After hanging up with her, I run through my condo, grumbling under my breath as I find my bag, and rush out the door. By now, I thought I might be the kind of person with a twelve-step morning routine involving meditation and journaling, but there’s no time for it.
And, besides, I always feel half dead when I wake up, anyway.
I’m in my car, pulling out of the condo’s underground parking, when my navigation screen lights up with an incoming call.
My daily morning call with my mom, right on time. That is so her.
I answer, and before I can say anything, she comes through, slightly fuzzy from the speaker but cheery, nonetheless. “Goodmorning, Lacey!”
“Morning, Mom.”
She launches right into her normal stuff: what we’re going to do to have a great day. How far along I am in progress toward mygoals. All the morning talk I’ve heard, surely, from the moment she had me.
I can picture her, thirty years younger and holding me to her chest, whispering not a lullaby, but how we would make it out of the situation together. The situation being her having one wild night, sleeping with a man she didn’t know, and winding up with a baby and no support from her parents nine months later.
“… just let me know how it goes?”
Blinking as I turn into the garage for Gaia Gaming, I try to figure out what she’s talking about. It’s never a good idea to space out during one of my mother’s mini rants; she’ll just lecture you about mindfulness and being present.
“I will,” I promise, though I’m not quite sure what I’m promising to tell her about.
She sighs. “I know it’s been hard for you, Lacey. But hopefully this will give you some closure.”
Just like this morning, when the grief rises up in my throat, threatening to close my airway, I shove it back down as hard as I can, swallowing and breathing until I feel normal again. I’m parked in my designated spot, close to the elevator and skywalk that will take me into the building. The last thing I want to do before going in to face another day at work is talk about my dead uncle.
Jasper. More than an uncle. One of my best friends.
“I’m fine,” I say, and to my credit, I manage to sound mostly truthful.
But my mother knows me. Jasper pitched in to help her out when nobody else would, and although my mom wanted me andher to be a power duo, I just ended up gravitating more toward him. I was weird and didn’t like the same stuff as my mom, and Jasper took me the way I was. He played games with me and encouraged my interest in development.
My mother always wanted me to go into something serious and traditional, like law or medicine.
“Right,” she says, sighing again, and I can practically see the expression she’s wearing on the other side of the phone. Resigned to the fact that she and I will probably never really talk about the grief we both feel for Jasper. We’ve just never really been the touchy-feely type. “Well, like I said, I’d love to hear how it goes.”
I’d nearly forgotten about it — my private meeting with the man settling Jasper’s estate. For the hundredth time, I wonder why this process is taking so long, and why Jasper set it up so I’d meet with the lawyer on my own. And I’m also secretly grateful to my mom for reminding me about it, or I would have spent too long in the office and missed it.
Again.
“I will,” I promise again, before turning off my car and grabbing for my bag. “Gotta go, Mom. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
The law officeJasper went through for his last will and testament is down near Redwood City, and it takes me nearly an hour in traffic to reach. By the time I park outside the squat building, I’m tired and feeling agitated from the drive.
Plus, I’m really trying hard not to think about the reason I’m there.
Three weeks ago, Jasper passed away in his sleep. For my mother, me, and all his friends, it felt sudden. Out of nowhere.
He didn’t tell anyone he’d been diagnosed with an aggressive, rare form of brain cancer. That is, until he was gone, and his lawyer contacted us to explain that Jasper had known for months that his time was limited.
I was — and still am— furious with him.
As I step out of the car and walk up to the front door, I can practically hear what he would say if he were next to me, “What, like you wanted to be bummed outbeforeI died, too?”
In the weeks since it happened, I’ve turned it over and over in my mind, trying to make sense of it. Theoretically, he could have had an aneurysm or been hit by a car, and everything would have felt the same, except there wouldn’t have been the promise of a letter from him. In that situation, wouldn’t I be wishing for any form of connection, for a message he could have written to me before he passed away?
But working through the logic doesn’t help. It doesn’t ease the devastation or anger.
