By Co Bauman
It’s the same place, different day. And it hits me with a force I am unprepared for, yet again.
I hear her. I can feel her.
I struggle to juggle emotion, noise and simple commands. I hear the familiar sounds around me in the muffled way you do when you first put on noise cancelling headphones or insert foam ear plugs. Sound is sucked down a vortex, leaving me inside myself with my own thoughts.
Somewhere I hear, “Paper or plastic?” I’m surrounded by seven lanes of lines and the intermittent beep of cash register scanners mixed with the blurred voices of acquaintances bantering small talk. I try to concentrate, bring myself front and center to the present, focus on the colorful magazines beckoning me and other shoppers with fake news. But instead I feel myself fading into slow motion as though I’m there, but not there.
If I steel myself and try hard enough, I can see my mom as though she’s standing in front of me again. It’s not a dream. But it jolts me awake as though it were.
She’s so familiar that conjured images swim to the surface eagerly, readily. They are consoling. Which is strange because in life I always heard her before I saw her, thanks to her unique throat clearing that sounded like a frog with a cold and was not able to be imitated by anyone. It was irritating to her. Comforting to me.
I don’t remember a time she didn’t make that sound. No matter where I was, whether sitting in an elementary school classroom or in an all-school mass or playing basketball or running track, or around the neighborhood or in a grocery store, her voice preceded her.
“Oh sorry,” I say, when I hear paper or plastic again, as I fumble with my bulky key chain smothered by mini rectangle shaped plastic to find my Chopper rewards card, “I have some bags.”
While I hand over my crumpled collection of nested bags, I feel the gush of wind that surges in each time the nearby entrance double doors open, as she blows in with it. I can so clearly see the khakicolored, pant-length wool peacoat, the cream acrylic hat perched fashionably too far back on her head to offer much protection from the cold. The tufts of short still-dyed black hair faded to a lighter color than in her younger years.
My chest swells as I recall the pride I once felt in seeing this petite woman in her 80s still willing and able to brave dismal winter temps to prepare a home-cooked meal for her husband – my dad. A man whose intervals left at home alone shriveled like his mind. And mimicked her shrunken body, withered by time and stress and age.
I knew inside she was burdened by a life she no longer recognized with a man who thank God still, after 60 years, recognized her. And I liked that she could enter this space with the confidence of a woman who knew her way around after shopping here all her life. It was her sanctuary, conveniently across the street from a life that was no longer familiar.
I offered regularly – whether in bitter temps or scorching heat – to pick up things for her to save her from going out. I shopped at the same store, after all. But I stopped asking when I finally realized the quick trips across the street were her brief escape from the overwhelming and stifling days she managed. Those quick trips may have helped save her sanity. But they didn’t save her. In the end.
This is how I remember our encounters toward the end we didn’t know was coming.
I glance again toward the automatic double doors and the steady stream of customers coming and going. I look close and hard with the knowing that she’s not among the throng of shoppers.
She’s never going to be again. We’re not going to chat idly in the produce department or discuss what each of us is making for dinner. I won’t hear her make her usual snarky comment to my vegetarian self, “So which bean are you cooking tonight?” It was a long running joke, her thinking that’s all I ate.
It’s been three years since my mom didn’t bother to wake up one early October morning. Completely unexpected and therefore devastating. I keep wondering if not saying goodbye is making me still long to see her in the place where I bumped into her with random frequency.
The sacker finishes bagging my items. As usual my cart is overflowing even though I, too, am only cooking for two most of the time. I insert my silver chip card. No signature needed.
I thank the young sacker, wrap my brown leather cross-body bag over my shoulder and grab the still chilly handrail of the cart. I push toward the exit. Still looking. Still listening. Still fooling myself with images that can’t be. I glance into the contents of my cart. Two cans of black beans perch at the top, where they shouldn’t be, squishing the Frito bag below. I say to myself, “Black bean soup, Mom. Black bean soup. I knew you’d ask.”
I load the bags in my car and glance back at the store’s entrance. “Goodbye, Mom. I sure do miss you, but I know I’ll see you again here soon.”
Back home I unload the bags, grab one of my many cookbooks and wonder if I enjoy cooking just because she did. And if it’s impossible for me to cook small quantities because I watched her cook for eight people all my life. Sometimes I don her old Cathy Guisewite apron and regularly use the retro yellow mixing bowl that was her mother’s. I love knowing her hands were where mine are now, and I love feeling like I’m standing a bit in her shoes.
I start making the soup, my mom’s familiar words permeating my mind, “Is it going to be too spicy?” Her routine question about every meal I ever cooked for her.
It’s ironic that the last big gesture I made on mom’s behalf was cooking all her favorite foods for her 83rd birthday – grilled salmon, asparagus, grilled vegetables, salad and banana cream pie. As I stood there preparing that meal, there was no way to know it would be the last time she was on this earth to celebrate her special day. That was nine days before she didn’t wake up. I treasure the stored phone message she left the next day thanking me for the delicious birthday dinner. And I love knowing it was neither beans, nor spicy.
How could I have known then that my trips to the grocery store will never be the same. And that for as long as I continue to live in her neighborhood, I will still watch. I will still listen. And I will still conjure the visions, the memories, the sound.
The sound that precedes her even in death. Her clearing her throat. While I try to clear the lump in mine.
And then I’ll head home…to cook my beans.