Landscape Isn’t The Same After Mother’s Death

My mother’s car rolled on a desolate stretch of Wyoming highway where the wind blows 50 and trucks drive 70.

The empty, rutted highway east of Rawlins is remarkable only because most drivers press hard on the accelerator, hoping to speed their way beyond the God-forsaken plains where my mother died. She never looked at it that way.

In a poem she wrote a few years ago, printed on the back of the funeral bulletin passed out at the Riverton Methodist Church last week, she said this of the place where she had lived:

I know you, Wyoming.

I know your boundless, spreading plains,

Your forsaken outposts with forgotten flames,

I know your silvered Rocky peaks,

I know your wind that ever speaks.

Antelope running,

Sunflowers sunning,

Buttes and bluffs standing by,

Larks thronging the splendid sky,

ln boot and brim I ride the rim,

Mid sage and painted flowers,

Grateful to the Giver,

for my Wyoming hours.

She admired poetry and read all the greats.

People didn’t expect this from someone who lived 69 years within 50 miles of the place she was born, a place better known for deer and Yellowstone than Dickinson and Yeats.

Born in 1926, my mother grew up on cattle ranches without benefit of TV, movies, or neighborhood amusements.

Looking out across the high plains stretching east from the Wind River mountains, she saw no lights and few signs of humanity.

This magnificent isolation became the subject of her stories and conversation with all her children.

On the morning of her funeral I arose from the bedroom where I slept 40 years ago and looked out the window at the plains and mountains she had imagined and described to me.

I recognized the place. Yet it was altered.

The death of one’s mother changes the landscape. What once seemed familiar suddenly seems changed.

The inevitability of biology makes good the chance that each of us in our adult lives will get a telephone call that begins, “I have some bad news.”

A week after I received the phone call I am stunned by the intensity of this unavoidable, but somehow unanticipated event.

It is the mirror opposite of the birth of a child.

As a wedding inflates the future, this deflates it.

Memories that once seemed ordinary, now ache with meaning: this was my mother’s bedroom; here are my mother’s shoes; these were the spices my mother used to cook dinner.

I went into her closet and felt her sweaters.

I rifled her purse and took her library card for my wallet as a reminder of her love of books.

I dab my eyes with her handkerchief to remember her fragrance.

All last week the aunts, uncles and cousins kept saying something good could come of this.

And some has.

For three nights the families who live in New York, California, and Wyoming laughed late into the night telling family stories.

New generations of children were introduced to family tales and listened in rapt amazement.

My daughter learned each of her uncles was a first-chair, all-state musician.

My son learned most men in his family had a decent jump shot when we all played a game of patio basketball.

Each of us who had let the years go by without enough correspondence or contact learned the value of staying close as a family.

Long-ago slights didn’t matter anymore. The time had come to heal festering wounds.

This is an indulgence, writing about my mother, She wouldn’t have liked it much. She would rather keep her private life out of the papers.

But mourning requires some outlet.

Some people will play music when their mother dies. Some will run, or knit, or drink.

I could write this.

It was a comfort. It was a bit of the old world that seemed familiar.

I wrote in the small-town newspaper office where my father and brother come every day, where my mother picked up the mail, where I thought as a child all the world unfolded as it should.

The world changes.

The wind blows more bitterly cold in Wyoming than I remembered.

, DataTimes MEMO: Chris Peck is the Editor of The Spokesman-Review. His column appears each Sunday.