the middle with me. Let’s experiment, I tell myself, let’s just explore. After all, it only takes a second to delete something that turns out to be junk.

Ending Option Number One:

My mother has just died. It feels like Dante has come for me. I cannot tolerate this orphaned feeling, this uprooted, dislocated, maelstrom that asphyxiates me. Ardent, still, gray-dark, the world tells me I don’t know who I am anymore. I was part of her and she lived inside my skin, even when we disagreed or fell silent. Looking at her was like looking in the mirror, but she never told me that and my spectrum kept me from knowing it.

I know that because my mother has gone there is a pendulum swinging back and forth over my fragile neck and that the only escape from my own personal Pit (not Poe’s, he had his own) is to explore. I will fingertip my way out of here, looking for the beautiful, black, painful silences of my mother. Her body is leaving, but she willed her shadowy, jagged or cottony word absences to me. That is why my cells speak mother tongue when my mother chose to be silent. Now, more than ever.

Fearfully brave, and stronger than her face offered you, I say softly, strumming no instrument but the heart. Sweet stone, my mother. Hard as a rock that woman, fortunately. Never judge a book or a woman by the cover. Pure steel.

What made her that way? Do not expect me to answer. I feel unprepared to carve up her quarry of youarenotallowedtoknows. What I do know about her should be enough. She had a stiff Methodist upbringing, which is something you never recover from and is what you need to know about her first. (You know how I know that, right?) 

Methodism keeps people in line more than non-Methodists realize. There’s obviously some secret, fidgety mechanism that gives an eerie power over the human brain. Almost like a cult, but don’t tell anybody I said that. Protestants can get furious just hearing the word. They don’t swear, either. Or drink, so I have heard.

That means murkiness is part of this religion, meaning that anything not conforming to puritanical codes of behavior is the work of the devil. Well, maybe not the devil, but if you do certain bad things, you become evil for life. You are one of the non redeemable. I believe I’ve tried to address this elsewhere, but it truly still is a well-kept secret. Methodism heaps shame, not the wrath of God, on the faithful, and that miserable little worm conquers you just like in somebody’s poem. You probably know what poem I’m referring to.

My mother, thank goodness for her, was a saint. She came from a saintly family. Nobody related to the family ever did anything wrong. If they did something ‘not quite right’, it was forgotten or never noticed, even though it is hard to unnotice something. If some embarrassing event took place, like domestic abuse, you just dealt with it. Like you dealt with dementia and cancer.

My mother bore it all without a word. She didn’t complain, didn’t tell. I gleaned information and names from photographs, from cards sent for every holiday in the book, from a purloined letter or two, from digitized area newspapers. Everything about her screamed old-fashioned, conservative, religious right, not very educated. I definitely caught some of those screams, and felt they were not justified. My mother was a good person. She meant well. She wouldn’t harm a fly. She was an ox.

Look, I don’t really want to pursue this any further. It’s not about the ox comparison. Instead, it’s worse. All the maternal silences from my past and hers are threatening my ability t0 hear anything else in this ending that is her death. My hearing is far too good not to be derailed by the pounding of nothing, of what she knew and crushed deep into the back of her mind. 

Wallowing in self-pity is also unhealthy. It could drive a person mad. It would probably be wise to return to the beginning of this story, my story, which is about the end of my mother’s life. It’s my responsibility to be here, present, in this airless, scorchingly quiet room, speaking with people who come to express their condolences because my mother has died. That’s what they think. My fear is that they are wrong.

The loud silence issuing from my mother drowns out the well-intended words. She can’t be jealous of them, no, she wasn’t a jealous person. Nobody could ever take her place anyway. She must have something on her mind.

Maybe if I focus on the flowers here, I will stop being an orphan. My mother loved flowers, so while she’s not currently speaking to me, I think it’s safe to assume she’s pleased with this place. Her not speaking is likely due to something else.

Only at some point I know I have to move on. This room must be made ready for another gathering like this one, set up by the person who does those things, for my mother and me. Probably the flowers will wilt soon, anyway. That is hard to live with: the ruined flowers from a funeral home. Doubly damaged. I know because I unearthed a few in an old, old box, inside an older box, on top of an album, inside the biggest box, also quite old.

It looks like we’ve already shifted gears to

Ending Option Number Two

This is the option where the ending becomes a beginning. That’s also fairly common in stories. Close the door to memory, leave everything on the threshold, get on with living. Look forward, because behind you all is gone.

