A month after Mama died, not fully understanding why, I loaded up the Monza wagon, my two infant daughters, and took off again for Tennessee. The past days had been difficult-full of unfamiliar stirrings and restlessness. A feeling of time had settled in thickly, and I found myself plodding through tedious moments. Trying to keep my mind busy, to prevent its meandering paths into the past, I was, nonetheless, drawn relentlessly into a rush of memories seeming to possess me; I heard the voice and saw the image of my mother demanding my attention, but I knew, too, I was demanding of myself that I submit. I ached with a bottomless hurt swelling and pulsing that knotted finally into a dead presence within my womb. Mind winning out, arguing relentlessly that I must go back home and spend time with Daddy, I found myself driving through the steamy, sultry Georgia hills, eager for the woods and mountains just beyond. Even the incessant whining of my six month old daughter and two year old from the back seat could not take me fully out of my ruminations. Distantly aware of a pinched feeling in my feet, I kicked off my shoes, exploring the cool accelerator with my bare foot, remembering how often, in past summers, standing in a sun-blistered corn field, I had cooled toughened, bare feet by tunneling down into the damper, worm-squirming under soil.
Today's blue sky and scudding clouds contrasted with the blue-black of that moon-silhouetted night I had driven through to reach my mother before she died. Then, too, my mind wandered aimlessly into the past, picking up this fragment and that, toying with them before dropping them into an unsolved mire-past compressed into present and future-a time bearing in upon me from which I knew I could not escape. Caught up in a cycle that had to be completed, I tried to defy the impersonal forces directing me, but I felt powerless in their grip. More than once on that night, I looked at the full moon hanging tauntingly in the sky, bringing me to think of seasonal change and the blending of winter into spring, spring into summer, summer into fall-reducing me to smallness, making me feel lost and alone. With the loneliness seeping into the depths of my soul, like the darkness itself, I yearned with the familiar needs that had propelled me from childhood. Always introspective, thoughtful and quiet, even as a child, I often became an outsider within my own family.
On this night, strong tides of blood pulsed within me, and I listened to the metronomic beating of my heart and moved instinctually in awareness of life. I was part of this night, just as the night was part of me, and in the night, my mother moved inside me, breathing in me and through me, and back out into the full light of the moon etching its visible spirit into the primordial landscape.
On this fated night, driving to see my mother, I had taken what I thought was a shortcut through the mountains; the tortuous road stretched into miles. And with those miles came a question: what was this land, these people? I knew instinctively, even as I asked, my heritage was a matter of blood; I would never be able to outrun it-it would always be there-hauntingly there, vast, brooding, and bigger than myself, a visible sign of all that was invisible me. Like the ancient crags that hung down over the valleys, like the fogs that came and went, like the ebbings of the human spirit-my background and blood and family were just there, signaling the ongoing of life.
Early that next morning, I stood by my mother's bed and listened to the heavings within her frail, ancient chest. She gasped, rattled, and signaled she couldn't breathe. I looked into eyes opened briefly through intense struggle; a fog condensed there, veiling and obscuring whatever warmth remained. For a moment, those eyes looked directly to me, pleadingly; pain surged through me, a mysterious sweeping of heat that flushed my heart then branched into my womb. Mamma's arms were strapped to her chest, and from everywhere, tubes protruded-electro cardiac equipment, intravenous machine, and catheter. Where the sheet had crawled down from her body, purple-blackened arms exposed themselves needle-pocked and slit to admit tubes. Standing by my mother's bedside, I reflected on the many times I'd heard my mother say that she never wanted to die in a hospital; if she had to die, she'd say, she would just as soon do it at home. I remembered, too, my mother's fear of dying; she had loved the mountain breezes, opening her bedroom windows early in the spring and keeping them open into the fall, even after the first hint of frost had chilled the air. She had told me once that she couldn't stand the thought of being closed up in a casket and buried, unable to breathe. Mama feared the hospital with its cold, impersonal staff, its antiseptic and pungent odors; even the droning of the air conditioner filled her with dread of pneumonia. Her sheets, I could see, were drenched with perspiration, as was her forehead; the sheets clung damply the parts of Mama's body they still touched.
