December 4th, 2022

There’s this big and steep sand dune at Sleeping Bear National Park, right off Lake Michigan. A sign at the top warns that if you descend to the shoreline below and can’t climb back, you’ll be charged a $3000 fine to be rescued. My boyfriend, M, and I had been visiting some sites in the Great Lakes area as vacation before a friend’s wedding nearby, and he told me he climbed down when he was a kid. Climbing back feels impossible when every step you take sinks you back into the deep sand. “It’s 1 minute down and potentially an hour back up. It’s totally doable, though,” he assured. But looking down the incline in the biting wind of that late September morning, so steep you can’t even see the landing area below, we scrapped any ambition to descend. 

The theme of that whole trip was call your mom. Mine had been admitted to the hospital for a tune up just before M and I had departed for our vacation. We Facetimed after she was settled in her room, and neither of us acknowledged how scared she looked or how fearful we were despite the insistence of how seemingly routine her stay would be.

Reflecting about Mom and moms helped me recall the time years ago that my young niece and I had a sleepover. She was about two, and after a late night (7pm) screening of Paddington 2, we snuggled up for a cozy sleep. Deep in the night, though, she shook me awake and compassionately exclaimed, “Uncle Rafe?”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s ok! I think I just need my mom.” I watched her flop off the guest bed and confidently walk into the dark night toward her mom’s room.

I told M the story on the plane. He giggled at the cuteness of how my niece woke up from a dream and took the time to comfort me. And of course she did. She knew I’d be left alone in the night, and she’d be safe and warm beside her mom. For the rest of the trip, we took up quoting the calm, confident, honest, “I think I just need my mom” at random points. 

At Michilimackinac, we toured the 19th century lighthouse station with a few retirees. After taking a photo for us, we small talked. M explained he’d moved to LA to be nearer to his own family who’d moved to California a few years before him.

“Wall yoo gatta be bai yer Maum”, one of the women exclaimed with a Wisconsinese slant and a nodding that told me she knew the yearning of distance. 

Throughout the trip, my family kept me informed of my Mom’s progress, and after an especially rainy tent stay, M kept me near Wifi and an airport. On the morning of our friend’s wedding, while we caught up with friends over breakfast, my Dad called and told me she had decided to end the severe treatments, be made comfortable, say her goodbyes, and go. 

There is a time ahead when I’ll commit to word the days of Holy minutes that followed that call. Someday I’ll make literate sense of the weeping, the quivering sick, the manic elation, and the relief of our time with her in the last hours. I’ll learn the words I need so you’ll understand how she was on fire, the most herself I’d ever known. I’ve longed for some language to process it and come up dry each time. I’ve scraped against the hollows of my mind for some meaningful takeaway I might be able to cling to in the throes of more pain to come in the life I’ll live without her. But there’s nothing there. I’m just so sad, and I wish this hadn’t happened. I miss her so terribly. I think I just need my Mom.

M and I arrived to that steep dune one of the mornings in the middle of our trip. There’d been a severe storm during the night, and our tent and belongings were pretty well soaked. As we made our way from the parking lot and into the deep wet sand of the trail, a young man approached us from a nearby campsite. He had sleep in his eyes and hair. He was holding himself in the cold. 

“Good morning, I’m so sorry to bother you,” he said as he approached with purpose. “Do either of you have a cellphone I could borrow?” He explained he was in a school group on a five-day backpacking trip; they’d collected the phones to help the kids embrace the wild of it all, and he needed to make contact with his Mom. “I just need to let her know I’m ok.” 

M handed over his phone, and the boy dialed his mom. After she rejected the strange number’s call, he texted her: Mom, it’s Cam on a stranger’s phone. Pick up, I’m trying to call you. 

She answered on the second try. “Mom, just wanted to say hi and let you know I’m okay. I missed you!” There was such relief in his voice. He’d made it through a cold and stormy night and, in the light of the morning, wanted her to know. The way her voice sloped to comfort him, “Oh honey. You’re ok, you’re ok. I miss you too.” I regret that I didn’t hug him. 

Grief has come to me like that storm in the night. I’m ok but my things are wet and I don’t have my phone and I don’t think we can do another night like this. We’d better book a hotel. I made it through, and I just need to let my mom know I’m ok. And any stranger passing might secretly know that I really just want to ask her if I am. If I will be.

But there is no stranger’s phone for me to borrow, no voice on the other end saying “Oh, honey” in that loving, sympathetic lilt. All I have is the steep dune’s slope I’ve descended; seconds to the bottom, hours to the top, and I’m short the three grand for a rescue. All I have is a recent dream where I climb into her lap, dig my face into her neck, and ask her how I’ll find her.