I was in Laos, visiting a place called 4000 Islands, when I got the news by email: “Grub is not doing well.” My big boy Grub, the fattest cat in town, had not eaten for four days and was in the kitty hospital.
As a youngster, he loved to eat, probably because he was a starving kitten when rescued. He was also white, with blue eyes. The name “Grub,” then, was a natural. Over years of limitless food, he ballooned to 26 pounds at his heaviest. He was a favorite at the vet’s office, and rivaled the size of the vet’s cat, Bubba, who was a mere 21 pounds.
The only other pet I’d had was Pal, the Airedale terrier that was the family dog when I was a girl. And then later there was my crustacean Hermy, the hermit crab that lived in a giant brandy snifter.
But Grub was my first real pet. He had a sparkling personality, huge paws with sturdy claws, and a grand purr. He was inseparable from my son. In his younger years, Grub chased Dylan, taking him down as a lion would, just for fun. He slept next to and on top of Dylan, edging him out of the bed. When Dylan’s dad play-fought with Dylan, Grub joined the battle, protecting his boy and batting at his dad.
Aside from his boy, Blackie the cat puppet was Grub’s favorite plaything—he’d drag it around, fall to the ground and rip at its head, overcome with a weird sort of bliss. Sometimes he played like a dog, fetching a rolled-up pipe cleaner I tossed for him.
In the mornings he joined me in the bathroom, where he hopped on the sink and drank directly out of the faucet. Then when I tapped my shoulder he put his front paws on me, and I carried him to the living room and plopped him on the couch, where he would spend the next 20 minutes. When he got too bulky to be very active, he sat outside underneath the bird feeder, and looked up at the birds now and then, never making a move to grab one.
So here I was, traveling with a friend in this distant land, far from my cuddly monster Grub. When I got the disturbing news, I recalled the morning I left my house about six weeks earlier. It was 6:00 AM, and Grub was sitting next to his empty food bowl. He looked at me with his regal blue eyes, begging for food. But he was on a very strict diet to help him lose weight, so I declined to give him any, even a snack. Instead I gave him a scratch, and said, “You’re going to be here when I get back, aren’t you?” He just looked at me.
The updates indicated that my 13-year old cat was very sick, but he was receiving lots of tests, antibiotics, an IV, and lots of attention. My hopes were high that he would pull through. I looked at his photo on my I-Pad, and sent him lots of love and good wishes. I really wanted to be by his side, but thinking about him was the best I could do.
In the evening I sat in the open-air restaurant, by the river there in Laos, listening to the water and thinking about Grub. Suddenly the head of a scruffy dog pressed on my lap; his eyes looked up into mine. I was so surprised, I almost shooed him away. His rank odor made me pull back, and here I was getting ready to eat. But instead, I reached down and scratched him behind the ears, and whispered, “good doggie” to him, and kept scratching. His eyes bore into mine. I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude from this dog, as though it was the first time he had ever been scratched behind the ears. I thought about Grub, who often heaved his bulk into my lap like this, looking for a little attention. And I’d scratch him and whisper endearments to him, just as I was doing right then.
After a few minutes, the dog lay down at my feet, and I ate dinner.
The next morning I got the dreaded message. Grub died in the kitty hospital. Taking into account the 13-hour time difference, he passed right about the time the dog planted his furry head in my lap.
Through my tears, I told my companions. The Laos guide’s eyes widened when she heard my story. She spoke with the restaurant hosts, who told her they had been very surprised the evening before when the dog put his head in my lap. That dog was usually afraid of people, they said, and never behaved with people as he had with me.
My sweet Grub came halfway around the world to say thank you and goodbye. I’ve never grieved so much for the passing of an animal as I did for Grub.
I stared at the email message, feeling assaulted, punched in the gut. There was nothing gentle about those words, even though they also said my mother had not been in pain.
I guess I was in pain—gazing at my IPad, lying alone on a bed in an apartment in Taipei, a world away from the hospice in Ohio where she died.
