For my mother, Judith Ann Burns
October 30, 1946 – August 22, 2025
What happens when a girl of 17, imprisoned in her father’s violence and alcoholism, escapes by dropping out of school and marrying a man she doesn’t love? That was the premise of my mom’s life. A seed of who she was to become.
A seed is so full of promise, like the premise of a story, like an embryo. It is not yet a plant and vulnerable to flocks of sparrows.
If only I could have replanted the seed of my mother’s life. I wish I’d been the writer to cultivate the premise of her story into a happy ending. I’d write her with some problems and some big dreams. She’d overcome the problems—mostly—and achieve some of the dreams.
She died on August 22, at the age of 80, after a life of alcohol abuse, patterned on her own father’s drinking. She even died at the same age.
I wasn’t, of course, allowed to build on the premise of my mom’s life. I lived with her until the age of eight. But after her arrest for letting our dogs roam the trailer court (after repeated offenses), my sister and I went to live with my dad and his new wife, Rita.
Then I watched from a distance as my mom’s life took its own course in Oregon, where she had moved just a block away from her own mother. I saw her once at 13, a second time at 40. For a time, I know, she and her husband lived in a shed. Occasionally we talked on the phone, and sometimes we exchanged cards. Once she sent me a huge box filled with wrapped Christmas presents. I breathed in the smell of cigarette smoke, knowing it was hers, ran my fingers over the wrapping paper. But mostly I pretended she didn’t exist. I even told my then mother-in-law that my mom was dead. I was so sure that fleeing to the East Coast and sequestering myself here would keep me safe from her, separate from her. In the New York Times announcement of my engagement, I claimed Rita as my mother.
I judged her harshly because of her choices. Her choice to cheat on my dad. To marry that baby-faced teen, a pedophile who preyed on my sister. To stay with this sexual predator when he promised to stop. Her choice to finally leave him, but only because she fell in love with another man.
I judged her so harshly that I wouldn’t go to my sister’s wedding unless she made Mom stay away. At the time, I was so sure that I was right.
In her last years of wordless dementia, I visited her only twice, but I did have video calls with her and her caregiver. I’m sure my mom didn’t know me. But I knew her, and gradually I forgave her. Even though my mom had three brothers and five children, I believe that I was the only relative, except my cousin Jim and his wife, to visit her.
She went into a sudden decline while I was visiting my dad. They told me she had days, maybe hours to live before she succumbed to pneumonia. I’d already agreed to hospice care rather than life-saving interventions. I decided to stay with my dad, stick with my plan. But on our last video call, during the last hours of her life, I sobbed with sorrow. Not for all the bad choices she had made, but for the single bad choice I made, to cut her out of my life.
The Latin verb obire means “to go towards.” It means “to die.” We derive “obituary” from this Latin word.
On that last day of my mom’s life, I drove my dad, 85, to visit his brother Jack, 89, in the little town of White Bird on the banks of the Salmon River. As we crossed the Camas prairie, my dad told a story about “Brother Jack” I knew well. After school, he’d encountered his brother with a friend. When my dad said hi, Jack pushed him into a snowbank. Why don’t you tell him, Dad? I asked. Maybe I will.
That day I sat with Mike and Jack, and Jack’s wife Sharon, as they talked about a girl, they both had dated many years before, when they were only in their teens. Outside, the Salmon River sparkled. The girl’s name was Donna Day, and my dad’s face creased in a delighted smile as he recounted to Uncle Jack the story. My uncle shook his head. “If you say so.” Next my dad brought up the long-held hurt of his big brother shoving him into the snowbank. My uncle’s fingers traced the rim of his coffee cup. He shook his head. “I don’t remember that, either.”
It was okay. My dad got to say his piece. I was glad.
Then the call came. My mom had died.
I had chosen not to be with her in her final moments. Instead, I seeded the ground of my own reality, where I thought it had the best chance to grow. My dad, always in my life.
Once Mom sent my kids a card. It quoted Edgar Allan Poe: “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
I want to find her there, a dream inside my dream. A seed that will become something beautiful. To do so, I’ll need to write a different premise for her, one where she had a dad like mine, who made me believe I could be anything.