Finality found her on a blissfully bright spring day. My mother died at home, alone. Consumed by COPD and the scars you inflicted. She knew the end drew near. Hard to breathe. A mind, the edges tattered by the dementia she feared most. I tried to bring her back. I tried long after my hands gave out. Long after my heart accepted it. One last time. Goodbye.

I get lost in this town without her. I’d tell people we fixed a lot in her last few years. Hard conversations. Confessions. Admissions. Tears. Late nights over rum. Longing for cigarettes we no longer smoked. I understand better now, what you did to her. Why she kept going back. How you drugged her. Trapped her. How she had no choices, either.

It wasn’t enough time. So many years spent arguing with and over your ghost. Nights where we still screamed and slammed doors. Cried over the same scars. Still on opposite sides of barbed wire fences. Bleeding. Begging for understanding. Skin and hearts shredded in the attempt to climb past the mangled metal for an embrace. A touch. Anything to heal the divide.

Now her home is a ghost town. Silence where her TV once played hockey games. She once read her books. Laughed. Spoke. We watched her fade slowly.

I’m glad I went back.

A cigarette smoldering in an ashtray. Smoke dancing in the dark over a filled glass. An abandoned coffee mug. Rings on notebook pages. Words, scribbled frantically. An attempt to process a world without her. Phone calls never again answered. Messages that will never go through.

I sit at my same kitchen table in my old chair. Ruminating upon this hollow crossroad. One road forward, left. Another headed right. And the one behind me. I could stay put. But why? I could leave. But to where?

I remember when roads were oblivions down which I tried to end my life. Chaotic shadows, taunting me. Here, on the edge of wildflowers returning, I find myself on a different road.

I can’t go back.

I inherited her brown hair and earthy eyes. Her compulsion for long drives. Nightfall. Empty roads. A home filled with love. She lived a life in grief. I wish I never resented her. We’re so alike, it wrecks me.

She wants her ashes spread in the mountains. Where I can pick wildflowers for her like I was a little girl again. One last long, aimless drive into nowhere. One final gas station coffee and a pack of cigarettes. Then she can finally rest.

I’ll drive home after a few days out there. Clearing my mind, my spirit. Cleansing it all of you one last time. Drinking rum and sitting with ghosts. She will finally be free of you, in a splendid field of summer hues where you never breathed the same air.

It’s all she has.

That’s not true. We are her legacy. Love and compassion. Adventure and curiosity. A love for books and music. A kindness for animals. A strong stance against people who mean harm to others.

Against people like you.

She will live on in every orange-dusted sunset and pink-smeared dawn. In the delicacy of a butterfly landing on petals. In the warmth of a house only she could make a home.

Because despite you, she made every place home for us. You never could take that from her.

A highway that meets the horizon. Jagged peaks stabbing skies. Trees as far as the restless eye can see. Daisies and buttercups tangle wildly into grass. Strawberry fields remind me of the Beatles songs she adored. A babbling river, crystalline in golden beams of sunlight.

There’s a reckoning in her death. That she outlived the man who terrorized us for a decade. A peace in this final chapter. I imagine death’s embrace was much warmer to her than it was for you. I got told by a paramedic that she probably didn’t even know it happened; she went peacefully.

Maybe you did get what you deserved in the end. Maybe not all deaths are the same. Final, yes. But maybe you didn’t slither away from your fate. Perhaps whatever suffering wrecked you in your last days was excruciating enough.

You can’t come back.

Twenty-two years since you burned the house down. You took everything but our lives. Had we been home, you would have taken that too. I can’t fight your ghost for the rest of my life the way she did. I’m exhausted. Throwing punches into thin air. Breaking glass. Screaming in the dead of night. Collapsing to my knees when the weight of memories crush me once more.

I can’t carry this anymore. It will continue to wreck me.

Can there be peace in life as there is sometimes in death? Can I sit up on that mountain where my mother will rest and make amends with that little girl in me who yearns for wildflowers and a great nowhere? Can I leave there as a woman no longer encumbered by the cackling skeleton of a dead man?

Can I lay in a shallow creek and stare at the sky in optimism, not with the longing to drown?

Is there a way for me to walk forward without always feeling so wrecked by the years gone by?

My sister and I talked about you, finally. We opened old wounds and memories like a dusty, tattered book that had been on a shelf for two decades. There’s a space in those words where your ghost was eviscerated by healing acknowledgments. Understanding. My mother and I may not have always gotten along. And we didn’t have nearly enough years to enjoy the time we did have to heal.

But the daughters she leaves behind have many years now to find what that means. We both have her eyes. We’re so different from each other but in some ways, the same. The years have gone by like days, told in pictures lining the walls our mother displayed. I’ll protect my sister forever. But she’s strong; she has learned from both our mother and from me, the mistakes and mishaps she won’t repeat.

She’s nothing like you.

I read somewhere that losing your mother shoves you into a new type of adulthood. It’s been almost three weeks since she went and nothing feels the same. So much remains unsaid. Unanswered. Frays left hanging haphazardly in the wind.

It’s more than a crossroads. It’s an empty space. A blank canvas. A home, lived in for years, suddenly vacant and only walls can speak of the memories stirring within. Murmurs of life. Whispers. Then silence. A void in the heart where she should still be. Love, rendered homeless. I don’t know what I hate the most.

It was an honor to take care of her in her remaining years. And it was an honor to care for her in death the way she always cared for others in life.

Yet the road I’ve always been on… the darkened one, of self-destruction before it became one of healing… I no longer know its purpose. My purpose. I lived as a wreckage for so long, I don’t know how to live in peace. How to pull off the highway and finally find a home.

But that’s the new adulthood. There’s no going back.

Maybe it’s time to let the scars finish bleeding out. Time to drop the skeletons off at their graves. To leave that blue motel in the rear view mirror and build a home. Unpack the worn out suitcases. Hang up pictures. Sit within new walls and learn how she made each place a home. Learn how to live a life that isn’t forever shattered. Live it for her.

Maybe it’s time to let myself get all turned around somewhere until it feels right. Neon lights. Night time stars. A city’s chaotic downtown. A mountain’s eloquent nowhere. Let the final cigarette burn out in the old ashtray. Let another gas station coffee guide me to whatever comes next.

I’ve been running for so long but it’s been in one place. Crashing down while going nowhere. Punching at ghosts who aren’t there.

I need to start walking to go forward. There’s no such thing as sharing the world’s wisdom in one lifetime. But she sure tried. And I will let it guide me to the turn off where I might finally see a glimpse of me not bound in shadows.

I can never go back. One last time. Goodbye.

Part 1

Part 2