The night my mother dies, Macie is standing in the backyard, lighting a candle to commemorate my mother’s passing. Macie went to a meditation a few days ago for Vesak, a time when it is believed that the souls of Christ and Buddha come to Earth. As she lights the candles, my sister-in-law thinks about how, for my mother, this is an auspicious time to pass to the other realm, and as she says a short prayer, one of the lanterns in the three-hundred-year-old tree, the centerpiece of my brother’s yard, begins to flicker. The lantern flickers for several moments as Macie stands there, feeling my mother’s presence. Macie shares this with me and I lie in bed, racked with sadness, and I wish for my own experience of a flickering light. Suddenly my beside lamp begins to flicker. It flickers over and over for several moments—is the lamp suddenly broken?—then it stops. As I lie there, leaving the lamp on in case it flickers again, Tim asleep beside me, I’m flooded with the feeling of my mother, her smell, the security I felt when she was caring for me when I was little. The next morning when I open my computer to share with Macie the story of my own flickering light experience, I see an email sent after I had fallen asleep. In it Macie tells me that after Jay got back from the coroner, while he was getting ready for bed, the bathroom light began flickering, something it’s never done. It flickered for several moments then stopped.
I dial Braddy, who lives in Tennessee, to share what’s going on. Immediately he shouts to his girlfriend, Teresa, who’s in the other room, to come.
“Jay and Chris had flickering lights, too.”
Braddy tells me that that morning, he and Theresa had been meditating at their puja, where they have set up lights. The plastic LOVE light molded with letters that spell out L-O-V-E started flickering. As the flickering continued, Theresa said, “I wonder if that’s your mother.”
A few weeks later, I am lying in my bed, where my mother slept the last time she visited our house. It’s morning and just getting light. I’m awake, but I haven’t opened my eyes. I’m thinking of the flickering lights, thinking of my mother, wondering if I will have another experience that feels like communication. I open my eyes. In the middle of the plum tree that fills the window in the summer with its bounty of leaves and fruit, front and center, is a leaf, shaped not like a leaf at all, but like a heart, the size of my hand. That afternoon, the heart is gone—it was a trick of the light, I decide—but the next morning it’s there again. It stays, greeting me every morning for the next three months.
“If anyone could transcend the line between living and nonliving, it would be your mother,” Pam, Illinois’s daughter, says when I tell her about the leaf. “She had such a strong will.”
The first storm of September brings a gloomy sky that hints of the winter to come, and in the accompanying high winds, the heart leaf I had come to rely on is ripped from its branch. That afternoon, I take the dog for a run in the hills behind our house. I wonder yet again if there will be any more signs that feel like communication. I imagine my mother as she might be now, free from the constraints of her body and from the parameters her struggles with health had seemed to dictate she follow. Knowing her, understanding now more than ever her love for us, I decide, yes, there will be more. Then something makes me stop midstride and look down. I am surrounded by fallen leaves, fifty or so, all around me at my feet, all in the shape of hearts.
In my mother’s writings, she documented how ill she felt through all the years I counted as my childhood. I knew she had ailments, but she never shared the extent of her suffering, which now strikes me as brave—everything came down to her, all of our needs, four intense children, and my father’s Godzilla-size raging. I think of the payoff she expected, after all her courage and battles, that didn’t seem evident at the Thanksgiving table or elsewhere. My mother had been at the forefront, decades ahead of the rest of the world, believing her story was important: Illinois farm girl turned broadcasting executive’s wife turned dietary revolutionary.
A few days ago I purchased an eight-dollar glass of green vegetable drink at a nearby coffee shop. The handwritten label listed kale and ginger and spinach and apple in the ingredients. I was tempted to tell the young woman who handed me the drink my history with juices like this one and how, once, it would have been the very last thing I would have wanted. Instead I thanked her, paid the eight dollars, and took a sip, noticing how all the flavors combined and worked together. The drink was cool and refreshing, and I thought again about my mother’s legacy. Luke, at twenty-one, has a gourmet’s palate. He prepares kale, which he grew up eating and still adores, almost every night. He relies on chlorella tablets to keep colds at bay, and he is passionate about the benefits of intermittent fasting. He also feels a gnawing hunger unless he has some kind of animal protein at night and loves, as I do, a well-prepared steak. Em, on the other hand, now twenty-seven, and as staunch a revolutionary as my mother was, is in a graduate program at Columbia, focused on changing the curriculum in schools to teach social justice. She has been known to follow austere eating patterns and almost seems to enjoy doing so, exploring how the limiting of certain foods can help her with various minor ailments of skin and digestion. She can happily live on legumes and vegan fare indefinitely, able to do what my mother could and I can’t, eat Spartanly for the sake of how her body responds. While my brothers and I had to withdraw from so many activities that would have allowed us to fit in, my children are functioning normally in the world while, at the same time, they are highly interested in nutrition, because the “normal” world is interested in nutrition now, too.
* * *
Tucked inside the Star Wars folder, hidden at first behind the pages of notes about wandering her farm as a child and the documentation of symptoms and supplements, I find, after I return home from clearing out her belongings, the thing I least expect to find in my mother’s writings: the beginnings of a screenplay. The several scenes and few pages of summary clearly have been written for a class; there are scrawlings in pen, an instructor’s feedback, her name in the top corner written as Carol Romann. This was something she shared with no one, not even a mention, not even with her screenwriting sons.
I read a scene where the main character, Claire, has a college-age daughter, Kristin, who leaves home for what would turn out to be the last time, to spend the summer with her boyfriend, Tom. Claire’s emotional reaction to that, her sadness kept hidden in real life, is here for me to see now when it’s too late to ask her about it. I read a scene between Claire and her youngest son, here named Jason, in the Beverly Hills house; a scene with Pierre, called Jean-Claude, in which the romantic tension is thick enough to cut with a knife.
What is this movie about? her teacher’s pen scrawls across the top of the first page.
My mother wrote as a response, just under his notes:
My main character wants … to discover the secret of vibrant health and beauty and to teach these truths to her children so that their lives can be enhanced and their potentials reached.
The goal … is for the main character to achieve her goal of radiant health and to have the nonbelievers around her, namely her husband, acquiesce to the truths she discovered.
My story is of a woman struggling to live.