My Mother's Magician

So the big news around town is that the roof partially blew off of our high school during the windstorms this week. 60mph sustained and 77mph gusts. For several days. (Not entirely true…there were a few times when the wind dropped down to 54mph.) That kind of wind takes the siding and shingles off of homes as easily as normal wind whisks autumn leaves off of foliage. Every tree and bush in town is stripped bare and the mess of dry still semi-green debris got powdered into a fine dust that chokes anyone trying to breath in its vicinity.

 All of the commercial signs came down except one which was already down: that one was blown back up and installed on a post three parking lots away. Conga lines of Semi-trucks dancing sideways into the ditches along I-90 prompted the government to close the interstate for a few hours during the worst of it and the weather radios blared all day long trying to get local residents to take the wind warnings seriously. The day after was an eerie kind of silence that had even us long timers flinching nervously whenever a slight breeze started up.

That’s not why I haven’t been online lately—though it was interesting enough that I thought I ought to start with it—if anything, it’s why I should have been online: hours trapped in my little apartment without much else to do. But I’ll be honest: I’ve spent the last week sleeping and feeling bad for myself. In the latter stages of grief, anxiety has given way to depression…or maybe that’s just me looking up after the storm of her death and realizing how deathly quiet it is in my life without that. I try to think back to how things were before the diagnosis, but the memories I find are not pleasant. I have always been close to my mother in that compulsive sort of way that led me to confess everything to her, but I was only really emotionally close to her during those last five years.

My therapist keeps pestering me about whether or not there was something I wish I had said to her before she died. No. There isn’t. I’m glad I never said any of this to her. I’m glad I didn’t know about it soon enough to disclose…

Do you know the difference between an illusionist and a charlatan? Do you know why one of them inspires us and the other feels like a betrayal personified? Consent. That is the core of the thing. We give our consent for the illusionist to lie and deceive us so he can bend our realities slightly and give us the magic we hunger for. The stage is an agreement between performer and audience. But the charlatan has no concern for our consent. There is no contract.

Our reality as the close-knit mother and daughter was largely an illusion. There was a time when it may have been real…but near the end, it was a careful charade suspended between us. It was a gossamer web of lies holding out on its last threads as it waited—like so many other things waited—for her death…I will forever ask myself if my mother suspected that much of our relationship had been created out of dreams and fantasies that we had endeavored to make real, that we were quietly playing the part of illusionists, putting on a show that hid the pain underlying it all.

Maybe she really did believe. Maybe she truly forgot the things she said to me once, the things she did to me once…or maybe she never saw any fault in what she had done. That last week, she had cried and apologized to my brother for an argument that had never sat quite right with her. 

Where was my apology? 

Oh, she offered me a chance to air my grievances some weeks before that, but it was in such a confrontational and critical way…it was nothing more than an offer to argue with her—an offer which I refused, because that wasn’t what I wanted. She never offered me what I wanted, and what I wanted wasn’t the sort of thing I could ask for.

So I kept my mouth shut and continued the show. It was my greatest, and final, performance for her. After she died, I told her I was a magician, and that I would see her again…perhaps sooner than she thought. I was speaking of a different kind of magic: the kind that makes the world of the dead accessible even to our modern minds. However, in retrospect, there were layers of meaning in that statement. I meant what I meant, but I was simultaneously being far more literal than I realized at the time.

It’s only 50 degrees outside right now, but all the fans in my apartment are on because it is too quiet in the absence of the wind. The fans don’t really cover up that silence, because it isn’t a real silence. It’s the same silence that is in the white noise of my conversations with my brother and father. It’s the same silence between me and my friends as we banter on the phone or around a dinner table. It’s the same silence underlying every meeting with my coworkers and every session with my therapist. The silence between the notes of my favorite songs, between stitches when I bead, between the clatter of dishes as I do my chores….

Her magician does not speak anymore.

I do not know what to make of that.