How do I want things to be, now that my mother has left me? (Well, she’s not really gone because like I said, she’s still tracking me in her own way.) As I ask that question, I get the image of the flowers in the room and suddenly it’s imperative that I surround myself with living, pretty, scented things after leaving here. Time to plant a garden, one with future things in it. I want things that are boringly pretty and nice.

Here I am at the greenhouse three miles out Route 1, on the edge of town. Nothing flamboyant, and it carries the essentials. 

Here I am with the selection I made. A partial list includes: peonies, iris, hens and chicks, daffodils - you get the idea. Traditional garden residents. Perennials, not like some people, who are not. Perennial, I mean.

Here I am at home, ready to begin these new lives. Hopefully that includes mine, although this itch beneath the skin is definitely not new. I’ve heard and felt it before.

The peonies are a flushed pink and white with pink streaks, both exactly like the ones at my mother’s house, which is also where I grew up. They will be covered with ants when they bud. That doesn’t matter. I need two more bushes, to match the number back home, though. However, peonies are essential to my plan, my need at the moment.

The iris are white, yellow, blue, and purple, just like back home. They smell like a mixture of honey, jasmine, and lemon. So sweet, so fragile. Do not cut them for the house. They are more at home outside. Iris should be planted, like back home, next to a low, sloping stone wall. The low wall should form one side of a triangular rock garden. That’s also where the hens and chicks need to go, and you can imagine the reason for that.

I confess to having bought a ton of iris, and a whole lots of hens and chicks. You see, I’ve got this crazy idea that succulents never die, and what’s more, they share some of their eternity with the persons who care for them. Semprevivas, they call them in one language, the ‘ever living’. A comforting thought. I wonder if they’re also able to bring people back from the dead?

The daffodils kind of get scattered, mostly on both sides of the house like they were back home. They’re in among where the early lilies-of-the-valley were a couple of weeks ago, or the snowdrops and crocuses a couple of weeks before that. I like where they’re growing, right next to the bleeding hearts and the columbines. (The last four varieties of flowers weren’t planted by me; they came with this house, which isn’t the one where I grew up.) There are so many types of daffodils, single and double, yellow and peach, and I wonder if narcissus are daffodils or vice versa? 

Now that I have my own garden, it is like wearing the proverbial coat of many colors, one that’s my size, not my mother’s. Yes, I know I said previously that she sits inside my skin, but I still get messed up about that. I mean, she was 2.75 inches taller than me. We both shrunk, so with her hunched back she might have gotten inside my size. 

That takes me back to her in the casket. She was lying flat and still, but not silent (to me). Her back had gotten so curved that she couldn’t sleep in a bed and slept sitting up toward the end. Did they have to do something unspeakable to her so she would look straight and comfortable? I would have heard her if they had hurt her like that, right? Or is my spectrum coloring my hearing?

People talk about plots for their gardens. Plots don’t have any set size, unless you’re working in a community garden. I counted and have decided I have four plots, with another three or four strips of flowers along a split rail fence or the garage. The trouble is, now I recall that plot is used for cemetery ‘real estate’ as well. And we used to plant flowers in urns on Memorial Day.

Thank you, Mom. You made going to fill the urns a worthwhile adventure. I liked those jaunts down to the Southern Tier where your generosity led you to enliven graves that you wouldn’t see until the next year. You wanted your people to be happy. You needed to fulfill your duty. Your beliefs. You wanted to talk to those people. I understood. You listened with respect, too. You told me who the names were. 

You marked me for life. Tied me to you. Ox of a woman, full of tears but never able to cry, and never ever tempted to sob your sadness aloud.

Now I am here, in the garden my mother built, or planted, using my arms and hands. A garden I bought, but also grafted onto what was here when I moved in. Things like made up my mind for me when deciding if I would buy this house that is attached. If I didn’t mention them before, they were the spiraea, the forsythia, the hydrangeas, the wild roses. They didn’t come from the house back home, but they could have.  

My garden only speaks to me through one person. It speaks only one language, and it is not Spanish.

My end, which was the beginning of this story, has tangled me up in a past I am not free to forget. I have tried hard to move forward from the unspoken but well known, only my feet are dragging. Take a step into the future, take two or three into the past. 

There are no flowers without my mother, the generous, the woman of the urns, the treasurer of secrets. She had me as her repository, like some strong wooden box she had carved all by herself. 

She didn’t know at the time that she was slipping inside my skin, my mother a kind reminder that silence is silvery and ought to be respected. It’s not clear who was grafted onto whom, but there are important things still growing there.

In our garden.