The last time my mother and I traveled together was on a college visit to these mountains the summer before she died. We had driven the Blue Ridge Parkway and eaten at a restaurant where marijuana wafted through the air. Barefoot in a stream with bouquets of rhododendron in bloom around us and smooth-worn stones beneath our feet, my mother told me her soul was the happiest it had been in a long while.
Now, by my front door, wineberries form a thicket behind a hobbled apple tree. My youngest child and I pluck the red thimbles on summer mornings. Lavender blooms sideways, reaching out for the sun from under a patch of red raspberries that grow rampant along with a smattering of purple-budded weeds, day lilies, black-eyed Susans, bee balm, lamb’s ear, irises. In the winter, when the trees are bare, you can see an expanse of mountain ridge to the south.
My mother would have loved this life. She would have loved my husband and our gorgeous feral children. I wish she would have stayed, seen this place, the way it looks when things get a bit easier.
When we first moved here six years ago, I ripped out a rosebush with light-pink blooms like my mother’s. I wanted more space for tomatoes, I told my husband. Really, though, I wanted to exile the daily reminder of my mother. That primal guilt remained, cold and punishing, waking me at night to ruminate.
I know firsthand the impact that unchecked grief and anxiety can have on a family. Once it became clear that mine was affecting not only me, but the people I love most, I sought the kind of treatment I believe would have also helped my mother.
Therapy meant revisiting the scenes leading up to my mother’s death until they didn’t hurt as much, and cultivating compassion for the teenage girl experiencing them. The guilt will never go away entirely. I am not “healed.” But I have learned how to regard myself with more and more tenderness, like a mother would.
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