That stark written message was not how I expected to learn of her passing. It was devoid of the warmth of an emotion-filled human voice that would then pause to welcome mine.
I had called my sister the previous evening. She said Mom was in and out of awareness, heavy with morphine to dull the pain caused by the gallstone. The words, “If she goes tomorrow” were spoken—but I didn’t believe it would happen that soon. My international flight would leave in 24 hours—I had planned to see her, to say goodbye, to be with her during her sacred time of transition.
Why hadn’t she waited just a couple more days?
The words didn’t change. My insides grew pitted and raw, and I tried not to wail because I didn’t want the Taiwanese family in the next room to hear me. I whimpered instead, gasping silently through my contorted mouth as I lay there on that bed.
After blowing empty breaths, stitching myself inside a hollow cocoon, I busied my mind, calculating what time it was in Taipei when my mother breathed her last. It had been early morning. I had awoken even earlier—when, unbeknownst to me, she was within an hour of leaving. That’s when I grabbed my IPad and looked at recent photographs of her.
Mom, Genevieve Nichols, 96 years old.
Her vibrant, 96-year old face smiled, happy to be drinking a martini with me. I wrote an email to my sister, telling her to tell my mother I was thinking of her, because she could probably still hear, even though she was dying.
As I drifted back to sleep I whispered, “I’m sorry I’m not there with you, Mom. You know it’s okay to go now. I’ll tell the funny story that you wanted me to tell at your funeral services, and make everyone laugh.”
I awoke a short time later to read those final words. Died. She died. Mama died.
I never called her “Mama.”
She was Mom.
I showered and paced the room. It was my last day of my three-month journey—starting from my home in New Mexico to India for two months, then Bali for three weeks, and finally Taiwan, where I had planned to travel another two weeks.
Shut in that room crying wasn’t where I wanted to be. I left, and wandered the back streets of Taipei, watching, through a haze of sadness and dashes of moisture, the city come to life.
But I still felt restless. I needed to go somewhere. Maybe I would find a temple.
I swiped through the narrative and maps of the Taipei guidebook on my IPad, then stopped. The Maokong Cable Car: French-built, completed in 2007, and the 4-kilometer transit rose over jungle-shrouded hills to an end point among tea plantations and pleasant strolls. I would go there.
On the short walk from the apartment to the mass transit station I wondered if my light fleece would protect me from the moist air that had grown cooler from the previous day.
Not really. At the end of the train ride, rain pounded the concrete and the roof of the station. People getting on and off clutched umbrellas. I snuggled in my fleece for warmth. But the rain—the rain. My fleece was not a raincoat.
I would not walk through that downpour to reach the cable car station, a few blocks away. Sighing, I resigned myself to getting back on the train for the return trip. To the empty bedroom.
But just then a cherubic man in an orange vest waddled toward me. He carried an armful of umbrellas, all sizes and colors. He handed me a blue one. I opened it, looked at the steady rain outside, then looked at its small diameter. He gave me a larger brown one, with a hooked wooden handle.
I pranced into the sheets of rain and headed to the cable car station. My sandals splashed on the sidewalk and the bottom of my leggings grew wet. Thunder rumbled, but I was happy at my good fortune that found me clutching the perfect umbrella. I snugged that dome to my head and thought, let’s go!
Just a few people waited in line to buy tickets, even though the guidebook warned of long waits. Nothing would stop me now.
“Too dangerous,” the ticket lady said. “Thunderstorm.”
No, not on my last day, not on this day, I thought. Come on, we’ll wait in this tea shop. I didn’t want tea, I just wanted the storm to let up. After 45 minutes, I returned to the ticket counter where the same lady was all smiles.
“You have an EasyCard? Yes? Then go up.”
There was hardly anyone else around as I clutched my EasyCard, the pre-paid pass good for mass transit in Taipei. I headed up two levels where the gondolas were swinging around a platform, opening their doors to allow passengers entry.
