Heron

They told me what I’d feel, but since when did I do what they say. I've inherited that much.

Today I spoke about my mother in past tense. Wearing the dress I wore to her funeral, the one I swore I'd never wear again. A loose dress by my own request; I had expected to do her the kavod of burying her, and I think I'm still upset about that.

I read the piece she wrote about her own mother’s death. Perhaps I’m looking for myself in how my mother mourned her mother, or perhaps I’m just looking for her. I wonder if the women in our family die young. Or if I am just untethered, holding a connection that was there until it wasn’t.

Am I supposed to question. When we lost the vision, the one where she and I are sitting in that tattoo parlor and she is getting the blue ribbon emblazoned on her wrist like she said she’d do when she went into remission. The clever artist pierces sharp ink into her skin and I hold her hand and try not to faint, the same way I tried not to faint at her first chemo appointment all those times ago. Future-tense memories.

Her hair is still cropped short in these future-memories. Still that spunky purple it somehow turned itself in the weeks before she passed away.

One day I’ll talk about the heron. The one she sent to walk me home the night she died, at 1 in morning when I’d gone back to Philadelphia for only a day before getting right back on that plane to Texas. And it was just me alone with this bird on our old neighborhood streets, mine and my mother’s, where I would always run just a little bit ahead of her whenever we ran together. So she sent the bird to fly ahead and pause every few houses or so, I could catch up, and walk me home.

She was always waiting for me whenever I got home. And perhaps in a way she was waiting this time, too. Her body spent one final night there.

“It’s alright,” my friend said to me through the humid headlights of her car on the front lawn. We are not supposed to know who the shomrim are, the women who alternate all throughout the night, every single hour in their long skirts and hair-coverings where we wore pajamas, to sit in total silence just outside my mother’s room and pray for her soul. We are not supposed to know. But they were not intended to have kept vigil in our home, and the woman starting shift as the heron walked me home is a friend of mine. “It’s alright, you can go in and see her if you want. I’m just outside the door.”

She was always waiting for me to come home. The last conversation that she had with me, was her promising not to die while I was gone.

The last thing I said to her, on the phone in the rain half a country away, was that I release her from that promise.

"You don't understand," my father said to me early the next morning. We were sitting in the living room, my five siblings and me with our suitcases all spread throughout the house, waiting for the funeral attendants to come and take her body. I was watching him, he was looking out the window at a bird. "Her favorite author writes blue herons."

I didn't know it was a choice to get in our own car and follow the hearse until we found ourselves doing it. I went to the funeral home without shoes on.

My friend laughs. "So did your mother."

One day I’ll talk about rain in Texan summers. How the forecast was sunny and a hundred degrees the entire day long. But she’d promised my father once that she would make it rain for him on her funeral, so no one would see him cry. So for the fifteen minutes that it took to bury her, just those fifteen minutes only, it was raining for us.

So she sent the heron.

So she made it rain.

So I wonder where she is now.