CLS Sandoval

After Mom Died

I had fallen asleep with some kind of true crime documentary playing through my earbud. I left one air free to be attentive to any moans or cries from my dying mother. It took a moment for me to remember where I was, on her curved couch that she had reupholstered in a bright pink white gray black patterned fabric, Barbara sent me a text asking how my mom was. I told her that she was still sleeping then I sat up and looked a little closer. As I approached, my mother, I saw that her eyes were slightly open, and her mouth was a gape. I knew she wasn’t there anymore.  Her pretty blue eyes once clear like the sky on a summer day. We’re now a cloudy gray, including Black people now blown out. I thought to myself she’s blind. She can’t see. Later I thought that was odd since my mother was obviously dead, and no longer needed her eyes.  I alerted her husband and my sister that my mom was no longer with us. My sister got to work cleaning my mom’s face and hugging her and I made the phone call to donate her body.

Unknown to me until months later, my sister sobbed herself to sleep, and felt my mother embracing her that evening. She, crying out to our mother, begging her to return. I feel my mom has had hand, allowing my sister to believe more than she had. to see that there may be life after this one. The way my sister put it was that the veil was softened.

I have yet to feel the presence of my great grandmother, Nana, or mother since their deaths. I think about them, as I gaze into the heavens under a stary sky. I even talk to them sometimes in my mind. But my sister is the one who really felt our mother’s presence after she passed.

Flying in the Air

On the third floor of my childhood home, I stood on my parents’ deck, hanging over ever so slightly.  I would dream of flying off of that deck, dropping just a little with gravity, then swooping up toward the clear Poway sky, perhaps on a stary night, high enough to see the Pacific, a 30-minute drive away.  Thankfully, looking straight down would tip my balance enough to scare me away from the wooden railing.  The lantana that my father had planted before I was born wound up the diagonal wood on the side of the house, all the way up to the shingles.  Here, on the deck, I could be eye to eye with the hummingbirds, suspended in air from their wings flapping too fast for me to clearly see, as they went from yellow to purple to magenta clusters of teeny tiny flowers.  I was flying with them.

 

Sunrise

Every sunrise of my life seemed the same until the morning of August 18, 2016. My mom and I flew into Madison, Wisconsin the night before. Then my daughter’s birth mother invited us to the hospital to meet her. I paced in the waiting room for the hour or so that the C-section took. Then I met my daughter. Holding her for the first time, I looked out of the hospital to see the sun in the clear blue sky, the result of a perfect sunrise.