I began my running away from home in October 1991, when I was thirty-three years old. I’d been planning my escape for years, first as a child with an active imagination in rural Pennsylvania, then with a brief marriage the summer of my sophomore year of college in Crete, Nebraska. I collected my degree in art and education the weekend Mount Saint Helens erupted. It was the same weekend that I climbed into Cecille Pfingston’s silver Toyota Celica with a few clothes and my 12-string guitar and rode shotgun all the way from Crete to Cici’s parents’ home in Sunnyvale, California. I learned later that 2,875 miles was not enough physical distance. But it was the best I could do at the time.

When the hills above Berkeley exploded in flames that October, and because my running away was not yet complete, I called my mother. She and I spoke by phone every few weeks but I hadn’t been back to her trailer at Green Acres Mobile Home Park for a decade. It was the same trailer she’d moved into twenty years earlier with her third husband, Earl, after being convinced by Earl into selling the house where I spent my childhood. Earl was long gone but my mother remained in the dark, nicotine tinged single-wide. By the end of our brief conversation, as the smoke from Berkeley drifted south and with it the ash from homes lost to the flames, I was long gone, too.

But there still was not enough distance between us. A few years after our last conversation I sold all I owned and left for Ireland.

It’s easy to put physical distance between two objects. Two people. And I am good at that. Despite the physical distance, however, and even though I pretend to my friends in Donegal that she doesn’t exist and that I don’t care, I think of my mother often.

When I returned to California in 2005, after a decade in Ireland, I was forty-seven years old. Old enough to know that even when you try to run away you carry everything with you - suit cases and psychic wounds, whole life experiences and fragments of the stories you told yourself about the way things were.

I make a right hand turn from Turkey Ridge Road onto the narrow circular drive. My mother stands in front of her trailer with a smile on her face and indicates by pointing the place where I should park the rented Chrysler Neon.

She’s so tiny. Her hair, thinning and grey, is still styled in the same shoulder length, teased and lacquered bouffant I remember from when it was thick and Clairol red. She’s dressed in jeans and a navy blue mock turtle neck. Her false eyelashes are in place with just a touch of frosted taupe shadow on the lids. Her lips are pink. She’s seventy-three years old.

I have four days to reconnect with a woman I don’t know. Four days to discover she stopped drinking around the same time I left California for the Emerald Isle. Four days to discover her partner of twenty-five years - a man she met speed dating at a bar in Fogelsville - died just a few months ago. Four days to pry the truth - truth stained with impassioned denials - about my childhood.

She spends a day pulling out huge scrapbooks filled with her family history. Pointing to uncles who died in the war, sharing yellowed newspaper clippings and notes written in her perfect Palmer penmanship.

When she brings the third scrapbook to the table I ask about my father. She lights up one of her Smoky Joe vanilla flavored cigars and hands me a photograph with a quizzical look on her face.

“Why would you want to know about him?”

The photograph in my hand, black and white and as small as a matchbox, is of a man with an Air Force regulation buzz cut holding an infant. The infant is me. The man is my father.

A man for whom I have no recollection. A man who had multiple wives of which my mother is number three. Number five ends his streak with three bullets.

“Why would you want to know about him?”

I’m as surprised as my mother when I begin to sob. I’m sobbing and angry and exhausted. Somewhere I find the strength to yell,

“I’m trying to figure out who I am.”

She offers no comfort. No mothering embrace. Just a simple, ‘oh’. I half expect her to say, ‘oh, is that all?’

An old woman shouldn’t die alone. She lost three husbands. She lost the love of her life. She lost my sister long before my sister died.

I don’t know why I decided to stay. I suppose, at first, I hoped I’d have the mother I needed when I was young. That didn’t happen. But I stayed anyway. All the way to the end.

Pennsylvania experienced a massive heatwave last year in July. At the same time the air conditioning unit for my now eighty-six-year old mother’s trailer stopped working. Her best friend Maryanne found her naked and delirious with an internal temperature of one hundred and four degrees.

But my mother’s character, according to Maryanne, had begun to change months before. She’d forget to pay bills. She’d leave food out to spoil. She’d lose her keys.

My partner Ben and I didn’t notice anything when we spoke with her on the phone other than the typical forgetfulness that comes with age. But Maryanne insisted something wasn’t right.

My mother was diagnosed with dementia, CPOD and heart failure a few days after her hospital admittance. She never came home.

The staff at Mosser Nursing Home love my mother. She’s funny and patient, they say. She’s nice to the nurses and they laugh at her bawdy sense of humor. She wants to go home, my mother, but she can’t. On one of my visits she falls and breaks her hip. A partial replacement fails and she’s put through a second surgery.

It’s clear, however, that she is failing.

I pack up the trailer. Her few friends circle me like vultures, wondering what they can have. Maryanne gets my mother’s washer and dryer. Ronnie from next door a piece of milk glass, David some furniture. I keep my grandmother’s writing desk, some bookshelves and those three heavy scrapbooks.

It occurs to me that my mother’s life is being erased.

An old woman shouldn’t die alone. But on January 3rd, 2020 at 5:00 AM in the morning, that’s exactly what my mother does.

By Mimm Patterson

From: United States

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