The One Where My Mom Almost Ran Away With The Circus

Happy 7th deathiversary, Mama.

The day before you died, Claire, my 11-year-old, asked me if I thought you were scared. Claire had a long list of fears, bears on hikes, our house flooding in the middle of the night, bad dreams about the same evil witch who could kill children with her bad breath. She knew fear and she didn’t want you to be scared.

I thought of the last conversation I had with you, how you screamed.

I couldn’t lie to my daughter, so I said, yes, I think Oma was scared, but I don’t think she is now. But, of course, I didn’t know. I only knew your body was kept still, intubated, paralyzed by medication, held in place, suspended. But internally, you were swelling and swelling, infections raging, organs failing. I don’t know if you had thoughts or feelings or senses.

The six days between intubation and death, that hazy, liminal twilight comes slamming back into my body every year, pulling me underwater, a massive anchor tied to my core, pulling me into the depth. My face is an open scream, but only bubbles emerge, no sound. And then I’m forever drowning and never dying. I’m scared that this is what it was like for you until we decided to turn the machines off and let you go. Every year I atone for what I’m scared I might have put you through, the six days you were underwater, drowning and never dying.

Claire asked me to tell her a story about you. In so many memories, I see your face with your mouth wide open, screaming. I could not pick a story that encapsulated you fully, but one that came close.

We were at the Circus. You and a bunch of rowdy kids. It was my brother’s birthday party, and so we sat in the front row. The horse trainer had a mustache, or maybe not, but he acted like he had a mustache, all greasy bravado and shiny spandex. The horses wore sparkly gem and feather contraptions on their heads and were running in circles until the mustache man asked for a volunteer from the audience. A half dozen kids immediately started yelling and pointing at you. Of course. You did not want to volunteer. I’m still surprised sometimes that you took his hand and climbed over the barrier, and stepped into the circle of sawdust and horse shit. Then again, you did always say that you wanted to run away with the Circus when you were little, and as a child myself, I was sometimes scared that you still would.

You were going to be the newest attraction, mustache man announced. He would teach you how to ride one of the costumed, sparkly horses. Just even getting up on the horse was a whole production meant to make the audience laugh. You were strapped into a harness, connected to a cable, leading to a hook at the highest point in the Circus tent, with four (also mustached guys) holding onto the other end. Instead of hoisting you up on the horse, you were supposed to run at the horse’s ass and then jump on its back, like an acrobat. Of course, the four men kept pulling at the rope to send you flailing and screaming into the air, purposely missing the horse multiple times before lowering you on its back.

They made you ride in circles and wave and then asked you to stand up on the horse. In my memory, there is a drum roll. I got scared, because I knew you would not be able to balance on a galloping horse. I didn’t know that your 110 lbs body that lived off of black coffee, cigarettes, and chocolate bars was light enough for four burly mustache men to hold. I’d heard of circus acrobats working without nets and breaking their backs, their necks, their faces.

But you did it anyway. You scrambled up and for a moment you stood, eyes wide. Surprised. You wobbled and fell and a scream went through the audience as the mustache men did what they were there to do and pulled hard, catapulting you up into the air.

It’s you swinging back and forth right over our heads, your arms and legs flailing, face cracked open in a screamlaugh. Your hair is wild and so are your eyes. You look scared and happy. You look straight at me, my face a mirror of yours. Wide open. That’s the image in my head, as if I paused the VCR, and locked eyes with you through the screen.

Listen….I never said I was a painter. But it is interesting how childlike this looks. That fucking horse! I mean. Wow. Anyway, I started this last night and ran out of steam to finish, so the rope looks like floss. It was slightly thicker than that…but I guess this adequately represents the danger I thought my mother was in.

Claire, who had just visited you the summer before you died, tells me about playing with your hands. She would pinch and pull up a piece of the loose skin on the back of your hand between her thumb and forefinger and then let go to see the wrinkled skin stand up on its own. You could not go anywhere, do anything, barely even make it to the bathroom without losing your breath, so maybe you were grateful for this game that allowed you to just lie there, almost head to head, just the way you needed so you could make out her face with your nearly blind eyes.

I used to hate my hands with the short fingers and round nails that never grow right. The shiny skin over my wrinkly knuckles, making them look like little sausages. Now all I see when I look down are your hands but without fingertips stained brown from the henna you used to dye your hair while smelling faintly of Marlboro Reds.

I wear your ring every day. If I forget, my thumb brushes against where it should be, searching.

I’ve been looking for you, Mama, in the seven years you’ve been dead. I’ve been mothering myself and my four daughters. You loved them desperately. Maybe not quite as much as me, which created the right amount of space to breathe.

I drink peppermint tea with honey when I’m sick or sad. Or both. I make it for your granddaughters. I make it because it reminds me of lying in the upstairs bedroom while listening to you boil water downstairs in the kitchen. I would fall asleep before you brought it up. The next morning, I would wake up and drink the cold sweet tea next to my bed and know you loved me.

I wish you were here to make me tea. We wouldn’t need to talk at all. I just want to hear you one more time, downstairs in the kitchen, boiling water.

In her beautiful memoir One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter,

scaachi

Koul writes thoughtfully and hilariously about her own complicated relationship with her mother and says “Nothing bad can happen to you if you're with your mom.”

