The Long Goodbye Though Her Mother Died When She Was 4, It Took The Author Years To Fully Understand What Her Mother’s Life Meant To Her

I was almost 4 when my mom died.

It was the day after New Year’s, 1970. My dad and my mom and I lived in the San Joaquin Valley in California, but we were spending a special day exploring San Francisco.

My dad parked the car. We started walking. He held me in his arms and she walked two steps ahead.

She was laughing when she stepped into the street. The sign said walk. But the driver of the city bus couldn’t see the sign, because he had just collapsed from a stroke. The bus sped driverless down the street, struck her, and she disappeared under it.

My dad stood frozen on the sidewalk. His hands gripped me so tightly that their outline imprinted on my bare legs.

Growing up without my mom was like losing the biggest part of me. Growing up with grief was like having a silent companion lurking by my side. This is my 26th Mother’s Day without her. But like a three-legged dog adapts, I adapted.

The memories of the accident used to run through my dreams, but they don’t anymore. I can pull them out when I want. They are like a slowmotion movie. It’s almost like they happened to someone else.

She emerged conscious. A crowd quickly encircled her body, which lay limp on the pavement. I pushed through those grown-up legs, brushed the bus soot from her body and lifted her hand. She cried to my dad, “Take care of the baby.”

When I was born my mother, Evelyn Briggs, was jubilant. She had waited four years since her marriage to conceive. She waited and prayed. Dreamed and wrote poems in anticipation. I was hers.

When I was born, she left her profession teaching high school English.

She rarely let me out of her arms. They wrapped around me day and night. Her rich voice hummed “Summertime” in my ears. I remember we played day after day while my dad, Greg, taught school. I was their only child.

She was only 31 when she died. I am 29 today. I feel like I’m now beginning to reach the fullness of life, now knowing assuredly who I am for the first time.

I wonder what my mother left undone. I wonder who she left untaught. She was also a civil rights activist. I wonder who she left untouched.

My dad never recovered from her death. Grief hung on him like a coat he couldn’t shake off. Talk of her was absent from daily life, from holidays and birthdays because even as a little girl I knew the depth of his pathos.

So death took both my mother and my youthful, athletic dad in one swoop - though he lived many more years.

In my life she was the missing link. I looked in the mirror at my Yakama Indian features, which were also hers. When I couldn’t find anyone who looked like me growing up on Spokane’s South Hill, I wondered if I was ugly.

I wasn’t. I just was a different race from everyone else in my school. Had my mom been there I would have known that.

I was a quiet child. Growing up without my mother, I knew I had to judge for myself, gather knowledge for myself and prepare for my future alone.

Growing up without my mom, I learned to trust myself. Even now when I need to see her, I look in the mirror. It’s not mystical. It’s just that I look almost identical to her. People see her pictures and ask if they are mine. I search my eyes wondering what it would be like to look into hers.

Some people say their dead relatives guide them. I don’t commune with the dead. She’s safely placed somewhere in God’s plan. I’m safely in his hand here.

When I reached my 20s, I started the metamorphosis into that person I imagined as I grew up. Grief therapy was the start. I learned about feelings of abandonment. I learned how the family-wide silence about my mother wasn’t healthy for me. But most importantly I learned to forgive myself and my family for not knowing the things we didn’t know.

Like that three-legged dog, our family learned to run despite the missing parts.

Some people tell me I owe who I am to my mother. I owe my birth. I owe safe passage through my early years. I owe delicacy of speech and my Yakama Indian blood. But I’ve worked to become who I am today. And I’ve trusted God’s hand on my life.

I believe in honoring my mother, and I still love her, but I also believe in getting on to the future. When I read about children who lose their mothers early, I want to assure them that they can live life fully, but they will have to work harder for it. And they will need to find women to admire and women who will nurture them.

I look back gratefully to my grandmother Margaret who, with my dad, raised me. My dad’s sister and my mom’s sister who together give me guidance and balance in my decisions.

And I found other mothers. Many dear friends, women older than me, gave me heart friendship. Women from my early childhood on gave me parts of what my mother would have. When I needed to learn about makeup or needed someone to teach me to dance, they were more than friends. They were mothers.

I’ve learned that memories aren’t written in indelible ink. If someone close to you dies leaving children, please do them the favor and write down every detail you can remember about their mom or dad. No matter how special that person is to you now, your memory will fade.

In my church we talk about making the sacrifice of praising God. To me that means that no matter how bad I may feel, there is always something to thank God for giving me. I can thank God because my blood is flowing through my veins. I can thank him for giving me a beautiful mother, for letting me speak; I can go out today and make someone smile; I can string words into sentences and I can dance.

Remembering my mother’s death, I choose to live fearlessly. I choose to embrace my friends and family in love. I choose to risk speaking the truth even if no one wants to hear it. I guess it’s part of knowing any day could be my last.

Hanging on to grief is a choice. So is choosing to live. My mom would have wanted me this way.

MEMO: Kara Briggs was a staff writer at The Spokesman-Review for four years. She recently accepted a reporting job at The Oregonian in Portland.