I just read Cheryl Strayed’s “Dear Sugar” #24 responding to a woman (“Grieving Mamma”) who recently lost her two daughters in a horrific car crash. It hit me like a knife to the gut.
Besides a couple of childhood friends and two grandparents, I’ve never lost anyone (yet) very close to me.
But I nearly did in late May, 2021.
I remember that morning vividly. I still lived in New York City then, Lenox Hill in Manhattan, on East 70th between 1st and York. (A fantastic neighborhood; prior to this I lived for a year in a rough part of East Harlem, where I was literally chased twice and faced superb chaos during Covid. For more on that read my memoir chapters HERE.)
I remember writing at my desk in my small, typical, pre-war cramped apartment, a third-floor walkup. It was cold and the radiator was humming loudly. Outside it looked cool and was probably mildly humid. (Nothing like what would come in summer.) Days before I’d finally gotten my second vaccine shot. I’d be flying into LAX to spend the summer (I thought) in California, planning to return to the city that never sleeps in mid-late August.
That morning my phone buzzed obnoxiously, strangely, moving around as if an electronic fat worm, on the kitchen counter across my little hovel where I’d left it. Instinct is a fascinating thing, isn’t it? Something struck me in that moment. A deep, intrinsic part of me knew something was wrong.
Annoyed and yet afraid, I stood from my desk—I’d written a paragraph about my excitement for the approaching trip to California, where I was born and raised and hadn’t been to in eighteen months due to the Pandemic—and walked across the apartment. Barefoot, the hardwood floor felt cold against the sensitive skin of my feet. Oddly, my heart thudded against my chest more actively than normal.
I picked up my iPhone 10. It was my mom. The time: 7:19am. This was not normal. Mom never called randomly without planning ahead, and certainly never in the early morning. (She knew that was my sacred writing time. I also routinely read various books and meditated.)
Pressing “accept” the first sound I heard was crying. Mom tried several times to get the words out, and failed each time. For some reason—I now see this as real-life foreshadowing—my initial thought was: Something bad happened to my father. I don’t know why I thought this. I just felt it.
But, finally scraping together the courage to speak, Mom said, “Jeannette.” (I changed her real name to protect privacy.)
I swallowed and felt my heart thud right out of my chest. Jeannette? My sixteen-year-old niece in LA? She’d been depressed lately, and had been cutting herself. One night of self-harm had landed her in the ER briefly to stitch the cuts. We had a long familial history of alcoholism and clinical depression. Alcohol or drugs didn’t seem to be a factor in this case. But clinical depression, yes.
“What happened?” I said, before realizing I hadn’t taken a breath in half a minute.
Then in a tumult of verbal anarchy—with fits and sobs and starts and stops—she explained what’d happened. In the middle of the night my older sister and brother-in-law had been rudely awakened by the sheriff, notifying them that their child had just been in a brutal, possibly fatal car crash. Shocked, they dressed and headed out to the crash, but by the time they were halfway there they were informed by police that she’d been transported to Children’s Hospital in West Hollywood. So they drove there.
At the moment, Mom said, they didn’t know what the results would be. Jeannette was intubated, couldn’t seem to form words, had open injuries everywhere on her body, was black-n-blue, and seemed to possibly be in a coma. My mother just kept saying “I can’t believe it” over and over. We talked for a few more minutes, in a disordered state of shock, and then hung up.
I stared at my mostly-blank laptop screen. I walked into the bedroom and ogled the hospital across the street, Weill-Cornell Medicine. Somewhere in the mad distance of Manhattan—the bizarre, sealed-off outside world I momentarily didn’t belong to anymore—twin sirens blazed. I felt my body, running my hand along my arm as if making sure I still actually existed. (I did.) Tears silently zigzagged down my cheeks. I thought of playing basketball—“Horse”—with Jeannette and my nephew all their lives when I saw them at Christmastime, for many years at my parents’ home in East Ojai, 90 miles north of Los Angeles nestled in the Topa Topa Mountains in the valley, where I grew up. I thought of my niece’s calm blue eyes, her pale skin, her straight blond hair. Her life had been so much more safe and protected than mine. Twenty-two years older than her, I was 38 right then. Almost forty, I kept repeating internally. Almost fucking forty.
Thankfully, my niece survived. It turned out to be a long, slow recovery. A week after her crash I flew to LAX and stayed with my sister and brother-in-law. I saw Jeannette many times in the hospital. We played card games and discussed her gratitude for being alive and watched funny YouTube videos, all while a nurse on suicide-watch sat five feet away, observing. She will bear some physical scars for the rest of her life, but she is doing well now, in therapy and a freshman at U.C. Davis.
Of course, it was only a few weeks after arriving in California, about six weeks after the crash, staying with my folks in the new Santa Barbara house I’d never seen before in real-time because I’d been stuck in NYC, that my father was diagnosed with Stage Four Melanoma. He’d looked awful when I saw him; I had the benefit of distance. He and my mom and I’d Zoomed during the pandemic, every 2-3 weeks, but I only saw him close-up. In real time I noticed right away his sunken cheeks, thin torso, and nasty, ceaseless cough. He’d had that cough for a whole year, my mom said. I felt furious. Why hadn’t he gone in to see a doctor? But my father, I knew, like myself, was stubborn. He “felt fine” and so he hadn’t gone, despite my mother’s pushing.
And so there I was: After eighteen months of pandemic New York insanity, a nearly-dead niece and now a terribly sick father.
Life, I grasped then, as I had grasped in various ways all my wild, unstable life, was mysterious.
Thus began my journey. A journey I am still very much on.
More later.
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Michael Mohr