It was during graduate school and my first feminist literature class that I truly began to give serious thought to lives of women and the impact of female relationships on me and on others in general. After studying many novels, I was able to draw conclusions from textual evidence and see if what I was learning was applicable and practical in real life. Suddenly fictional characters seemed more real and identifiable. I wondered if I could ever be as strong as my beloved heroes I read, such as Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale. Both the novel and the characters gripped me tightly. Could I survive complete systematic violent oppression? I was so young when I read the novel the first time and it was hard to see how my life could fit into such a seemingly farfetched dystopian tale. At the time, I thought I knew a lot about life, grief, pain. I thought I understood love, friendship, and relationships. It turns out that at age twenty-two, I really did not know much about anything. After college, I continued to gravitate to books that feature female heroes and I continued to silently examine interactions of women I knew and even those I did not know. As I transitioned into married life and motherhood, I realized I did not have to live in The Republic of Gilead for survival to be meaningful and extraordinary. I realized I often failed to see how everyday life is charged with invisible trials outsiders know nothing of, battles fought alone and in silence. After a time, I came to realize that heroic women are not just in novels or on the cover of magazines. Strong women are and were a constant in my life. I never realized how much this is true until in my own time of desperation, my own tests of survival, two women saved me.

Part I

Fern is the mother of my lifelong friend, Michelle, and Fern died in 2005 after a long, ugly bout with Alzheimer’s. But what bout with Alzheimer’s is not ugly? No number of notes above the thermostat or reminders of where household items were located could deter the disease that stripped her of her life. Though I tried hard to erase the vision of the last time I saw her, I could not. The stark white hospital bed in which she lay seemed like an enormous white whale determined to swallow her whole and she became smaller and smaller each time I saw her, until she seemed a speck in a vast snow drift. She reminded me of the apple lady doll my mom had sitting on the hutch whose face was so sunken and withered it was barely recognizable. As a little girl, the doll frightened me, but I was drawn to both its grotesqueness and familiarity and this feeling stayed with me while I sat by my silent friend and the visions stayed long after her death. To say Fern was like a mother to me is an apt cliché but it does not really capture our relationship. Even though we were bonded through her daughter Michelle, our companionship went beyond that. Fern’s house was one of my frequent stops well into adulthood and long after Michelle moved away. Many of these stops were at times of crisis in my life, and I found my way to Fern’s couch and her shoulder. I could not wallow in tears for long though because such outbursts were not of her character. Fern was practical to the core. She did not coddle me but said things such as “well that is a mess. What do you think you ought to do?” and “get up off the couch and quit bawling.” These questions and commands often ended with a quick hiccup like giggle and a spark in her eye. It always made me pause for a split second to consider the problem might not be as bad as I thought. When I got older, I realized that in her own young life, with a busy large family, a sick husband, and an unexpected newborn, she simply did not have time for emotional proclivities or theatrics. People like Fern, and my own Mom, met challenges with a calm ferocity and stoicism that appeared instinctive, drawn from an inner force I had yet to, or maybe never would, acquire. Fern was widowed not long after Michelle was born and Michelle’s siblings were nearly raised at the time of her birth, so for quite some time it was just Michelle and Fern. This was the opposite of my house and an anomaly in our larger friend circle, but I often found myself marveling at them. Michelle seemingly never had to share her mom and when I was with Fern, I did not have to share her either. Again, it took my studies in feminist literature to realize that what I admired most was their freedom and when I was with Fern, I felt that same sense of independence. My nuclear family was a solid representation of the time. My mom worked on a regimented schedule that centered around when my dad would be home from work; breakfast at 7am; dinner at 6pm, family television at 7pm, snacks at 9pm. The one-on-one times with my Mom were limited and when they occurred, I voraciously clung to them and often cried when they were over (I should add the crying annoyed my mother a great deal). While I loved my idyllic life immensely and the safe comfort of the routine, I remained in awe of the self-governance and undefined schedule under which Fern and Michelle lived. Fern believed that a lot of life’s troubles could be fixed with a long rambling drive to nowhere in her navy blue two door Monte Carlo, a respectable meal at the local Moose Lodge, and a good stiff 7&7. Soon, I came to realize she was not entirely wrong about this remedy. Although I am sure she was often disappointed or angry with me, Fern did not let it show. She was fiercely protective of her children and, by extension, me. She was the last girlfriend to set me off down the aisle on my wedding day; she is the one who straightened my train, fluffed my veil, and kissed my cheek before I took my dad’s arm.

