Member-only story
Getting Somewhere
The search for my mother’s soul after her death
I took her cell phone knowing she’d want the photos to be saved. When I’d finished importing them to my computer, I navigated to her texts. I knew that when I turned this phone off, there’d never be a reason to turn it back on. That was something I couldn’t accept yet.
About her health, the texts revealed nothing I hadn’t already known. What I did learn was that my brother was just as desperate to talk to her again, though we had different ideas for next steps. His post-mortem text to our mom read Please come back to me. Mine read Take me with you.
Death leaves so many questions in its wake. Where was my mom’s soul now? How could I get to her?
Along with her cell phone and Christmas tree earrings, another thing I took from her house after the funeral was a small book I’d made for her in college. I was taking a bookmaking class and wanted to put my new skills to use. For the cover I used a soft green fabric, her favorite color, and inside were the lines to an acrostic poem I’d written for her.
It was called Somewhere and it was about robins, her favorite bird:
Standing on a naked tree limb sprouting
out of a grassless knoll, were two still robins
making eye contact. They were sick,
engulfed in some sweeping…
