Drew and Jada went off to school after begging unsuccessfully to stay home and help unpack. “We’ll have plenty of time to get things settled. Go learn something,” I told them.
Hope had left her senior year a semester early to work as an intern to the executive director at the Clinton Foundation, and by a stroke of luck, she had a few days off.
Roman and I were lounging on a twin-size mattress on his bedroom floor. We needed a few lazy minutes of play before we attacked the boxes in earnest.
Finally, reluctantly, I got up to check the e-mail on my phone in case anything had come in from the office. I had missed dozens of calls from my mom.
I dialed, heart racing, wondering if something had happened to her sister in Wisconsin who had been waiting for a kidney transplant. Mom was planning to start the testing to see if she could be a donor.
But instead of Mom, my brother John answered. He had lived with her off and on most of his life, never able to hold a steady job with his disabilities.
“Why don’t you ever answer your damn phone?” he said before I got a word out. “Mom’s sick. Really bad. I’m pretty sure she’s dying. But she won’t go to the hospital. I called a friend to take her but she said she can’t—”
“Call 911. Now!” I told him. I was already crying, already wondering why I had ignored the bad dreams.
“She won’t go. She says not to.” His voice was shaking. He was scared.
“Call them right now or I’m going to. Tell her she doesn’t have a choice.”
He hung up to call 911 and then called me back, saying she was getting worse.
I got dressed, threw a bag with extra clothes in the car, and started driving. She lived seventy-five miles north of me. I called one of her sisters and told her what had happened. She called me back for an update twenty minutes later, but I hadn’t heard anything more from my brother.
I was still thirty minutes away when my phone rang with a blocked number.
“Is this Cara?” a man asked me. A stranger.
I nodded. I didn’t want to speak to him. I made foreign noises with no idea if they were real words.
“This is the doctor at the ER who attended to your mom when she arrived. I’m sorry to tell you that we’ve done everything we can, but she didn’t make it.”
“No,” I squeaked through the tears. “You have to keep trying. Can’t you do something? There has to be something.”
“Where are you? Is anyone with you?”
“I’m driving. I’m trying to get there. I’m almost there. Please.”
Mom was fifty-nine. She was the strongest woman I’ve ever known. She was physically strong, and emotionally strong. But what had been diagnosed as pneumonia was a blood clot in her lung. It shouldn’t have happened. She should have watched my children grow and held her great-grandchildren. She should have stayed with us in the house that she helped us build. She should have retired early and driven across the country on the adventures she’d always dreamed of.
I held her still body and kissed her good-bye. I whispered, or maybe I shouted, “I don’t know how to do this.”
And then I drove to her house feeling weaker than I had ever felt in my life.
Nothing could save me from the biggest threat I had ever faced, not a big house, not our new muscles or mind-set, not even my beat-up old gun, Karma.
When I woke up this morning I had a mom, and now I don’t.
We finished moving and unpacking. Everything found its place. I got my brother John situated about ten miles from me where I could take care of him. My dad and John had stopped talking years ago, so I knew I was on my own with him. He couldn’t drive or hold a job. He couldn’t save and plan for the future—not even next week—but he could take care of his own day-to-day needs. And he was family. Family takes care of family.
It was months of work to get everything sorted and moved. To sell my mom’s house, we did home repairs and remodeling on it, as well as to the one we moved John into. There were endless weekends and evenings on our hands and knees installing flooring, painting walls, and repairing siding.
There was no celebration for the completion of Inkwell Manor.
Not yet.
Not until we settled into our new roles over the holidays and I found days where I could remember without weeping. Not until we came to terms with the way life doesn’t deal things out just the way you expect or want them. She doesn’t even deal them fair all the time.
But the celebration did come.
It didn’t happen as a dance party or a lot of patting ourselves on the back. It happened slowly, as we all stretched into our new sense of self and found that we had become a little fearless.
When summer came and Mom’s plants were beautiful and full in my gardens, I thought about Caroline for the first time since the day Mom died. I still tried to meditate when I remembered to, and Benjamin was usually there, still and calm. I believed he always would be.
I walked to our shop, set up a ladder, and pulled the nail—Caroline’s nail—from above the door. The curved scrap of metal clanged onto the concrete floor.
Then I walked toward my house—my home—with the nail, still warm, clutched tight.
I opened the back door and could hear the kids upstairs, listening to music, talking, living.
On top of a chest that belonged to my great-grandmother was a carefully wrapped antique photo my dad had brought to me that spring. The round frame had a bubble of glass over the front, and under it was my grandmother at about six years old. Her own grandmother was beside her, smiling as peacefully as Benjamin.
Oh, but her eyes! I knew them well. They were Caroline’s eyes.
I pounded the warm nail into the wall in my den and hung the photo, then stood back three steps to be sure it was straight.
“I was never alone,” I said to those women, and to all the others who had survived before me.
The kids thundered down the stairs and I smiled over my shoulder at them. We had ugly days ahead, everyone does, but we had more good days than bad, more smiles than tears.
And we would never be alone.
About six months after Mom died, I started feeling sorry for myself, wondering if the months of exhausting work had been worth it. If the kids and I could reclaim the lost dates, friends, movies, and countless hours of sleep we had given to Inkwell Manor, if we could take it all back and buy a small cottage with double sets of bunk beds, would we be in a better—or at least an equivalent—place?
What if I could go back and spend those hours with my mom instead?
One Thursday after school, Jada and Drew were raiding the pantry together and I was in the library, listening. Jada was having trouble with middle-school mean girls, and Drew was half listening and halfheartedly giving out mediocre advice.
Then Jada said something that caught her brother’s full attention. She said, “I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?” Drew said, angrier than I’d heard him in months. “Jada, you built your own damn house. You can do anything.”
If they said anything else, I didn’t hear, because I had just gotten an answer to the question that had plagued me.
Yes, it was worth it.
Yes, they were better for it.