Between 2013 and 2014 I spent eight weeks in the hospital. What I thought was food poisoning from a raunchy soft-shell taco, turned out to be a sudden and vicious colon perforation followed by a series of medical misdiagnosis, mysterious maladies, and perhaps plain bad luck. Peppered around the intermittent hospital stays were endless doctor visits, tests, pain, anxiety, and sleepless nights. I was never healthy during this time, physically or mentally. One tense miserable night resulted in a midnight rush to the ER where a scan revealed an internal MRSA abscess on my recent surgery site. Hospital staff went into high gear; I was immediately isolated and anyone who walked into my room had to don gear that resembled hazmat suits. In the subsequent years of the COVID pandemic, these practices became commonplace. However, at the time it was unusual, and I felt like a freakish midcentury carnival side show. Even hospital personnel seemed more comfortable gawking at me from a safe distance and I craved the constant comfort of human touch my previous life held. While I tried to remain positive, I missed my normal life desperately and often felt unbearable fear, dread, and loneliness. The saying is true that I did not miss my robust good health until it was gone.

During this hospital stay, I was plagued by ghastly nightmares and drenching night sweats. Looking back, those nocturnal sessions were very much my own Nightmare on Elm Street. Though not clearly formed like the hellish Freddy Krueger, dim shadowy beings filled my room regularly like Dracula awakening at sundown. They were terrifyingly faceless and made up of impenetrable blackness. I was always in that state where I hovered over my physical self, but I could not wake nor move, nor scream to escape. I felt suffocated; the panicked sensation of being pinned without air was ever so vivid, and growing up on a lake with strong rambunctious brothers had taught me that feeling. The call button was a mere inch away from my hand, yet I could never reach it; over and over I willed my fingers to grasp it, but paralysis invaded my limbs. I know I cried during these terrors, and I pleaded with myself “wake up now, wake up now,” however I could not, or worse, I thought myself awake and felt instant relief only to realize I dreamed I was awake. And the blackness was always still there, gnawing at me, swaying back and forth at the foot of my bed, hovering above me in their phantasmal shapes. The length of the nightmares seemed indefinite though I really had no sense of time, only that intense menacing visions arrived without fail when I slept. It took more and more effort to come out of these dreadful occurrences, but when I did, I was always completely drenched. My hair was wringing wet, my nightgown soddened. Not one piece of bedding was dry and every night I had to ask for a fresh gown and linens. Due to hospital protocol, I was supposed to wait for the nurse to change all items, but the longer these fiendish sessions lasted, the more lenient the night staff became, and they began to put fresh items in my room for me to use instantly upon waking. It was like shedding a snakeskin – I could not peel off the layers fast enough and I was repulsed by the dirty laundry on the floor, the reminder of the horror. Daily the infectious disease doctor visited me, and he always asked if I suffered from any night sweats. Had I been more myself, I might have commented on his apparent idiocy but daily I replied “yes,” and recounted the wretched night. He patiently made notes in a cheap modest spiral notebook with his tiny #2 pencil that looked like it was stolen from mini golf, and eventually I came to think he was writing a grocery list since nothing ever changed in protocol. Upon leaving and in response to my relentless questions, he always faintly and scarcely patted my arm with a thickly gloved hand and mumbled, “We’ll see” through his mask. These routine visits left me more uneasy and more fearful. There were no answers to my condition, and I grew thinner and weaker by the day. I often refused to Facetime with my kids as my own now gaunt gray face disgusted me with its dull eyes and tube hanging from my nose like a gruesome translucent worm. My spirits plummeted and I even became too fatigued and dispirited to text, which had become my lifeline to my family.

