Falling Into Autumn

By Karen L. Hogan

Tom sits at the piano playing his Fall Hymn. I see an autumn-colored leaf riding on the skin of the water, being carried away by the swift flow of the stream . That’s what Fall is to me—each leaf taking its leave.

The California drought parched the arroyo, leaving the streambed dry and dusty the year my mother died. The leaves started falling earlier than usual. I had to imagine them being carried downstream.

My mother was not your apple-pie, cookies-baking-in-the-oven-when-you-got-home-from-school kind of mom. She was more Lauren Bacall than June Allyson. “So, you’re dating a new man,” she said to me. “Does that mean you just met him or that he’s had a sex change operation?”

She was funny and she had shed much of the baggage that women her age, those who came of age during World War II, had carried.

I was her only daughter. I had helped her shed the baggage by the choices I made along the way, smashing the boundaries that defined what women could do, weren’t supposed to do, wandering into the realm where dragons and wolves roamed free.

We were close, but each time I stepped foot in the realm of dragons and wolves, it tested her comfort zone. I would go one way, while she stayed at the crossroad.  

Eventually, she would follow me down the path or at least believed me that the dragons and wolves were not the fearsome creatures she had been led to believe they were.

But then, about a month before she died, we came to that crossroad that was always the most troubling. The signposts pointed Family Peace one way, Karen’s safety and well-being the other. The path away from family peace was the one that harbored her most fearsome dragons and wolves. And for generations, the women in my family, as had women in families throughout the ages, chose to walk the path of Family Peace—without regard to the damage it would do to their own souls.

For me, safety and well-being is the path of living, rather than merely surviving. She was angry with me for leaving the path generations of women had followed. Or at least I think she was.

But I knew we would reconcile, that she would see that those dragons and wolves lived in a lush, welcoming forest. I thought she would follow me, or at least understand.

But then, on that hot July Sunday, she fell.

She was eighty-three but her big spirit hid well the frailty of her body—a body ravaged by end-stage emphysema. With each breath, she battled the advance of slow suffocation.

I was with her when the doctor told her that her hip had broken into four pieces, saw the look that came over her face. I knew that she had made a decision. She didn’t want to prolong her death. She told me that years earlier. Asked me to promise her that when she made that decision, I would make sure she would leave as she wanted, not as my father had, Alzheimer’s leeching his spirit until he was a shell of who he once was.

I promised her I would.

They operated that Sunday night, and then she disappeared into herself. I would visit, looking for a sign that we would talk, meet peacefully at the crossroad, and she would give me her blessing for the path I had chosen.

The call came at two in the morning on Wednesday. She had pneumonia and was in the ICU. Given her frailty, I might want to come to the hospital.

I touched my mother’s hand. She opened her eyes and spoke to me, the words muffled by the mask that covered most of her face. She gestured and I moved the mask.

“I’m dying,” she said. “I thought I was dying last night.”

“Is that what you want,” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, and closed her eyes.

The nurse freaked out and shot the words at her. “Do you know who you are? Do you know where you are? Do you know what day of the week this is?”

My mother didn’t answer.

The doctor insisted they could cure this.

“Cure what?” I asked.

“The pneumonia,” he said.

“And, then what?” I asked. “She believes that pneumonia is the cancer patient’s—and the old person’s friend.”

He had no answer. And so they relented to my mother’s wishes.

“I’m giving you morphine now,” the nurse said.

“Give me lots,” my mother replied.

It was so my mother. Those were her last words. She died eight hours later.

I had done as I had promised. I let her take her leave. And she left without giving me her blessing.

I was devastated.

The leaves blew across the path on my early October evening walk in the Arroyo a few months after she died. I was still looking—hoping—for a sign that my mother had blessed my choice.

I reached the point where the path diverges and walked down the branch that bordered the dry streambed. Halfway down I turned to look back.

No one.

I turned and looked ahead.

No one.

I had the arroyo to myself.

“I’m a motherless daughter,” I said aloud, and then listened. Wind playing with the dry leaves. Leaves skittering across the dry path. Birds calling to each other.

I let the words sink in. I’m a motherless daughter.

No mother to curl up next to on the couch. No mother to disappoint or be disappointed in. No touchstone. Just my own life experience and the memory of hers. The choices I made. The choices that were not choices for her. Like her well-being over family peace. Family peace was encoded on the extra X chromosome of her DNA.

I looked to where the paths diverged and thought of the moment my mother heard the doctor say her hip had broken into four pieces. I could see it on her face—her choice. She could have chosen survival over living. But instead she chose living, by being willing to let go and leave. She took the path that for all any of us know is filled with wolves and dragons. And she had asked me to clear the way for her.

That was her blessing.

I continued on my walk. Followed the path as it looped back around to where it became one path again. Listened to the sounds of the dry October arroyo evening. Heard Tom’s Fall Hymn in my mind. Imagined a leaf being carried downstream.

My mother did not have the language to live the life of a woman who can own her own life. She could not help me write that story. I had to write it for myself.

Instead, she showed me how to die.

How to leave—as a leaf takes its leave.