Excerpt #3 from The Death and Adventures of Jackie

Anna, with the graceful support of her mother’s Wyoming friends; so steadfast, so solid, managed to weave her way through the sometimes graceless tasks of taking care of her mother’s “affairs.” The unwavering love from this family astounded her. Though she had only met them during one prior visit, there was no doubt that they were family. They were the root that she unconsciously clung to day after day. At some point during this time, her husband called her and said “The kids and I are coming, we’ll be there.”

“How can we do that?  We don’t have the money,” asked Anna.

“Everyone pitched in.”

“Whose everyone?

“Well….everyone.”

He proceeded to tell her that everyone, absolutely everyone, in the various communities that their family was a part of rallied together sending checks, from $20 to hundreds, so that her husband and 3 children could be together in Wyoming. She was again astounded by the outpouring of love coming through and into her…steadying her.

Sometime after her family joined her, Anna realized that she wanted to temporarily move into her mother’s cottage in Bighorn, Wyoming. It was only for a week, but her children and her niece had taken a road trip from California to this cottage with their Nana, and it felt like it would be a comforting blanket, a sanctuary to stay there. The kids wanted to have their Nana’s dog, Mollie, and her black cat, Sweetie, there as well. Anna was a bit concerned about this, because she was horribly allergic to all animals with fur, from gerbils to horses, yet it felt like the right thing to do.

When they arrived at the cottage, the children were thrilled by the company of Mollie and Sweetie, and all of them found solace with each other. As soon as they walked in the door, a realization hit Anna. “Mom’s journals! I bet she was writing in another one!” She scanned the surface areas of the cottage, looking for a blank writing journal, and found one sitting on the bedside table, next to an enormous, comfy, poofy, inviting bed with a beautiful antique headboard.

“But the best darn thing about Grandma’s house was her great big feather bed.

It was nine feet wide, and six feet high, soft as a downy chick

It was made from the feathers of forty-eleven geese, took a whole bolt of cloth for the tick.

It’d hold eight kids and four hound dogs and a piggy we stole from the shed.

We didn’t get much sleep but we had a lot of fun on Grandma’s feather bed.”

This John Denver song came immediately to mind, bringing what would have been a wistful grin to Anna’s features. She could feel the gentle pull on one corner of her mouth, as if tiny angels were trying to lift what should have come naturally, yet her face remained immobile.

Anna picked up the journal, and gently stroked the front cover, back cover, and spine, imagining her mother’s magic hands doing the same, “I wonder how long ago her hands were on this.”  Jackie had been sending Anna journals she had written in for years. She would fill one up, stick it in the mail with no explanation or note, and then start on another one. Anna didn’t read them as they arrived. It seemed so personal, such a window inside her mother, it felt almost invasive, too private, to read them. From the moment she heard of her mother’s death, she clung to the journals like a lifeline to her mum, opening up pages like a divination tool, like Tarot cards or Rune stones, to give her some answers, some direction, sometimes just to imagine her mother’s voice saying these phrases to her. In one of the journals, the one Anna called the butterfly book, her mother had written,

“I thought that these might be journals-but I am no writer. Therefore this is a record of thoughts, desires, memories. I hope that you will know me………Mum.”

It was downright crazy and prophetic, some of the things that Jackie wrote in her journals, things she wrote down since 1996, the year Anna’s youngest child was born and the year she began mailing them to her. For instance, from the journal Anna called “For the Grand’s” because that is what her mother wrote on the front cover, written sometime before December, 2002, one year prior to the whirlwind that swept Jackie up and out of the car:

“I LIVED!”

“I RISKED!”

“AND I ENJOYED!”

-Nana

Anna opened up the last page of the journal she held in her hands, what she would come to call “The Africa One” because it was from Tanzania, a country Jackie visited often when she was married to a millionaire…

“I have much more experience than I have written there (here). More than I will, more than I can write. In silence we must wrap much of our life, because it is too fine for speech, because we cannot explain it to others, and because somewhat we cannot yet understand…Ralph Waldo Emerson”

Anna lay down, enveloped in her mother’s bed, holding the journal tenderly to her heart, tears slipping down the tracks carved in her skin, newly swollen rivers, flowing from some bottomless source for there seemed an endless supply…

After resting in this embrace, dozing from time to time, Anna got up and walked throughout the house, marveling at how her mother had created the home she had always wanted. A perfect English cottage, complete with wild English garden, smack dab in the middle of Wyoming. She walked into the kitchen, stopped in her tracks by The Little Zen Calendar that revealed August 13. “That must have been the date she left on her road trip,” thought Anna. The bit of wisdom printed on this date was, “The butterfly counts not months but moments, And has time enough.”-Rabindranath Tagore. This time, Anna’s mouth gave way to the little angels, just a tiny bit, feeling an ever so slight grin form on the right side, a grin most likely invisible to the naked eye. You see, as she drove from another friend of her mother’s to the cottage, a beautiful orange butterfly hovered just inside her peripheral vision, keeping pace with the car, centered perfectly outside the driver’s side window. This butterfly flew with her the entire time. She tore off the page and slipped it into the journal.

She continued to walk around the little house, trailing her hand over counters, plants, and objects, with tender reverence, much as she did her mother’s own body. She walked back into the bedroom, and into the tiny bathroom. Picking up her mother’s giant blush brush, she began stroking her face, then her neck, then brushed the soft bristles down her shoulders, arms, over the backs of her hands, then her palms. She leaned in towards her reflection, searching her features for something familiar, when she noticed tiny printed words in the upper corner of the mirror,

“I am committed to feeling a bond with each person I meet, to respecting my own integrity and honor, to living within the energy of love and compassion and returning to that energy when I don’t feel it, to making wise and blessed choices with my will, to maintaining perceptions of wisdom and non-judgement, to release the need to know why things happen as they do, and not to project expectations over how I want this day to be and how I want others to be. And finally, my last prayer, ‘to trust the Divine. And with that I bless my day with gratitude and love.”

“Wow, mom. Way to set the bar on being the most awesome human ever,” Anna mused.