Tubular Rivet Studs at Sunrise

What if I just showed up at her door and said “What the fuck? I love you.”

Holding my mom’s hand in the hospital, sleeping on the recliner in her room, bringing her Diet Coke with lots of ice, giving her reiki — it all felt deeply right. Her pain was hard to witness, and I almost felt it with her. I saw the fear in her face when a nurse walked into her room, the question of how they would need to touch her or move her and how much it would hurt. But instead of fear it with her, which was my instinct, I leaned in and reminded her to breathe, to not tense up.

I dropped everything and flew to Ohio to be with her partly because I feared she wouldn’t survive this. My penchant for negative fantasies might be a way I believe I’m preparing for the worst even though they (mercifully) almost never materialize. My sister, too, has these, so she conspired. Fear was not unfounded. The injuries were severe, left her requiring major surgery, her underlying health was compromised, and her age advanced. Still, my mom is nothing if not a defier of expectations, and maybe because both my brother and I flew in to be with her, she rallied and revived.

After spending nearly two weeks with her and mostly pausing my life to do so, I went to Chicago for the weekend to do some planned promotional activities for my forthcoming essay collection. I’d spontaneously invited two friends to spend the weekend with me there and received an unexpected enthusiastic fuck yes in response. We stayed together in an old South Loop building on the 15^th floor in a 3-bedroom apartment whose door displayed the name, Tubular Rivet and Stud Co., which we decided would be our gang name. Both friends had been connected to my late friend Brita who passed away last year, so we spent a lot of time talking and telling stories about her.

As she had liked to do when she was alive, we woke before the sun and went to her favorite beach in the city to do a ceremony. We had some of her ashes one of my friends had saved and brought to cast into the lake at sunrise. For the occasion, I got carrot juice, which had been her favorite. Orange flared over the blue-gray horizon and slid sweetly down the back of my tongue while what remained of her body took to wind and water. How some of the fine ash stuck to the concrete wall of the pier worried me and, flutily, I swiped at it, only to have some of the fine ash stick to my fingers. Somehow, this was OK with me and I slid the ashy hand into my pants pocket to protect it.

After the sunrise ceremony at Montrose Beach, we got breakfast at a diner in her old neighborhood, one she would have liked. While there, I thought of another old friend — one who I hadn’t spoken to in years but had once kept close like family. We had a falling out and she ghosted me after, which broke my heart. She leapt into my mind then and I shared the story with my friends over breakfast. “What if I just showed up at her door and knocked and she answered and I said, What the fuck? I love you!”

The Tubular Rivet Studs agreed this was a fine idea and conspired to help me find an address online and transport me to it.

Several months ago, I met the poet and author Liz Huerta whose work explores feminist lineage, ancestral power, ritual, and queer representation in storytelling. She spoke of caring for her father during his end-of-life journey as he weakened from ALS. She shared some powerful poems about these deeply emotional and grief-laden experiences that were both mystical and deeply human. Meeting her and hearing her work on these topics opened my eyes to how storytelling can be a way to navigate the transformation that comes with this phase of my life, this rite of passage that is witnessing and caring for aging parents.

When we arrived to the googled address, it was a storefront that appeared to be closed.

“It looks like where she works, not where she lives,” I said, disappointed.

“Someone’s in there,” one of my friend’s said, and I squinted through the half open blinds of the front window to see the silver hair and familiar face of my estranged friend. With trembling hands, I stepped out of the car and approached. She saw me and I saw her and there was confusion and disbelief in her eyes. I smiled and waved and walked toward the door. She unlocked and opened it.

“What are you doing here? How’s your mom?”

The two questions were asked quickly and in one breath and I wasn’t even surprised because this friend of mine is a professional psychic medium, so of course she would ask about my mom in this moment after we haven’t spoken in five years.

“My mom’s not good, and I’m here because I was in town and thinking of you and missing you and you stopped talking to me …”

She told me her mom died just two months earlier and her grief was so thick and fresh, she woke early that morning sick with it and came to her shop asking for a “sign of signs.” When she first got there, the light in her reading room began to flicker in the rhythm of SOS. She took a video of it and showed me the video. I looked at her.

“You know I’m part of the sign, right?”

We talked and my tubular gang was invited inside. Her wife came out and hugs cascaded with laughter and healing. The SOS in the lamp gave way to the sign of signs in the form of a cherished friendship restored, a lost connection repaired, perhaps facilitated by the spirit of my friend Brita conspiring with the spirit of my no longer estranged friend’s late mother.

And though my mom is bouncing back this time, buoyed as she was by her children gathering around with fierce love and acts of service, I know I’m in for a long and difficult road ahead. A couple years ago, I went to care for my dad through cancer treatments. I thought that might be the end for him at age 84, but he survived and has been cancer free more than a year now. The up and down that is this season of my life and my parents’ lives — it’s harder and more beautiful than I ever imagined.

And so I move through these crossings — hospital rooms and lakefront ceremonies, lost friends found and parents slipping between injury, ailment, and comebacks. It feels like life itself has become a ritual, each encounter an offering: a Diet Coke with lots of ice, a handful of ash, a trembling knock on a door. The living and the dead, the near and the estranged, they circle one another in a composition I could never choreograph alone.

Perhaps this is the true inheritance of care — to surrender to the rhythm of endings and beginnings, to let grief and joy braid themselves together, to witness how love keeps showing up in forms I don’t expect. I am learning that the rite of passage isn’t just about saying goodbye to the familiar, but about being remade and reconnected, again and again, by the fierce tenderness of staying close — to parents, to friends, to the mystery itself.