BA-CHI

I am in Canada. In a dog park. My mother is dead. I am wearing her lipstick. It is the last one she wore, I think. I found it when I went to her apartment, in her walker basket. She was so pretty wearing the pink-red.

Grief is a slog. If I stay busy I feel my feelings. I also don't feel my feelings. If I don't stay busy, I feel my feelings and I also don't feel my feelings. Everyone has an opinion about grief. They're all right and they're all wrong.

One sadness is family politics. My family is not close anymore, like many families. What keeps us apart is the grenade of narrative. And probably me. I know I've been an ass. I know I've always had an opinion: about what people do for work, for spirituality, for politics, who they choose to be around, how they eat or drink, how codependent or addicted they are, and how 'narcissistic.' I've suddenly become a psychotherapist, raising my petty judgment to the level of professional diagnosis.

My mom and I seemed to be on planet Earth as foils for each other. Even right after my liver surgery, when I painfully lowered my body onto her couch, I had to put my hand up in the air. She put her hand up many times, too. Her contributions to me felt like criticism and vice versa. I was hoping to get to the point where she didn't trigger me before she died, but no.

I finally cry. It feels like doing yoga - painfully good. Underneath all the narratives is the pure missing of my little mom, clip-clipping her walker forward, after one of our arguments on the phone, Mom with a knot in her gut, greeting people with her pink-red mouth.

A maintenance guy had come to the door while I was there.

"Dottie was a mess!" The last word had two syllables. "I'd pick her up in my truck. She tried to get across the highway with her walker. Traffic goes too fast down there. She wanted a burger. So I went and got her one and brought her back here. I loved Dottie!"

'I miss my little mom' comes to me in the dog park. The thought feels pure. Behind that is an old sadness, sitting like stale coffee in a cup on a window sill you intend to wash one day.

Maybe my writing will have new depth I thought, selfishly, but also open to my mom's legacy.

I am walking through a playground in Canada, wearing my mother's lipstick, crying. There are dogs. Some vigilant, some ridiculously affectionate. You get what you get with dogs and families.

I am outside Toronto, working with my old sweetheart, Anurag's family. Anurag's nickname is 'Rags' and he is as humble as that moniker. He is with Kate, his fiancé. There is no weirdness between us.

Kate is fighting for custody of her kids with a son-of-a-bitch of an ex. I used to think that if there was conflict, I could always let go of something. But this guy really does seem like a son-of-a-bitch.

Boy, do Indian families know how to 'family.' I mean traditional. I'm eating great food and helping Deva, Anurag's sister, care for their Mom, who calls me 'ba-chi' -Hindi for 'my child.

'

"I won't remember your name."

"Vanda. It means wanderer, butterfly," Then I tell her the funniest joke about three linguists arguing about which language is the most beautiful. The punchline is the German linguist yelling, And what is wrong with 'schmetterling'?

I'm not sure she gets it but she gets me. She says she has three daughters now: Deva, Kate, and me.

When I first came, I told the women my mom had just died.

"And you're here?" they asked, shocked. That would not happen in their culture.

"Sometimes you take her seriously and sometimes you don't," said Deva, referring to the dementia. I sat on her bed. She told me how she wanted her death to go. I made a big deal of recording it into my phone so she felt taken seriously. She wants a simple, clean death.

"Plastic on the floor before you lay the body down. Go buy now, ba-chi, So you don't run around crazy later."

The Indian tradition is to bathe the body after death, and she says a sponge bath is fine.

"Well, can't we just put you out in the yard and hose you off?" I joke, and her soft, brown face breaks into laughter.

Deva is exacting in how she wants everything concerning her mom done. I'm trying to work with integrity and do the right thing by her, but I'm pretty sure it's impossible and we're not getting along. This morning, I put the short side of the comforter on the long side of the bed on the first try and Deva barked at me. That's when you know there's something reactive that is running Deva. She has been taking care of her mom for eight years, exhausted, mind body, and soul. There's usually one in every family that steps up, and it nearly kills them. I should have more compassion for Deva.

I get away to clear my head of my family, Kate's, and Anurag's. I am walking in a park in Canada. My tears run down onto the pink/red lipstick and the dogs.

I return, sit on Kate and Anurag's bed, and tell them how sad I am. I know you have to share this stuff and let the kindness of others hold you like a hammock. That used to be the role of family but it's not always that way. Anurag and Kate's kindness is right there.

I drop a heavy pot lid on the floor, it makes a noise and Deva yells at me like I am an underling. I am unwilling to be here in this capacity and plan to leave. It's my role with Deva. In a meta sense, I am here to foil her, too.

Now back home, I'm talking to my friend, Kristina on the phone, while opening the mail. She tells me about a woman she met on the Camino who had lost her sister to cancer a year before. 'I'm going to come to you as a butterfly on the Camino.'

A year later, the double doors of a barn swung open. A man walked in with a butterfly swooping around him. 'He's been following me for the longest time!' The man became the woman's life partner.

It is a magical story, and just as Kristina says the word 'butterfly,' I open a backpack I ordered for my trip to Spain, and a card pops out with a butterfly on it. I freak out and tell Kristina

.

"Cool! So holographic!" she says.

"I wonder if that was my mom?"

"I think so."

The back of the card is about how valuable input is. 'We appreciate it if you leave your honest view.' I'll bet that's exactly what my mother would express if she could talk to me, but who knows?