by Julie Rieger
If that was his way of saying that people who’ve lost their marbles end up here, well, folks, bring on the marbles.
Okay, so let’s go back to that moment when I was lying next to my dying mom in Oklahoma, in that excruciating hospice environment at home filled with sadness and spray cheese. Suddenly my phone rang. Before I could barely whisper hello, Mona said on the other line: “Baby, get out of your mom’s room. You’re beginning to take on her breathing patterns.”
“Okay,” I said, and walked out of my mom’s room. Wait—what? Mona was in Los Angeles. She was calling me at 2:00 a.m. local time and had no way of knowing that at that moment I was sitting beside my mother.
But somehow, from fourteen hundred miles away, Mona sensed that my mom was close to making her final exit as Margaret Hadley. Mona just knew. That was part of her gift—the gift that came when she touched the underbelly of death. She intuited things before they happened, including the fact that her own life would change dramatically when she turned fifty.
CHAPTER THREE
Fish without a Fin
Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.
—JOHN GREEN, THE FAULT IN OUR STARS
On February 10, 2011, my mom, Margaret Hadley, left this fish without a fin. I didn’t exactly float to the top of the water, but I was certainly motionless for a while. Sadness, loss, guilt, and regret were all on a marquee over my heart. I wore them with every outfit, every day of the week for months to come. I hated myself because I didn’t quit my job and move to Oklahoma. I didn’t move my mom to California early enough, either. I did try, but it was too late; she wanted nothing to do with it.
I was in an emotional black hole when my mom died. How could I grieve the loss of this woman who’d loved me with every cell in her body and stop hating myself at the same time? I lived in limbo. Nothing made me happy. No one made me happy. I stopped answering the phone. I stopped listening to phone messages. I still can’t bear to listen to voice mail, as it provokes a huge emotional reaction in me. I have PTSD from all the calls I got during Mom’s illness; every time the phone rang, something was wrong.
Mona would come over to console me during those dark days: We’d snuggle on the couch and hold hands while we watched television. We didn’t need to exchange words; her presence was a salve. I never thought I’d shrug off the cloak of grief.
Five months later we celebrated Mona’s fiftieth birthday at a party in West Hollywood. At the entrance to the restaurant Mona and I hugged for what seemed like forever before I left, then we stood with our arms still wrapped around each another, talking. We exchanged our usual I love yous and smartass comments. (I suggested she get a bra with more support.) “Girl,” I finally said during our embrace, “your guests are waiting for you to come back.”
“I’m not done yet,” she replied, still hugging me tight.
I wasn’t done yet, either—and I’m still not done, because that was the last time I saw Mona. A few weeks later Mona was driving home from vacation late at night somewhere between Arizona and California with her girlfriend, her sister Pam, and her brother-in-law Steve. The car blew a tire, careened over an embankment, and crashed into a ravine. Everyone survived but Mona. She was killed on impact.
Mona turned fifty and somehow, for some reason, that was enough for her on this earthly plane. She had intuited that moment. She may not have known that she would leave this world in a fiery flash, but she certainly exited her life with the same dramatic flair with which she lived it.
I was beyond devastated when I found out about her death. I wanted to retract whatever belief in God I had—to the extent that I had any belief in God. But a strange thing happened later that same night: When I finally fell asleep after raging at the universe, Mona came to me in a lucid dream. Her presence was completely and totally palpable. She was there, hovering in front of me. Then she floated over to my bedside, kissed my forehead, and said very clearly: “Everything will be okay.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Brenda the Good Witch
Might I offer you some advice? Forget everything you think you know.
—BARON MORDO TO STEPHEN STRANGE, DOCTOR STRANGE
Mona was right—everything was okay. She just wasn’t right, right then. After I grazed my way through grief on powdered doughnuts in Oklahoma, I graduated to Randy’s Donuts in LA. I was like Humpty fucking Dumpty in pieces, living the reality of the sixteenth card—the Tower—in the tarot deck, although I didn’t know jack about tarot at the time.
Tarot cards have been used for centuries as a divination tool. The standard deck has seventy-eight cards that represent archetypes and spiritual metaphors with symbolic meaning in people’s lives. Here’s what you need to know for now about the Tower: It depicts a medieval-looking tower in flames with lightning bolts striking from on high. People tumble or leap from the ramparts in total desperation. Some cards depict the tower blown apart, with people impaled on sunken turrets or pinned down by giant dislodged bricks. It’s not a pretty picture.
This is the card you usually get when things are collapsing around you in order for new things to be built. Sometimes shit has to hit the proverbial fan and things need to burn down to force you to create new structures in your life. (And let’s face it: generally our asses need to be on fire before we make radical change in our lives.) The Tower card also suggests that you can’t rebuild structures the same way they were before; you need to build new structures from the ground up on entirely new foundations. It’s futile to try to create the life you had before a momentous event like the death of a loved one, and guess what? Your life is not supposed to be the same. Grief changes us practically on a molecular level.
These structures I’m referring to aren’t literal, of course. They relate to the foundation of your belief systems and values. They have to do with the way you think and live your life every day—on every level. They’re about rebuilding relationships with people, with yourself, and with your purpose in life.