One night as I drifted to sleep, darkness again invaded my room. My limbs were leaden and all I could do was lie in the bed and watch the shadows creep. All light was squashed, and the maliciousness came slithering into the room with sinister ease. As I struggled without success to raise myself in the bed to somehow flee the ominous invasion, Fern suddenly appeared in my room. Hazy violent violet shades that mimicked fire flickered around her but could not touch her. She was as real as the bed in which I lay, and I fought to call out, but I could not; I remained mute and cemented. Fern was perfectly dressed in her hot pink two-piece suit that she wore to Michelle’s wedding, and she was exactly as I remembered her. Oversized owl-like circular brown glasses rested on the tip of her slightly upturned nose. Tightly gray permed hair coiffed perfectly atop her head. A delicate Timex watch and thin gold bracelets hung loosely on her slight white wrists. Her elbows curved up a tad, like they wondered where the heavy purse was that she always carried in the crook of her arm. I could see her white hands streaked with a road map of blue veins, hands that I so often saw gripping the steering wheel, patting my leg, holding her Seagram’s. I could see her mother’s ring with five birthstones flashing brilliantly like multi-colored emergency lights penetrating the night on a deserted highway. A small, rounded hump typical of her age spread across her back which made her shoulders pitch forward slightly. She stood in her sensible thick heeled chocolate brown shoes with her feet spaced apart as women do when they have more to worry about than looking statuesque, and the stance was unmistakably formidable. It was how she always stood, especially when she was serious. And as I was absorbing her presence in this split second, she spoke. In in her stern yet everyday steady voice, one I had indeed heard hundreds of times, she said “Leave her alone.” That was it; three words. Three words said plainly and directly, just like she used to command the invasive stray cats to leave her garage. Three ordinary words, words like I had heard her say when a rowdy teenage girl slumber party went wrong. She did not raise her voice, scream, or show fear. “Leave her alone.” Then, she was gone. As swiftly as she arrived, she vanished.

And the blackness left. It disappeared and it did not return.

I did not spring out of the bed miraculously healed. It would be two months before I would vigorously refuse the standard wheelchair exit and walk out of the hospital on my own. And another month after that before I left the surgeon’s office for good. But I slept. I slept without fear, without terror, and without anxiety. My night sweats also stopped, and the short yet momentous event played over and over in my head. The memory of the blackness still sent a ripple of nauseating fear through me, but immediately picturing Fern created a sense of peace, and of power. Not surprisingly, the infectious doctor took credit for my relief, and I let him. Sometimes it’s what we do, isn’t it? He would not understand. Immediately after seeing Fern, I texted Michelle about the visit; Michelle did not doubt my experience because she knew the force behind her mom, behind my friend Fern. But she did ask me how her mom looked, and I straightaway reported “Radiant, like the day you got married.” I was so glad to give Michelle that information and I felt her unspoken relief in my own heart. “You’re so lucky you saw her,” Michelle said. “Yes,” I said. “Yes I am.”  

Part II

My first, best, and most loyal girlfriend, my Mom, died on April 10, 2021. Eighty-nine days after her doctor called me with the terminal diagnosis of the mystery of what ailed her. Eighty-nine days of hoping against hope as I watched Mom vanish before my eyes. With merciless ferocity the disease ransacked her and possessed her with unforgiving fervor; every time I saw her, she lost something of herself. Her once rounded back, much like Fern’s, quickly shrunk into her emaciated frame until pointed shoulder blades protruded wickedly like stalagmites rising from the floor of a cave. She began to turn shades of yellow and purple that make-up could not mask. Mom was not one to obsess with appearance, but she kept her lipstick in her pocket to cover the increased Goth-like bluing of her lips. The heirloom rings she proudly wore slipped about her fingers like a ceaseless demonic merry go round. The more she corrected their positions, the faster they fell; the more they slipped, the more bruised her fingers became until the bruises themselves mimicked cruel rings. And she was so very cold, all the time. It settled in her bones like an unwelcome guest and I could not stop thinking about my inability to make her warm; it was one of my many, many failures during those eighty-nine days. I wanted to bring her comfort, but I didn’t know how. I wanted to curl up against her and cry. I wanted her to comfort me as she had done my entire life, to pat my back and say, “that’s enough now, let’s just go on down the road,” but this seemed too much to ask, much too selfish of me. What’s more, I knew she would have done what I asked, but it was me who should have held her and gently patted her back. Again, it was more literature that also consumed me; Dylan Thomas’ poetry ran relentlessly in my head: “Do not go gently into that good night. Rage rage against the dying light.” I could not remember much else about the poem, but those lines followed me everywhere, every day. Then I would see Mom, and I would see the hollowed-out shell of what she was; I saw her evaporating, and I wanted it to end so she did not have to become this imposter of herself. I looked at her the same way I looked at Fern- with defeat and disbelief. I was wrecked with hopelessness in the face of my personal doomsday clock. Then, the 90 seconds ran out and my Mom, died. My world imploded and exploded – my mentor, my friend, my champion, was no more. After she died, I found myself saying “Mom fought hard,” and I know people say this frequently, but I hate the saying and hated hearing it spew uncontrollably from my mouth. Because in the end, there really was no fighting the disease that claimed her. She did “rage against the dying light,” but because she “would not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me” (Dickenson).