My stomach squeezed tighter; this time, I realized, I was facing no emergency to be followed by my mother's recuperation, as had been the case so often in the past. Looking past the fogs and sounds, I saw that my mother was already locked into the endless corridors of death. And somehow, I felt guilty. I remembered D.H. Lawrence's description of death: I saw my mother lying there, felt apart from her, knew her inapproachable; and I realized I probably had never known my mother as she was in herself, a person. I had never recognized the living being that was my mother herself. The memory did not bring me consolation: my mother's remoteness now, her disconnectedness, was fact; suffering was her lot but also that of humans everywhere.
Standing helplessly by my mother's bed, I knew a passion driving itself into the deepest descent of soul. From my mother, I sensed a communication emanating from a core of the self, a last feeble stirring of something within, a convulsive effort gathering life into breath and sending it forth. Almost as an ESP between the living and soon-to-die, I breathed even as living sucked the breath out of my mother's body; her struggles were with the eternal; her reckoning could not be escaped. Mom shuddered visibly, collapsing back into herself; still, the ordeal was not quite over, not yet; something yet remained to be done, a resolution yet not fully acknowledged remained to be made. Sensing this unexpected lull, seeing it in a relaxation of external effort, I kissed my mother's hand lightly, then abruptly turned from her, walking from the hospital room back into the clutter of family, carrying with me a denial of death, the same denial my mother had fought futilely; I embraced hope instead, clinging to it, unwilling to accept inevitable fates.
Just being there prolonged my mother's struggles. Although I had grown up here in the hills and had seen death, sometimes graphically, as country children must, I had never been this close to death, never had it reach for me until I felt myself succumbing; sure, I had seen animals die, had witnessed in them the final spasms of life. Death, however, had not affected me closely, and I had only glanced at it half-heartedly, knowing that I did not belong to it, that I belonged to life.
So began the last forty-hour ritual of hearing doctors' reporting, listening to meaningless chatter from the nurses' station; I clung to dropping tones that might signal some whispered discussion of my mother. To the hospital staff, my mother had become an object which they attended, indifferently, occupying themselves with pulse, heartbeat, pulmonary functions, secretions, and excretions. The family was reduced helplessly to peeping in for reassurance, indications of change. Checking in on my mother, I observed them suctioning her lungs. With her hands strapped to the bed, each push of the tubes through her nose and into her lungs caused Mama's body to arch convulsively. Mama had worked at a convalescent home; she had talked about the old people, how she hurt for them, how she would never want to have tubes connected to and pushed into her body. I haunted the door, waiting for them to finish the procedure, then I slipped into my mother; it was the child in me who cried, "Mama, they're hurting you, aren't they?" Mama struggled to nod her head no but lapsed comatose, no longer strong enough to respond to the call of flesh, not hers and not that of her daughter's. A chill swept my body, blocking my heart in ice, and the ice moved into my womb, shocking me as if I had been injected with formaldehyde.
Mama clung to her last moments-refusing to die until one by one, each child had been drawn into her silent, watery communication of death. None of the children, though, could admit their mother was dying, this shadow of themselves-so they had eaten and slept in the hospital corridors. An aunt brought in fried chicken or a casserole nightly, faithful out of a sense of duty but also love. It was, after all, her sister dying, a sister who had early assumed responsibility as the oldest in a large family; a sister who had rocked the babies to sleep so that her own mama could rest. I knew my aunt loved Mama; I also knew that her being there was a compulsion because she knew she, too, was dying, not immediately, but dying nonetheless in part with her sister. Death had already come to her visibly, visiting her husband in a cancer, which had wasted slowly every cell of life until he had laid upon his bed at home an emaciated skeleton, his flesh collapsing in upon breath itself. All my aunt now wanted was to get closer, to understand this thing that had happened to her, this strangeness that had settled into her own house, her bedroom, this thing that was now twisting the life out of her sister's body. I had to bear my aunt's being there, though tolerance even of myself came hard.