Mona’s son JJ ended up living with Suzanne and me for around a year before he got back on his feet. Days after he moved in, weird stuff started happening around the house: The lights would go on and off, music from Suzanne’s laptop would suddenly start playing (including, I shit you not, the Psychedelic Furs’s “The Ghost in You”). Out of nowhere the bathroom heater would turn on. “That’s Mona calling,” Suzanne would say.
Around this time our wolf pack brother Reuben suggested we have a group reading by phone with Brenda, a psychic who lives in Cincinnati. She is one of Reuben’s dearest friends, and he hoped that she might be able summon Mona from her astral lair.
Who’s Reuben? you might ask.
Reuben is a juicy Latino who spreads his love around like jam; Jimmy is his husband, an equally adorable and loyal man who is more private with his emotions. Mona and Jimmy were friends growing up in Cincinnati. Jimmy eventually became a Catholic priest, then left the church because gays were not welcome there. (Pedophiles, yes; gays, no.) (I almost deleted that parenthetical comment about gays and the church but decided, what the hell, it’s true.) (I really like parentheses, by the way.) Jimmy met Reuben, who worked at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati. They fell in love and years later moved to LA.
Over the years, Jimmy lost track of Mona, only to learn that she lived two blocks away from him. Suzanne and I, as established earlier, lived on the same street as Mona and her girlfriend. Mona was possessive of her friends and didn’t cultivate connections between them, partly because she was an attention hoarder who liked to keep her “people” to herself. (She had her “girls” and her “boys.”) But clearly we were meant to be together in the same spiritual wolf pack, because in a town with a population of nearly four million and an area of 465 square miles, what are the odds of us all living within four hundred yards of one another? You do the math.
Okay, so back to Mona in her astral zone.
Suzanne and I first met Brenda at Jimmy and Reuben’s house for dinner one night when she was visit
ing LA. Brenda is a gorgeous, part-Hispanic woman with shiny dark hair. She grew up in a Wisconsin town named Waukesha, which means “Healing Waters”—a term that pretty much describes the sea this woman swims in. When we first met I thought she was the daughter of a Mexican witch doctor. In fact, her dad grew up near Eagle Pass, Texas, and ended up in Wisconsin working as a migrant farmworker. If there was anything witchy about him, it was his love of the bottle. That affliction developed in Brenda a finely honed sensitivity to people’s vibrations and emotional nuances, which went hand in glove with the psychic gift she was born with.
I’d been crying for months when I met Brenda that night, my usual animated self snuffed out by grief. So I had no real grasp of the full impact of her wise words when she looked at me before I left Reuben’s house that night and said: “It doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be so hard.” Only later would I learn that being of service to others is Brenda’s holy grail on this earth, and that she’s so super psychic she should’ve been wearing a cape with the letters “SP” sewn on the back.
A few weeks later, Suzanne and I were at Jimmy and Reuben’s place, getting ready to put Brenda on speakerphone. Brenda had never done a group reading by phone before, and neither had I. I had no idea what to expect. What should I wear? Should we bring a snack? Eat beforehand? Do we bring an offering to the dead? Am I in trouble? What did I know?
But okay, if Mona’s spirit was actually going to somehow communicate through Brenda, I was ready to hear from her. I missed her so much it hurt. I may still have been crying at work every day at this point. I was mourning the loss of both my mom and Mona; any freshman psych student could figure that one out, even one who’d missed half their classes and didn’t buy the textbook.
We all settled down on stools around a speakerphone on the island in Reuben and Jimmy’s kitchen. I was ready for whatever Brenda was going to throw at us. I wore my Mona catcher’s mitt, catcher’s mask, and kneepads. Hit me, psychic lady.
“Hi, guys,” Brenda said.
“Hi,” in unison from the group.
Brenda proceeded to ask us to bow our heads in prayer, and I began to sob. What was happening to me? I was crying at the opening prayer. That’s like crying at movie trailers. Breathe, I told myself. Just breathe.
Once the prayer was over, I got a grip. It was Mona time—not.
“Reuben, I have your mom and dad here,” Brenda said. “We’ll get to them later.”
“Okay,” Reuben said.
Brenda somehow asked Reuben’s parents to step aside. Then she said: “Julie?” I thought: Julie? Did she just say Julie? Why would you say my name, psychic lady?
“Your mom and dad are here,” she continued. Oh shit. What? My mom and dad? I didn’t see this coming. My heart fell.
My parents divorced when I was just a kid; my dad died eight years later. Both of my parents weren’t particularly spiritual or metaphysically inclined. My mom used to say: “When you’re dead, you’re dead.” I wasn’t even sure if she really believed in God, as in some bearded guy sitting on a throne in heaven, despite our churchgoing ways. And my dad was a Christian Scientist, a secret he kept to himself for some reason that will always baffle me.
Now here they both were, presumably fresh from a supernatural marriage therapy session, coming back together through Brenda.
“Okay, thank you,” was all I could think to say to Brenda.
Brenda then told us she would bring Mona into the reading and would get back to our parents later. I held my breath as she started to “talk” to Mona.
