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Camilla Nusbaum

The car was packed, and our anticipation was inevitable. I don’t think I understood what would happen that morning at a brisk 6:00 a.m. Saying a last goodbye was the plan. The whole thing felt unreal, so I sat in the passenger seat watching the sun creep over the hills, illuminating the mountains biblically. 

Not thirty minutes into the drive, I saw my brother’s brake lights and the subtle turn signal telling us we needed to follow into a rest area along I-90. My brother was already out of the driver’s seat by the time we pulled up next to the shiny blue car. His face was red, and tears were brewing.

“I just got off the phone with Chelsey. Marla passed this morning.”

My grandmother covered her face with her shaking hands, and I knew that her facial expression would break me if I looked too hard. We didn’t make it, and she was a wreck.

“What do we do next?” I asked.

Until that phone call, we were rushing, needing to make it for my grandmother’s sake and for Marla’s sake. We were at the mercy of time.

We drove for eight hours and barely spoke a word. The occasional cough or the switch of songs were the only things we could focus on. I could feel my sister’s tears but couldn’t bring myself to say anything, let alone look at her. The mountains were flanked by pain. My brother’s tires threw rocks at the cracks in my sister’s windshield, like little reminders of the purpose of our visit. Driving up there used to be special; now it was clouded by grief.

In the morning light, the sunrise felt just for us. My phone vibrated slightly in my pocket, breaking the tension in the car. My dearest cousin, who had just lost her grandmother. A granddaughter who lost hope in her voice.

“Hi Bailey, what’s going on?” I asked.

Tears were evident in the crackle of her voice. She said, “She’s gone. I don’t know what to do.”

The conversation that followed was full of “I know” and “We will be there soon.” I don’t think she knew we were coming, and the relief in her voice when I told her almost broke me entirely.

Mile 333 mocked me as the curves’ cadence ran my mind around the memories of us. Ears popping in and out at eighty-eight miles per hour. The town of Saltese was worn as the wind whipping through the windows. Our arrival was less than climactic. We stepped out into the cold, harsh wind to be met by the silent porch. In my mind, Marla walked out to greet us like she always had.

Across the lawn, the fence’s gate slammed behind my distraught cousin Chelsey. A daughter, like me. Marla’s oldest was doing all she could to keep it together until she broke down in my brother’s arms as the rest of us awaited the tear-filled reunion.

My family has three pillars. Wisdom, determination, and direction. Aunt Marla, Aunt Micki, and my grandmother, Pam. When wisdom died, everything else was thrown into a tailspin. When we needed direction, she was lost in memories of youth with her sisters. Determination didn’t believe it was real. None of us did. I sat, surrounded by everything I hold dear. The family won’t be the same, I thought. It didn’t feel right sitting in the same room that she passed in. Cooking in her kitchen. Sitting in her chair. It felt familiar, but all new at the same time. It felt like she could come out of the bedroom at any second, and we would all laugh together. But at that time, there was no laughter. All hope was lost in grief. 

Not even wisdom was perfect, and the grief of future loss shook me. My calm facade faced my family with a resemblance of wisdom in the face of grief. I tried my best to keep it together, but found myself digging myself deeper into that grief, and tears were my only means of expression.

We spent those first days wandering her house like ghosts, touching her things as if they might dissolve at any moment, careful not to move anything out of place. Chelsey kept apologizing for not being able to hold on longer, for not keeping her alive until we arrived. As if any of us had that power. But that was all that Marla wanted. Her sisters.

“She waited as long as she could,” Chelsey said. “She kept asking for you.”

Direction cleaned and cooked. She scrubbed countertops and filled the dishwasher, her cup of soda forgotten in Marla’s spot for at least an hour. “She would want us here,” my mother said, and we all knew Marla had loved spending time with her family, no matter the reason.

And me? For the new generation, was I supposed to be wisdom? Was I supposed to know what to say, how to get us past this? My intelligence only went so far when it came to dealing with death. I felt like a shell of myself and emptied of everything useful. So I crept in the shadows, never getting too close, so as to mask my own pain. My head spiraled, but Aunt Micki says hers did too. All of ours did.

On our third night there, I slipped away to the back porch where the Idaho sky spread wide, irrevocably star-filled. Marla loved the stars, like me. The screen door creaked behind me as my brother walked to me, a tequila cocktail in his hand, even though he hadn’t drunk in months. Alcohol seemed to soothe the hurt.

I looked up at those endless stars, wondering if she was up there somewhere, watching us grieve her—a family with one of its pillars missing, learning to stand again.

We’re the pillars now, I thought. We have to be for Marla. 

We’re the pillars now, I thought. We have to be for Marla.

For the first time since that phone call on the road, I felt something other than grief. A small spark, like a match from a hotel matchbook. Not wisdom yet, but perhaps the beginning of understanding.

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