I accepted-as the family accepted-the doctor's explanation that nothing else could be done locally, that he was transferring my mother to Vanderbilt, that he would have already done so but had to wait for a bed. When finally my mother's heart stopped, Mama was alone-except for one child sentry in the hospital hall. Most of the myriad relatives and children had gone home wearily to rest, prematurely lured by the calm whereby death so often announces that a covenant has been resolved. I, too, had fled to comfort my own daughters, who had been corralled with my brother's wife. Not having eaten in two days, I stopped at a Dairy Queen and ordered a hamburger; I wolfed the food down. Once at my brother's, I finished off the food and drink and disposed of bag, cup, and sandwich wrappings on my way into the house. Both girls were in the same crib, and I hugged them, then dropped into bed; before I could sleep, the telephone rang jarringly. "That was Hank," my sister-in-law, pushing open the bedroom door, reported; "he says they've called Code Blue and that you need to get back there, fast."
I pulled wearily out of bed, looked in a mirror, ran a comb quickly through hair that hung limply, straightened my clothes, trying to brush out of them the telltale wrinkles that seemed to have settled in permanently. My every move was urgent. The drive to the hospital though stretched interminably; my senses were heightened: I felt, tasted, and saw everything as if time and space had suspended themselves. I thought to myself it must be some kind of joke that any of the receding things existed, only vaguely aware that I myself was moving; I remained, however, strangely connected to it all. The blue of the sky startled my eyes, jerking me into the reality that I was riding the bumper of the fellow in front of me. Normally, a conservative driver, I had cut out in front of this driver, rushing to beat the crest of a hill. Breath escaped gritted teeth and I vaguely heard myself murmuring, "Get out of the way; don't you realize my mother is dying? Get out of the way!" The blacktop snaked in front of me, undulating and rushing me into some necessary outcome.
By the time I reached the hospital, the hall outside my mother's room was already filled with commotion, frantic activity. Relatives were already gathering, circling in upon the smell of death. Everyone wanted to get close, to glimpse death before it had been treated cosmetically to resemble sleep. Their purposes were noble: my mother was family, and family came when its members died. We were all of us part of each other. We also felt death removed from us as we observed it in another. Whatever death was, I knew it was not sleep; it was not a state from which one would return. A change in matter was being wrought, a change of form, and philosophy now had nothing to say; religion, too, left the soul empty. Logic thundered in my head, then fled; an energy and force now centered on me, demanding an accounting. A sensation of strangeness welled up within me, and I no longer knew if I controlled or was being controlled; I felt as if I had been removed from the light, that I was now somehow a shadow playing upon a darkened, interior wall upon which other shadows moved.
I arrived too late; Mama had died, and I had not been there, just as I had not been there when they wheeled her to surgery to reset her broken hip, just as I had not been there on Mother's Day. An old inadequacy gnawed at me from within. Someone pressed in upon me from the right demanding, "What's going on? Do you know what's happening?" Estranged to myself as well as this piece of flesh by me, without patience, I pushed on through the shifting shapes, and speaking neither to myself not the voice which had addressed me, I answered, "I think my mother just died." Catching my brother's Hank's eyes, I saw confirmed what I feared; he shook his head: "She's gone, Laura."
On the raised hospital bed, Mama lay still, her head rolled to the right. Her tongue curled brutally to the right, the result no doubt of having tubes and machinery forced into her. She already looked rigid, something apart from herself. Priding myself with self-control and maintaining an image of invulnerability, I knew better than anyone how vulnerable I really was-to myself, to others-how inside, I always curled into a fetal protectiveness. Standing by my mother now, I fought for reserve, the magnetism still strong between me, the child irresistibly drawn to her mother's breast and clinging for a moment helplessly, and the mother now only faintly warm. Ordered not to leave me alone in the room with Mama, Hank now gently pulled me up and away from my mother's body. My heart within wrenched, as if it were being pulled from my chest, ragged arteries protesting and spurting my lifeblood from me. Mama's warmth lingered upon my cheek, growing hotter and yet lighter, going, and I didn't know where.
Glancing backwards, I saw that my mother's body had every appearance of being worn out, of having finished a terrible wrestling with machinery and professional hands. Nurses' aids were hastily drawing the bed's curtains shut in order to ward off death from other ICU patients who had not yet resolved themselves to the fact that they, too, were dying. From that moment, I accepted the death inside me, knowing I would have to reckon with it; still, I had never been touched this intimately; my soul within winced.
