Because thou didst keep the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of trial, that hour which is to come upon the whole world, to try them that dwell upon the earth.
- The Book of Revelations, 3:10
In the last conversation I had with my mother, she fell asleep on the phone.
She didn't mean to, of course; by that point they'd dosed her up with an opiate cocktail meant to stave off the pain caused by the advancement of the insidious, relentless blight that would ultimately, ignominiously, take her life.
I spent a lot of time in the years since feeling an insensate guilt grasping at me, often in the moments before I fell asleep. Why didn't you drive to the airport and get on the next flight? I asked myself. You could hear it in her voice that night. You knew.
While attempting good humor during a root-canal yesterday, the technician pulled the Television On That Weird Wall-Mounted Swingy Thing over my head so that I could watch inane morning talk-shows to distract me from the drilling, the strange stenches and the occasional plumes of smoke that emanated from my wounded incisor. On one of the programs, they played host to a spirit medium whose job it was to make women cry, apparently. While reducing some middle-aged woman in a pantsuit to a briny mass of glassy-eyed sobbing, the medium told the woman that she wasn't meant to be there when her son died. It wasn't meant for her to help him make that transition because someone else's life was meant to be touched by that moment - in this case, the woman's sister (the deceased's aunt). Just as I was beginning to become interested in the medium's message, a technician decided that would be the exact moment that she'd turn on the Price is Right.
I wasn't always appreciative of who my mother was while she was alive. I often wondered if she was happy while never really asking her if she was. I projected my own feelings of loneliness and desperation onto her. I wanted her to be different sometimes to make me feel better about leaving home for good. But if there is a benevolence in the universe, I can't imagine my punishment for those crimes would be to not see her again while she was alive, and for this anguish - diminishing with time, of course - to burn within me. But maybe - just maybe, I thought - I simply wasn't meant to be there.
A little more than seven years before she was taken from us, my mother drove me to the bus station in Bangor where I was to gleefully alight upon the coach that would take me to Boston, and thence unto Zurich, and finally to the dusty, windswept Anatolian steppe-city where I'd call home for nearly half a year. She was nearly silent on the short drive there, and while waiting for the bus in the car (it was late January, after all), she went through a short list of things she'd expect: a call when I arrived, an email a week, and for me not to get into cars with strangers. (Her hair would have completely whitened if only she'd known how many times I was to break that). When the coach arrived, there was a hug, a kiss, and an I Love You, and she got back in the car. She stayed and waited for the coach to pull away, and as it did I saw that she was hysterically sobbing in the car. Body shaking, glasses off. I don't know if she knew that I saw it, but I have to imagine she'd have been mortified.
Five and a half months later I was returning to Ankara from the Aegean coast and again I found myself on a semi-luxury coach. As the crisply uniformed bus attendant (!) handed out snacky-cakes and towels soaked in lemon essence, the driver croaked the destination cities for our route. One in particular caught my attention: Alaşehir. I couldn't place where I knew that city's name until I took to my tattered copy of Let's Go! Turkey! and discovered that Alaşehir was the ancient city of Philadelphia, and the last of the Seven Churches of the Apocalypse. My pulse quickened. However, as this pronouncement came close to 1 AM, I knew that even the basest trickery (as I'd perpetrated at Thyatira) or supplication to divine infants (as with Ephesus) would likely come to naught, as more than likely the coach would slow to a crawl near the otogar, eject several bleary Turks into the awaiting predawn, and race away into the darkness.
I was surprised, then, when the coach came to a complete stop outside the Alaşehir otogar at nearly three AM. A single car awaited in the lot, and from it stepped a middle-aged woman and a young man in his twenties. Ankara is a big university-town and I'd already made the connection when I saw them embrace, double-kiss, and part, with him clambering onto the bus with his mother-cleaned clothes bound in a neat rucksack. As he sat down and they lowered the lights again, I looked back at that car. His mother was sobbing hysterically in the vehicle, her head lowered onto the steering wheel. I remembered seeing my own mother do that, and wondering why. Did letting go hurt that much? I asked in my naivete. And before I knew it, Alaşehir - and that Seventh Church - was behind me.
Later, after the galling sensation of I WAS SO GODDAMN CLOSE wore off, I wondered aloud to a friend that maybe going to that seventh church wasn't meant for me to do - that maybe it was meant for another time, an incentive for returning to a country I adored so much. But as the years go by - this year marking eleven since I last stepped foot on Nazim Hikmet's galloping mare's head - I have to wonder if it was meant to be at all. As my life becomes more entrenched and complicated - pleasantly, I might add - I turn to my memories of Turkey and they provide moments of grace, humor and insight.
Several months ago I dreamed that my mother came to talk to me. We were in my living room, and my "cats" were mewling around her ankles for attention. While batting them absently away when they grew uppity, she looked straight at me and lowered her glasses.
You have to let me go, she said, so that you can live. And then she started petting the cats again.
I think often of the enveloping darkness that swallowed Alaşehir and that seventh church as we sped full-throttle toward Ankara, and of the coming darkness I heard in my mother's voice that night when she fell asleep explaining her day to me.
Except now, finally, whether I was meant to or not, I can begin to let go.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
