So Many Seats

This story was written as an entry to the “The Dragon Beside Me” challenge; for international women’s month. The challenge asked for submissions about a woman who has inspired you, with a word count limit of 800.

Sometimes when I visit my parents house, I walk by my mothers office and look in the doorway, finding her elsewhere, her desk chair abandoned. The empty chair hits a note, reminding me that one day this chair will be permanently empty. Knowing one day I might glimpse it and profoundly feel her absence. It’s a premature grief, acknowledging that your time with someone is limited. At the age of 69 she may continue to live for decades, but it’s still a moment that gives me pause as much as it does appreciation - that my mother is simply in another room, and the option to find her and wrap my arms around her is still available.

Most of the time when I walk through this hallway and glance over my mother is there at her desk. She’s often hard at work on her latest contribution to our small town’s heritage association newsletter. Four times a year she chooses a business, an event, a person or family from our town’s history and compiles a folk history on the subject to share in the newsletter, interviewing locals, getting quotes from her network about their memories, finely weaving the story together. It’s time consuming, but it’s a labor of love and one she does well. Many of the townspeople she has interviewed have since passed away, but their stories live on, captured by my mother for preservation. She’s been at this for nearly twenty years. The town is lucky to have her. So am I.

If she isn’t at her desk compiling her interviews into narratives, she’s often there chatting with friends or playing Solitare, usually listening to Bob Seger. The wall is thin between her office and my childhood bedroom, where I sleep when I visit. Through the wall I often hear her singing offkey to Night Moves. It’s endearing. Sometimes she’s putting together a slideshow - photo montages set to music. She used to make them for special occasions like birthdays and graduations. Now it seems she only makes them for funerals. She says it’s hard to look through the old photos anymore.

Occasionally I talk with friends who do not share my maternal luck, and I’m reminded how extraordinary it is to be raised by someone whose love is transparent and unquestionable, whose support is ceaseless. The kind of mother who runs to your aid when you have a night terror and scream in the middle of the night. The kind who always answers when you call. She was the first voice I heard in this world, and it still soothes me. I dread to know the day will come where this support is not available to me.

My sister and I often talked at length about how we’d won the lottery with our mom. Unfortunately the warm love of a good mother and a safe, healthy childhood wasn’t enough to prevent my sister’s eventual mental health struggles and subsequent death. When the news came, it came from my mother. Her voice breaking on the phone, trying to form the words through her own shock. We were connected by wireless signals and the worst possible news radiating outward from each of us like shockwaves. We’d both fought so hard to save my sister. We’d both mothered her. My partner drove me the impossible two hours to my parents house, while I wailed gutteral howls from the passenger seat, pinching my arms trying to wake up from the nightmare. (I had bruises for a week.) I found my mother in the recliner in the living room and I sat on her lap and held her while she sobbed.

Five years have passed since that day. We have persevered, certainly in no small part by way of leaning on each other. I’m grateful to have had five years without additional grief, and hope for as many more as possible. But sometimes the sight of that empty office chair reminds me of life’s impermanence. That sometimes there are empty seats where the people we love should be, and aren’t. In offices, living rooms, and so frequently around a dinner table at a holiday gathering. It’s a lot to sit with. Chairs as vessels, holding us in the present when in use, a stark vacancy when unoccupied.

Neither of us could save my sister, but my mother’s love is my own saving grace. In the depths of despair I hold close to the knowledge that the last thing I could do is abandon my mother - I am determined to do everything within my power to make sure I outlive her. I can only pray I do live to bear the weight of seeing her empty seats one day. And I hope until then she’ll be in so many seats across from me.