Death and life are, I know, bound together, complementary and mutual to each other, and out of their union comes yet more life and death, a primordial and eternal thrusting out of which continual unrest seeks rest. This was the cycle of life I had already seen played out in nature, the eternal coming and going of spring, summer, fall, and winter, but it was death, too, with a finality and ending that was permanent and to which all living beings succumbed.
Coming back home a second time, this time after my mother's death, was a necessary thing. The details and rush of her funeral had permitted little time for good-byes. There was too much shock-and too many people. Funerals I knew were supposed to help people grieve, to help them adjust to sudden absence of spirit; but I had felt only resentment. My grief was private, and it was bigger than myself. Something had been taken from inside me, and I felt violated, known, and vulnerable.
Relatives flocked into the funeral parlor, curious to look upon this new victim, confirming somehow thereby their own immortality. From there, they would drift out into the halls, compare notes, and renew acquaintances, comfortable in the drone of their own voices. This went on until the casket was closed. Even then, the press of people had followed in the traditional funeral procession leading over miles of twisting country road and ending finally at the gaping hole that would swallow the gray steel casket-vaulted and earthed-in at last from gaping eyes.
Only after the first spadeful of earth had cascaded in hollow thumps upon the casket were people content to leave-and only then could I find a quiet moment alone at the damp, mounding earth. The earthen thump upon the casket had pounded upon my heart, and an inaudible scream tore from my very being; for the first time, my reserve was broken, and I cried quietly, a single escaping tear signaling anguish. The pungent earth assailed my nose as I stood by my mother's grave, betrayed. Out of the earth had come flowers and food; I had learned the cycle, but I rebelled that it should be my mother who was now being taken into that most fecund of wombs. "Dust thou art, to dust returnest," echoed in my heart; "'twas not spoken of the soul." I knew, though, the oldest mythologies had told the story: God in Eden had breathed life into mortals, telling them it would be there until he took it again. It was an ancient story; philosophy and religion had not been able to improve upon this account of origins and science had missed its essence completely. What I wanted right now was reassurance, but I was barred by flaming swords.
After the funeral, family members reassembled back at the old home place. Afraid, I submitted, understanding a reckoning was being demanded of me. The minute I walked through the front screen door, I sensed this was my father's house; only he belonged here now. Yet, Mama lingered everywhere, shadowy but robust, comforting, and arguing no non-sense about lamenting what we had lost. Life was meant to be lived, and we were the living. I could almost see my mom walking out of the shadowed corners of the living room; only my mind denied it could be so.
For each child there, coming home after the funeral had been a necessary ritual disguised by concern for the father. We all cast side-long glances into the closets of the past, afraid of skeletons we had grown accustomed to finding there; we each knew Mama's presence, lingering , was benevolent and caring, a continuing nurturing of life. In coming back, each of us tried to conquer fear and to believe that coming back a next and then next time would not be so hard. I quickened, the cord that connected me to mama, and indeed, to anything, severed. Something in me had been lost irretrievably, and an unspeakable sadness invaded, ravishing and leaving only a shell of what I had been formerly.
Coming back this second time, I watched my daughters enjoying Pa's house, playing until weariness embraced them. I had forgotten how quickly the dirt here claimed everything, and I spent my time washing faces, hands, changing clothes-fighting the losing battle against dirt, as I now understood my mother before me had. I tried to ignore the ragged, tick-eaten dogs that insisted on sleeping under the porch chairs, the black flies that clung and left black mess over everything.
In the hours that followed, as I found time, I helped my sisters empty out closets and dressers, trying not to linger with the rush of memories pouring out to us. Everywhere, we found messages and insights into a personality we now knew we had barely known. Our mother had been a person completely separate from us-and we had denied her this. The notes, letters, and cards mounted in yellowing albums disturbed us all strangely. The more obscure the memory forming and intensifying, the stranger we felt to ourselves. We could not tear ourselves away before being flooded by a vast, dead past that our mother had forgotten to bury. Or had she? Mama's voice called strongly to me from a distance, "Do this in memory of me."
