113. We Shall Be Remembered

Writer Steph Jagger shares about losing her mother, and then finding her in the nature all around her.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

 INTRO MUSIC 

 I’m Steph Jagger, and it’s going to be okay.

In 2015, my mother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, and in 2016 I took her on a road trip through three different national parks of the West. In the five and a half years since the trip with my mother, I have dreamt of bears every June. That month seems to serve as some sort of marker. My mother and the sky above her conspiring, sending signals, an interstellar Morse code to my subconscious.

June of 2020 was no different. The dream came early in the month, around the sixth or seventh. In it, I came across a large bear. It was sprawled across the section of pavement just outside the entrance to a hospital. The bear began to pant, and I noticed its tongue and its gums, pink, pale, almost white. It was exhausted.

It was dehydrated. It was alive, but barely. I walked closer to it and without raising its head, the bear looked up at me. Its eyes were pleading. It could not walk or crawl or pull itself one step further, but it was clear to me that the bear was attempting to make it it inside the hospital. It couldn’t say it out loud, but the bear needed care. I looked around for help and suddenly a large man dressed in blue appeared together. We carried the bear through the doors once inside. The bear was placed on a gurney and whisked away Its condition was critical. I stayed back to check the bear in to provide the details. I knew after asking me its name unknown, its age unknown, its blood type also unknown. The woman behind the desk reached over the counter, took my hands and said, don’t worry, your mother will be just fine. We’ve got her now. We’ve got her. 

One month later, almost to the day, my mother was moved into a full-time care facility in Vancouver, Canada. I could feel her relief from 150 miles away where I live now, tucked into a grove of large cedars.

I could feel my mother’s deliverance. Her wild and joyful freedom. Wordlessly, silently. It moved through the ground, through the roots. The mysia of all the trees that are rooted into the soil between my mother and me, the blood red veins that connect us because of coronavirus based border closures and quarantine rules. As well as the sound, health and safety precautions put in place by my mother’s care facility. I have not seen her for well over a year, and I’m not sure, but it may be much longer. 

A part of me is deeply saddened by this, but another part, the part that speaks the language of silence. The part that knows how to pick up words on the wind is at peace. Because I know that my mother is everywhere. She is coiled up in inside my DNA. She is in the bedrock of the earth.

I find her in every layer of soil and silt around me and underneath me. She is inside every crevice of every rock I see she is trickling through every stream. My mother is groundwater searching for paths moving swiftly now out to the ocean and I am the landscape being carved in her wake. I will stand on the shore and watch her cut sand ever after.

My eyes will be trained on the water. My mother is everywhere, as is her mother. I find the pair of them in the jagged peaks of the mountains around me, in the clouds that form above me. They are the faces carved into a large stone near my house, an ancient altar with a silent story. I am the person who visits, who sits and prays at their feet.

I can hear their laughter inside the chittering sound of the eagles who lived by the beach. I can see the women of my lineage in the eyes of a family of deer before they bounce shyly away with a wean and toe. They’re everywhere, which makes me think I might be too. A lot of people might say, it took me a long time to come to this.

The idea that divinity lives both inside of us and all around us, but to see it that way would be both narrow sighted and narrow-minded. In actual fact, it has taken millennia. It takes time to rise. It takes eons and earthquakes. It takes glaciated ice scraping down your back. Thousands of years of stony pressure.

It takes water dripping one droplet a day for a million days and a million more. It takes the heat of a culture that wants to burn you down. It takes the lingering heat of a culture that has. You see, a woman doesn’t rise on her own. She does it through lineage. She does it by placing her life on top of her mother’s and so on and so forth.

For thousands of years, I am, but a tiny hill. But when you add me to my mother and to her mother before her, we begin to form a mountain. When you add all of us together, we are Everest, or as the Nepali say, goddess of the sky. I am the evolution of my mother. She is the backbone. I am growing into the two of us, along with hundreds who came before us form a collective, and this, this has been our a hundred thousand year rise, our emerging into a singular chain of starlight that pours down from the sky.

Never have I felt more of myself. Never have I felt more whole, more powerful, more like her, more like me, more like some intoxicating blend of the both of us and the ones who came before all of us now moving in the same direction at once, dancing together on the shore after decades at sea, some things may be forgotten, but in the process we shall be remembered.

OUTRO MUSIC

CREDITS