“Come on, Mom, we’re heading up the hill.” I sat in the middle of the seat, facing the hill ahead of us. She climbed in after me, and sat on the seat opposite in the enclosed cabin.
Yes, she was there. She was smiling, her hair was smooth and perfect, a light shone in her grey eyes and her face radiated.
“We’re going on a ride, Mom.” As that car swung off the platform we hovered in space for a moment, until the giant connector on top firmly grabbed the big cable that began pulling us on our journey.
“Oh my, we’re going right up the hill. We’re riding in the air. Look how high we are! It’s raining, but we’re okay in here, we’re safe.”
Had she been there in her human form she would have been uneasy, suspended above the ground, swinging from a cable, viewing high-rise apartment buildings and roads below. The rain splattered the glass sides of our enclosure that swayed with windy puffs. I imagined her sitting directly across from me on the hard seat. As I stared and stared, I thought she would materialize before my eyes.
“Whoa, look at that, Mom, there are gardens and houses below us. And see how big Taipei is with all those buildings.”
I snapped photos, aiming at her place on the seat. I wanted to believe that later I would see her ghostlike image, or perhaps a mysterious light.
Clunk-clunk. Every so often the car would rise up and over the connection where vertical towers supported the heavy cable that held us aloft, floating through the air.
“The wind is blowing, but we’re safe mom.” I reassured her, but she really didn’t need to be reassured. She was very calm and was just enjoying the ride.
I snapped photos, aiming at her place on the seat. I wanted to believe that later I would see her ghostlike image, or perhaps a mysterious light in the photo. I was that certain of her presence.
“You’re a cloud person now, Mom. I’m glad you’re with me, going up this hill. Look at what the French have done for the people of Taiwan! Wow.”
Raindrops streamed the windows. Cars from the opposite direction emerged from the gloom and passed us—most of them empty of passengers. We seemed to own that ride.
We came to a covered station, where the rain let up and the cable and our car turned a right angle.
“We’re turning Mom. We don’t get out here. We just keep going. Look at all the trees down there. We’re going to ride this all the way to the top. I hope you’re enjoying it, Mom. I’m glad you’re here. We’re both safe and enjoying this ride together.”
I didn’t hear her say much—I just sensed she was enjoying the time together as we rose higher and higher in the gray and the rain, in our enclosed gondola, with the silly pink and yellow cartoon-like characters smeared across the front window, obscuring the view below. She could see everything, though.
I stopped my commentary now and then to hear the quiet, punctuated by the clunk-clunk and the spray of rain. No engines, no other people, no street traffic, no bird calls. We rode the mist, higher and higher over the rich greenery. I spotted a temple along the shiny wet asphalt road below and said we would stop and see it later on the return trip. I didn’t want to halt the magic, the feeling of connection and exploration with my Mom. It seemed so easy. No fear, no resistance, no hesitation. Just gliding along, suspended in that airy world, washed by the tears spouting from the gray around us.
I warned her when we approached the end station.
“Time to get out, mom, it’s over.”
We disembarked in a covered station. I opened my umbrella and walked into the spitting rain.
She had left me. I tried to feel her in the restaurant where I drank a latte and ate an expensive bowl of tasteless squash soup, but she had left me.
Several days later, when I reached my mom’s apartment and joined my sister in the task of closing out her physical life, I spoke of the cable car ride in Taipei.
“We rode it all the way to the top.” Then I corrected myself. “I mean I rode it to the top.”
I said “we” unconsciously, which didn’t really fit with how I presented the story of what I did after I learned Mom had died.
But I was correct the first time. Mom had been there with me, just hours after she passed. I hadn’t bid her goodbye in that hospice room when her spirit left her physical body. But Mom had found me. She was the one who had taken me on that cable car, where we shared a precious 30 minutes, riding through the clouds in our silent world, she looking confident and pleased and at peace.
Raindrops streamed the windows. Cars from the opposite direction emerged from the gloom and passed us—most of them empty of passengers. We seemed to own that ride.