Those eighty-nine days and the days thereafter obliterated me with grief. A seismic shift in my world occurred and for some odd reason, I kept thinking not about literature but my college geology class, which Mom made me take, and the professor’s lecture on the immense destruction caused by shifting tectonic plates. At one time (more like 250 million years ago) the world was covered by one continent; the shifting and continual shifting of plates made Earth as it is today. When plates come into contact, catastrophic natural disasters can occur. That is how I felt about my world. I was one whole person with my Mom and now I was not. Immediately I felt estranged from anyone and everyone whose mother was living. I was once Pangea and now I was a separate continent and I felt continual internal savage shifting. Often without warning, my plates moved, and I wept with intensity I had never known, including when I found myself consumed by my own illness. Sometimes these eruptions occurred as I drove to work, and my vision blurred from tears that scalded my face so much that I had to pull to the side of the road. Then the anger would come; anger cooked in stomach and not only threatened the tiny breakfast I managed to consume but threatened my routine sanity. This was not how things were supposed to be. After combating to compose myself, I drove on to work, faced my class, and went about the now absurd task of teaching composition. I wondered if the students could tell I was orphaned. I assumed everyone could see it. “There she goes, the girl who just lost her mother. . . there she goes, the motherless girl. . . there she goes, the poor dear.” I assumed everyone could see the jagged scar that tore through me, exposing my misery. It most certainly had to be visible from the inside out. Yet, that was not even the worst, the worst was the barren expanse before me: life without Mom.

It was again my sleep that suffered during Mom’s illness and subsequent death. It was fitful, limited, and restless. Though I was surrounded by people enduring the same wretched loss, I felt imprisoned in my own solitary confinement of grief. Sorrow and emptiness pervaded my nights, and my pillow was often damp with tears I did not realize I had shed. I woke so much I thought of my days as a young mother, always on alert for my crying baby but, it was my own weeping that woke me. When sheer exhaustion won, when I did sleep, the reality of the abandonment I felt met me with brutal force moments after opening my eyes. The bit of refreshed peace I gained from resting was erased as I remembered my Mom was dead. However, sometime after the funeral, as I lay in that dreamless, agitated state I felt something different in my bedroom; I felt something even before I opened my eyes, like something pushing me gently to the surface of wakefulness. My normally chilled room was ablaze with warmth, and I experienced a sense of calm that had long been absent in my life. The aching emptiness that imitated true physical pain was unexpectedly gone. These intense feelings raced at me as I struggled to come out of the confused drug like sleep. When I opened my eyes and labored to sit, I saw my Mom at the foot of the bed.