The second night after I had returned home, still awake, I listened to a car turn up the mountain road, labor heavily, slow, and then turn into Daddy's driveway. I asked myself, "Who could that be at this hour?" Mama and Daddy had compassionately told me of Elbert, remarking how he was drinking himself to death; how he drunkenly staggered onto country porches at all hours. I decided not to stir, hoping Elbert would leave. His car horn honked twice. Silence. Gathering quiet. Then, a few minutes later, the quiet was broken.
"Ed, Ed, " a thick, liquor-slurred male voice called.
"W-wh-who's there?' I heard Daddy respond slowly, sleepily.
I recognized from Daddy's halting, blurred echo, he was only just now aware of Elbert's presence. For a moment, I reflected on his helplessness here in this house surrounded by darkness. This was a house that creaked in the night, a house where small animals scurried in the loft. It was a house where I had cowered in bed listening to the muffled sounds of traffic in the valley, not understanding the disconnected vibrations wafted aloft on mountain breezes. This was a house where being alone had frightened me as a child. I remembered lying awake on the many long and repeated nights when Daddy left at eleven o'clock to pick up Mama from her work at the nursing home. He would drive through the night-dampened darkness, the old Chevrolet's headlights pointing out the twists and turns in the gravel road leading off the mountain and into the valley. I would lie awake gripped by fear, listening to car's departing drone, sometimes afraid even to breathe loudly. My sisters nearby slept fretfully. Eventually, I would hear the car churning its way back into the driveway, the doors slamming, the screen door's opening, the tired, soft voice of my mother sharing last words with Daddy before they both slipped into the creaking bed to sleep. This was a time when I, too, could safely sleep, occasionally awakened jarringly by a chicken's death squawk, or more likely, by Mama's and Daddy's moving about the next morning, getting out of bed, lighting a lamp, pouring water into a tea kettle for coffee.
Daddy, too, had been reduced by Mama; age now claimed and made him fragile; he no longer appeared to me the same hard, defiant, and sometimes cruel male he had sometimes seemed to me as a child. His helplessness now in this house brought back memories to me of the nights when Mama had worked those long hours and climbed into bed only late at night.
I had assumed some responsibility for my siblings, and they often came to me with the questions they were too embarrassed to ask Mama or Daddy. They looked up to me as having answers, but any wisdom I had acquired was that experience inflicted, and it was not what I would have chosen for myself. Before I was twelve, I felt older, having taken life's hurt inside myself; not knowing what else to do with it, I had cultivated an imaginary game in which I projected myself outside my own body, observed whatever it was at the moment tormenting me. It wasn't always anything specific, just the hardness of life, the small animals hunted for meat, the chickens' heads axed off for Sunday's dinner. I became a survivor, never letting anything or anyone get too close. Inside, I stayed a child, reaching out for affection, and eager to please. And it was the child's fear I remembered tonight even as I reflected upon Daddy's helplessness.
"Ed, I wanna talk w'you."
"It's the middle o'night," Elbert. "Don't you think people ever hav' t' sleep?"
"Aw, people don't care, 'bout me anyway," the voice whined. "They don't wanna talk t' me. Yo're th' onliest friend I've got. You take me in."
I heard Daddy respond. "Ain't no wonder people don't wanna talk t' you. They're tard of being 'wakened jest 'cause you had t' much t' drink. They ain't gonna stand f'r it, and I ain't either. Go to sleep on the porch; we'll talk tomorrow."
Next morning, Daddy dismissed Elbert's drunkenness, laughingly telling me how one night when Elbert had threatened suicide, a neighbor had replied, "If I wuz livin' th' way you are, Elbert, I shore wouldn't be in no hurry t'die. You'll jest git t' hell faster."
The rest of that night, I listened to the quiet about me, a quiet interlaced with occasional thick mutterings coming from the porch where Elbert slept in the chairs, a whippoorwill mourning in the distance. The girls tossed an arm back and forth or cried out in dream. In the walls, rats or flying squirrels moved about. I thought about spiders-how they hung out in all the corners here and under the beds and boxes that held long worn-out, out-grown clothes. I remembered how in the hospital Mama, given Codeine, had hallucinated about big black bugs crawling out of corners, old boxes, when they had first medicated her. I knew Mama's fears went back to her own childhood and a life starker than my own. I had tried to talk Mama out of the hallucinations-"Mom, it's only the medicine that's causing you to see bugs." She had replied , "I wish I could git one and put it on you. You'd see, they're real."
