RIverwalk - the begining... the idea... remembering forgotten places... my mothers suicide
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
The eve of hope. My hippe liberal parents were campaigning hard... door to door in the swing county I was born and grew up in. I was home for a weekend, considering how to quit my corporate job and leave behind a toxic workplace and all the insecurity that goes with being a target of sexual harrassment. I had left my husband and was in a serious state of limbo. I dropped my parents off at a luncheon for Mark Udall who was campaigning across the state and went to pick up my 91 year old grandmother. She in her dementia had forgotten. The 1940's junkyard that sprawled out along the Cuchara River that had been the domain of my grandfather and the prison of my grandmother was locked up tight with its rusted scrap tin lashed to the 12 foot high fence with an additional 2 feet of barbed wire above painted green. I had several hours to kill in the small town me and 3 generations of my family had gone to highschool. This small town was also where my mother had shot herself on St. Mary's hill in 1975, leaving an 18 month old daughter... me.
A brief homage visit to her grave with my requisite ritual begun as an early teen... the prayer for her soul... prayer for me... prayer for my family and friends... sitting on her grave talking to the stone my father had carved with her name "Christine Leigh Calza Fowler 1954-1975" as if she was there and we were instead of sitting around the kitchen table sitting around the overgrown lilac bushes that had taken over the grave plot. Followed by the multiple kicks of fury that had rendered her stone some what crooked. My Father had said, "I am going to have to bring a crow bar to straighten the stone... the ground is settling." I kept my mouth shut.
I still had time to kill and my grandmother had not returned to her fortress. I decided to find the spot, the clearing where my mother had taken her life and bled to death from a gunshot wound to the forehead. I drove my little car up behind Saint Mary's hill. There were piles of beer cans and an old mattress. I followed the muddy dirt road up until it was too washed out to go any further and got out and walked. I was overwhelmed by the thought that my 21 year old mother had thrown herself away like a piece of trash. This thought was beyond sadness for me. I was totally overcome in that little pinon clearing with the shot gun shells with sorrow for my loss and for my mothers. I sure would have liked to know her. I don't even know if I found the right clearing and the shotgun shells wee recent, but that didn't stop me from looking for evidence, of what kind I have no idea whatsoever. It was silent and the town below seemed so far away.
I walked back to my car as the clay built up on my boots like sedimentary platforms. I sat in the seat my door open, scraping mud off my boots and looking out at the abandoned landscape... its garbage and secrets all mixed together. Everything ends in death.. not everything ends in death... everything ends in death... not everything ends in death... I imagined myself digging into the earth on the spot where my mothers blood had soaked into the earth... pouring my own into the same place and walking shockwaves... the shockwaves that were the ripples that had eminated out throughout my entire life from that one moment that one spot in time... I saw myself prostrating... like a pilgrim to mecca my entire body on the ground to standing on the ground to standing... from that first moment... the shot and the slow leak.... everything ends in death... not everything ends in death... everything ends in death... not everythign ends in death... everything ends in death... not everything ends in death... from this spot on walking my way to all the places I had visited and carried this belief, prostrated circles to Boulder... Paris... New York... Sydney... Tokyo... Sao Paulo... Aukland... Istanbul and each circle the ripples held the same message everything ends in death... not everything ends in death... as I drove down the hill over the shockwave speed bumps of sorrow, I decided to trace my mothers path. The last portion of her walk until that fatal moment. I started at the community center where my parents were gathering with the other Sangre de Cristo Volunteers for change, many of my old teachers and neeighbors. and walked the river, abandoned and forgotten along the old WPA flood wall built when my Grandmother was a young girl. I crossed under the Main Street Bridge that she had undoubtably crossed and along the Bosque, the canopy of trees was beautiful. the river was full of water and I was distracted and had forgotten how beautiful this spot was in this ugly little town.
I wanted to make this spot remembered and precious again
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