Mona was a Chatty Cathy while she was alive, and she was no different in spirit form. Even though we heard Brenda’s velvety sweet voice, Mona’s words were definitely being spoken; her thoughts came right from her heart. Through Brenda she told us how important we were to her: We were always her first call. We were the ones who came to her rescue when she needed rescuing, who gave her love when that was all she wanted. She made us laugh at her keen ability to keep us apart for all those years, but told us that it was time for the boys and girls to come together. She thanked us for caring for her son (and I immediately thought: So that was her fiddling with our electricity and our electronics). She gave us advice on how to help him manage his grief.
Through Brenda, we told her how much we loved her, but after about forty-five minutes, Mona left. I guess she left to go party in the spirit world or visit Saturn or do whatever the fuck dead people do.
Brenda then brought in a few other spirits: Reuben’s folks, whom she knew; Suzanne’s grandmother; and, later, Suzanne’s adoptive dad. Once he left, my torturous path to freedom began.
“Julie, I have your dad here,” Brenda said.
I looked around the room, then back at the speakerphone. Almost thirty years had passed since he died. I was stupefied even to hear his name. He wasn’t much of a dad in life when I was growing up, so that became my refrain: I grew up without a father. I played that tape over and over again, sweeping whatever daddy issues I might have had under the carpet. And though many will tell you that whatever you sweep under the emotional carpet often comes back to haunt you, no one tells you these things might come back in spirit form to actually haunt you.
I looked around the room one last time, trying not to lose it. Dad? I thought. Ghost Dad? Is that you out there?
My father, Thomas Locke Rieger, was a nice-looking military man who was a beat away from being a colonel when he and my mom got married. He was respectable and honorable. He served in Korea and Vietnam and served his country for decades. His mother, my grandmother, was a bona fide member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization run by women whose family lineage goes back to the nation’s fight for independence from England. Service to this country is practically in my family’s DNA. But all I knew about what my dad did in the military when I was growing up was that he was in “transportation.” Those military guys kept tight-lipped about their assignments.
Mom claimed that his drinking drove her to leave him in 1974. Vodka was not his friend, though he thought differently. Sometime after retiring from the military, he skidded off the rails, moved to Salt Lake City, and took a nosedive into the bottle. I do remember his drinking. I once saw him pour from a gallon jug of vodka that he’d stashed under the kitchen sink. Another time he acted like he was only drinking sparkling grape juice while he taught us a card game called Follow the Whore. He rode a bus to Oklahoma to visit us when I was nine or ten and we hung out together in the Elks Lodge, playing bingo while he drank. You could cut the smoky air of sadness with a knife.
We weren’t close, that’s for sure. He loved my brother and me—that I know; he was always excited to see us. But he also seemed despondent because he knew it was temporary.
Perhaps my dad should have stayed in the military, where he’d served his entire adult life; he became aimless and drifted when he retired. The military world is ordered and highly structured; the civilian world, on the other hand, is messy and challenging. He was a good man who didn’t know how to operate in the chaotic real world. Alcohol became the salve for his frustrations and lack of purpose after the military. After all, isn’t any form of substance abuse all about masking the pain of living? In my dad’s case, it literally took the life out of him.
He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. We didn’t attend his burial, though. To this day I don’t know why. I missed the twenty-one-gun salute; the soldiers folding his flag and handing it over to me, his youngest. Not a single human being with the last name of Rieger, besides his children, attended his funeral in Salt Lake City. They could have shown up.
I learned that day: Show the fuck up. Always show up. If your friend breaks up with their boyfriend or girlfriend, show up. If someone needs a friend, show up. If someone in your family dies, show up.
“Wow, your dad is a big spirit,” Brenda said through the speakerphone. “He’s a powerful guy, Julie. And he says he’s always been with you in your dreams. He wants to know if you re
member dreaming about him when you were younger.”
“I don’t,” I replied, though my head was reeling: Did I dream about him? Was he somehow present in the twilight zone of my sleep?
“Well, there is something he wants to clear up with you,” she continued. “He says that he would like you to stop telling people that you grew up without a father.”
Hold on. Tires screeched to a stop in my head. Those particular words spoke of something deeply woven into the fabric of my personal narrative. I looked over at Suzanne, who looked back at me with total acknowledgment because she’s the one who knows: How many times had she heard me say that I grew up without a father? That tape went way, way back. Now here was my spirit dad on the Other Side, calling bullshit on me while Brenda communicated for him through the phone two thousand miles away.
“He says that he’s always been with you,” she continued. “Every time you won a golf tournament, he was there. Just ask for him, Julie. He’ll be there whenever you need him.”
And that’s when I lost it. I absolutely lost it. Not only was I grieving the loss of my mom and my friend Mona, I was experiencing delayed grief for my father. It was a trifecta.
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
Finally Brenda spoke: “Sorry, guys, I have Julie’s mom here and I can’t communicate if I’m emotional.” Oh great, my mom was making the queen of psychics cry; nice work. What exactly was she going to do to me? Honest to God, I didn’t think I could take what was going to happen—whatever that was.