Toward morning, Elbert got up, stumbled off the porch, and drove off. His death-loneliness and despair become my own, as I felt the waste of life draining from each lost moment. This despair I was to feel intimately all my life, triggered by things that had happened, events traumatic enough that I buried them too deeply to be retrieved easily. Only as I approached mid-life would I discover stakes so high that I would have to confront what I had buried. This would be the beginning of the culmination of a reckoning that Mama's death had awakened in me.
I was not strong enough yet to face myself, and more importantly, I had found I could play expected roles and, thus, evade at least any intense questioning from outside myself. The activity and energy demanded of me permitted me to bury what it was in me that was already dead in life-or at least I had thought it was dead. I had not yet learned that death is always resurrected in order that life itself continue.	
At some point on that second visit, the work ended. There were no more drawers to sort through. What could be done had been. Daddy and I had visited kin-an hour here or there. We had enjoyed the drives through the country and the peculiar character of individual conversations. For me, it was a time of coming to some beginning terms of what my childhood had meant; I could see how far now I had moved away from it. This was no longer my life, but it was still very much a part of the blood thundering inside me, and I knew now I could never escape it.
Already, I'd returned in sleep to people and events past, and they peopled my head and heart more strongly sometimes than the people who pressed in upon me daily. I would return to the home place again and again in my dreams; and always, there would be the urgency of something there yet unfound and demanding my attention; I would awaken haunted and sure only of the driving force within me that kept me going. It was a strong force, a life force, form shaping matter; I knew I was not aware of consciously, and yet consciousness was a result of the life force's being there. In me, it directed itself outward into my husband and children, and still it was not satisfied; I felt it insatiably directing me into something yet to be.
One night, Daddy and I had sat up late at one of her relative's house. Sitting on the front porch swinging, we were restoring what we could of each other to ourselves, yet each of us felt a separation like the hand of death dropping a chill into the body. From the squatting cracker box crawl of houses lining the streets of this urban neighborhood, the never-ending noise of human voices drifted in.
Daddy and I came back home from our visits aware that responsibilities had been resumed, and with this awareness came a sense of dissolution. It was this Daddy and I took to the porch each night after the girls had fallen asleep. We filled the evening with easy conversation, content when the words slid away and left us with only the katydids' chirping, wind rustling the leaves, a whining mosquito.
I had already decided that tomorrow I would head back, The girls needed a good bath-not another wash pan filled with water from the buckets and heated, a fast once-over with a washcloth. I was tired of the sweat and dirt clinging to me. But before I left, I knew I would have to go back to Mama's grave-just as I'd done when I first came-and standing there, I would tell Mama, "I'm going, Mama. I don't know just when I'll get back. But I will be back; I have to be back; just as you've told me, I have family here. But you know, Mama, it's more than that; it's something inside me, pounding, something wanting to get out, wanting to be a part of everything that's here. You're here, too, Mama, aren't you? I can feel you inside me; it's almost as if I am you. I'm not afraid as much as I was. It's almost like when you prayed with me, 'Now, I lay me down to sleep; I pray thee Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord, my soul to take.'"
That final night home with Daddy, I didn't sleep-but settled down into the old mattress and sagging springs, where Mama had spent her last nights before going to the hospital, resting until the roosters started crowing at daybreak. Then I pushed out of bed, made a cup of instant coffee, walked outside, and breathed in morning air. Daddy, awakened, stood with me awhile; we neither of us said anything, just stood together and felt the morning seeping into our souls. Eventually, I roused the girls out of still heavy sleep, dressed them while they complained, told them they could sleep again on the way home.
I kissed Daddy good-bye; we both knew there would be other mornings and other places, other beginnings and endings, other seasons that would have to be lived through. We were content to know this was the place of birth, a place we shared, a place we would both come back to. The call of the land was an old call, a blood call, the call of our ancestors-a call we both knew we would never forsake; it bound us to each other and to the land, and to the mother and wife it had taken back into its womb, into which we, too, would eventually succumb. From the woods, the last call of the whippoorwill lingered as I backed my car out of the gravel driveway. Daddy waved and moved back into the darkness of the house.