She was smiling and smiling hard. It is funny to think of it because her smile for photos was always forced; she hated having her picture taken so it was only the surprise candid shots that captured her genuinely happy self. And that is the smile she made. She also wore a sweatshirt I had not thought of for years. When we shopped together and had spent too much money, but I wanted just one more item, Mom justified the purchase with “Well, okay, but we have to share it.” That normally meant the item spent 98% of its life with me but this garment, a long-outdated favorite, had stayed in Mom’s closet and now it was on her. The cream-colored oversized sweatshirt emblazoned with our much-loved sunflower pattern covered the front. Billowy hazy clouds partially covering a blue sky with a glittering sun made up the background of the decal and at the height of the 80’s, I loved it. I always felt confident wearing it and it was a perfect staple of my (our) fall wardrobe. Often Mom would ask me to bring it home from college so she could wear it; often I would forget, and she would feign anger and our ownership banter started over. At that moment, in my room, she stood slightly hunched and leaned to the left as she did during her signature gut busting cackle. Her hair was styled as it was in the height of the 80’s: permed full to fuzzy curly in a bit of a mullet and peppered with gray. In this briefest of moments, all I could do was stare; I was enchanted by her presence. And I felt love. Of course, Mom loved me as she lay dying, but again, those short three months were so horribly and shockingly complicated. We received the death sentence, and Mom got in her chair, and there she sat. Delicately dancing around the imminent end seemed to suit us both better. There were no Hallmark moment confessions, no last-minute questions answered, just hanging on, day by day, and hoping for one more day over and over, until there were no more days with Mom. Plus, I could not help but think if we did not say it, if we did not say death, it would not happen. I told her every day I loved her, but that was not anything different from our normal daily conversations. “I love you Mom,” was always followed by a nonchalant wave of her tiny hand and a “yeah yeah. See you later.” So, when she stood at the edge of my bed, laughing, full of life, full of love that radiated and exuded from her, this was the Mom I knew. This was the pre-89-day Mom. As she stood before me, her eyes shone brightly, her body was completely full and healthy, and sheer delight permeated the room. All in that fleeting moment I was trying to think of when I had seen her so joyfully happy and while I was both dumb struck and awe struck, she said “I love you,” then she was gone. I lay in bed the rest of the night pleading silently for another return, but my room remained empty. However, the next day was different for me. What I thought was permanent despair began to dissipate and I began to think I could “go on down the road.”  The next night as I began to awaken from a surprisingly peaceful sleep, but before I even knew full consciousness, I heard myself mumble “Hi Mom.” It felt like when I was a child, and sick, and Mom would appear at my bedside with a cool hand on my forehead before I even called for her, before I even knew I needed her. Through my window shone a blinding light that forced me to squint as I tried to open my eyes, and as I lay in bed, unexpectedly the light washed over me, it ran through me, and then it was gone. In that moment, I felt my Mom. I felt her touch, her embrace- everything I knew about her passed through my senses. I felt what I had longed for during her illness but could not ask of her.

I struggled to make sense of what had happened but there were no rational explanations. What I came to eventually realize is that I no longer felt that original shattering ache and loss that began with Mom’s sickness. The seizing uncontrollable outbursts stopped, and I felt less damaged. I felt like I always did when my Mom rescued me from whatever ailed me; I felt cherished, whole, and strong. It was not like I still did not ache and miss her infinitely, but I began to consider that I could face this bizarre future without her. I thought again of Pangea and how the world has survived the chaotic disruptions and remains habitable; just maybe I could be habitable too. Over and over, I have asked her to come to me again, but she never has. She has been in my dreams, but I awake from those with fragmented memory; I know I have seen her, but the kaleidoscope like images are disjointed and nonsensical. This is the opposite of her visit. I remember with stunning clarity her visit to my room and less about her in the clutch of death. I remember in stunning clarity when she passed through me. The truth is, I do not feel that same acute grief as I did when she died. Often, I long for a cathartic cry and it will not come which ironically leaves me a bit shaken and deflated. But every time I feel this, I see her at the foot of my bed in that sunflower sweatshirt, I see the light outside of my window and I feel an odd, inexplicable, sense of contentment.

It is not lost on me that my physical and mental ailments may have manifested into life-like hallucinations. It is not lost on me that in both instances I was in a state of an existential crisis and suffering from fear and agony I had never known. I have contemplated looking at an astronomy chart to see if I could figure out what celestial event occurred outside of my window; could I research a meteor shower that might have occurred that fateful night? Should I go back and research the array of medicinal cocktails Dr. Frankenstein prescribed for me? Lurking in my rational mind are explanations for my experiences. I do not disagree, but I do not believe them. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred does not survive solely by her own wits; she is aided by others around her, and she is forced to rely on situations she may not fully trust to survive, which makes me think of my own experience. The events are on repeat in my head, I watch them constantly both in times of ease and despair. With every playing, I come to the same conclusion: these two women, in my greatest need, moved heaven and earth to comfort and to protect me. These are the women in my life that even death cannot separate. These are the heroes in my own life’s novel. Such is the power of love.