One time, when I was 11 or 12, the same age as Claire when you died, you took me to see Cirque du Soleil in the big city (Frankfurt). This must have been the early nineties, so Cirque du Soleil was a big deal and very expensive. Too expensive for you who’d get up at 5 am during summers to work in a factory packing fish food in addition to your regular job as a secretary. We drove to the city in your tiny, black Fiat Uno. When we got out of the show hours later, the car was gone. Towed. We had to walk to the taxi stand close to midnight. It was before we had cell phones. We had no GPS and no map. We had to walk along the Kaiserstrasse, which, back then, was the unofficial red-light district. The place to go for sex or drugs, or both. It was the first time I saw a prostitute.

All I remember was your vice grip dragging me along, telling me to look straight ahead and talk to no one. I fell asleep in the backseat of a cushy BMW taxi that took us the 45-minute drive back to our small town.

I don’t know if you were scared. I don’t know if you spent more on that taxi than the tickets to the show. I don’t remember details about the show itself. I do remember that you were in charge and that you had me and that nothing bad happened.

There were, unfortunately, many times bad things did happen when I was with you, but not that time.

Seven years is a long time and it is nothing. I’m just now starting to really miss you. I first needed to walk through the anger at everything you were not and now 7 years later I’m starting to see everything you were.

After being angry at you, I was angry at myself for not fixing or changing our relationship before you died. But now I know that nothing is ever lost. My relationship to you continues to evolve. I read once that in a seven-year cycle, all the cells in our bodies renew themselves, so we are a new person every seven years. I was reminded of this on your 7th deathiversary. It sounded so beautiful that I was a completely different person now, that maybe not only my body but also my emotions and thoughts got a total overhaul and I could start fresh with you.

But, of course, that online myth is quite disappointing in reality. The average life span of cells is 7-10 years, with muscle and bone lasting much longer, sometimes decades and the cells in our stomach lining renewing every few days. And the reality is, well, also more real. Parts of my relationship with you changed immediately when you died and parts will stay the same for decades or forever. But mostly, all the different parts are always moving and changing and evolving, so it is hard to grasp anything, and all of a sudden it’s 7 years later and I feel so different. And so the same.

Thirty years ago, I pulled up the heavy shades in my childhood home, the ones facing the street, and mimicking the speed and momentum and clattering whoosh of you doing the same chore. Slower at first and faster at the end but not so fast that the shades slammed into the top of the window. I copied you so exactly that it felt like inhabiting your body, instead of my own.

Now, sometimes when I walk by the mirror and only see myself out of the corner of one eye, I see your face. I do not have your eyes or brows or nose or lips. No part of my face looks like yours and yet I always find you there, in the way it moves, the deep laugh lines in the same place around our mouths, the hooded lids, the way I stare at people and answer the phone and laugh with my eyes squeezed shut while my mouth rips open wide enough to expose my silver grey crowns in the corners of my grin. The way I scream in the shower and in the car. The way I sing loudly and off-key when I’m all alone in the house.

The way you look at my face is the same way I will forever look at my daughters.

You were never scared of wanting. You always wanted more even when you knew you wouldn’t get to have more. How beautifully brave is it to never stop wanting more when you’re dying? To continue wanting second chances, and another conversation, one more hug, a last visit. On my last visit, I said my goodbyes and went to the airport, where I sat for hours until the announcement that my flight had been canceled for no apparent reason and was rescheduled for the next day. In 20 years of flying between Germany and the US, I never once had a flight canceled. I’m not saying it was magic or god or manifestation or grace or the universe. I’m not saying I knew I had been given one last day with you. I didn’t. We did nothing exciting. Just more sitting around the table. More tea. One more night in the same room, listening to you wheezing on the breathing machine.

But what makes me happy is that you wanted more and you got more. One more day, another conversation, one more hug, a last (last) visit. I believe in you more than I believe in god and if anyone made this happen, it was you wanting it so bad, you bent the universe to your will for 24 extra hours.

How much wanting does it take to fill your entire life up to the last moment? I almost hated you 7 years ago when I had to be the one listening to your last conscious words on the phone, your last independent breaths. I thought it was torture, maybe punishment. It was also a gift. And if anyone had said this to me 7 years ago, I would have hated them, too.

You did not slip quietly into a coma. You went screaming and trying to rip tubes off your face. I don’t know if a peaceful, gentle death would have been better, but peaceful and gentle you were not.

Sometimes you were a walking scowl. You made your own weather. And you made other people uncomfortable. You were edgy. You were loud. You could be uncompromising. You were very small but always took up space. You had presence.

I listened to you suffocate and I could not comprehend how your voice was still so loud. I didn’t understand where you got the strength. As you were dying, you wanted to live. You wanted more. You did not go quietly and you did not live quietly.

I give myself permission to want more, because of you.

I wish I could hear you call my name again. As Gregory Boyle says in his book Tattoos on the Heart: “We all just want to be called by the name our mom uses when she's not pissed off at us.”

Julisch.

My name in your mouth.

Preserved, not in resin, or amber, but between plates of metal and glass, tucked inside years of voicemails that include the school’s attendance line and the dentist, and also, forever you, my dead mother, whose voice always sounded like you loved me, even pissed off. You could never hide it and never tried to.

The last message I sent you was an audio voicemail played for you after turning off the machines. During your final unwinding, you heard me telling you the circus story. My brother texted that you had listened and then left. I hope you weren’t too scared. I hope it felt like slipping into a warm bath. I hope it felt like dissolving into light. I hope it felt gentle and peaceful.

But if it felt like screamlaughing and out of control hurtling through space, I don’t think you minded.

I can imagine your face.

Photo credit: Astrid, one of my mom’s oldest friends. This is from their last photoshoot before my mom’s death.