Fluid, Like a Rock
There is a story from ancient Egypt: a dead man’s soul meets with the gatekeeper to the afterlife, who places the weight of the man’s lifetime onto a balance: the good deeds on one side, the bad on the other. Things look a little dicey for this soul. It’s unclear which way the scales will finally tip. In the end, they are perfectly balanced. Of course, it could be worse, but it isn’t good enough. Just as this soul is about to be turned away, he says, “Wait! I remember one more thing,” and he whispers into the gatekeeper’s ear. The gatekeeper puts this last deed, in the form of a feather, almost weightless, onto the scale. The good side descends. This smallest of kindnesses is enough.
*
I think about my mother rubbing my sweaty feet after I had waitressed a double shift and then walked home to save bus fare.
I think about the time I had woken up in the middle of the night, shrieking. My high school history class had been watching documentary films about the Holocaust, and I couldn’t shake the image of a bulldozer moving a pile of naked, skeletal corpses. My mother came into my room that night and sat beside me and traced her fingers over my back until I fell asleep again.
She bought me a ten-speed bike once, after I graduated from college. Not as a graduation gift, but because it was something I wanted, and I almost never wanted anything, or, more accurately, I almost never spoke about what I wanted, and she knew that, too.
I wonder: is this the feather? Should it have tipped the scale in her favor? How does one measure such a thing? Mothers are underappreciated in so many ways, but there is also an assumption that a mother’s act of giving life carries so much weight that no matter what is put on the scale opposite, she is to be forgiven.
It’s supposed to be an unbreakable bond, and yet, I broke it. OK, in fairness—and I am not sure where fairness actually fits in—I would say my mother had been filing away on that bond for decades, and I had been holding on with my fingernails, with my teeth, until one day, she said one thing, just one thing, and I let go.
I let go, and I fell away.
And I met a new wariness in people’s eyes when I said I was not in communication with my mother: What kind of person…?
Indeed. What kind of person?
*
Just the other day, I picked up the heaviest physical object I have ever lifted in my life. Heavier than the half-sized refrigerator I carried up to my daughter’s dorm room by myself, using one thigh to heave it up each step. Heavier than the full-sized freezer a heavyset worker at the TruValue and I had lifted into the back of my pickup. The worker had smirked at me, giving me a look up and then a look down when I told her not to worry about calling one of the guys to help. I suppose there is some correlation between size and strength—I am tall but on the thin side—but she really had no idea what I carried around all day. Looks can be deceiving.
While all rocks tend toward the heavy, some are so dense, their crystals so small and so packed, there is room for no more. It was this kind of rock I lifted, this kind of rock that called to me from beside the road.
When I pried the rock loose with a crow bar, I reached under, feeling for an edge. Not finding one—the rock was roundish, bigger than a basketball, smaller than a laundry basket—I prayed to the gods of friction, bent my knees, straightened my back, and, before considering the wisdom of the move, I lifted the rock and let it drop immediately into the wheelbarrow, which was already heavily dented, having made the acquaintance of various rocks before, although never one as heavy as this. Using one thigh under the bucket, I levered the wheelbarrow into motion. After twenty feet or so, I turned it toward the yard and the flower bed whose border I was building, but I tipped the wheelbarrow just a hair to make the turn. The wheel got mired in crushed rock, and the wheelbarrow was on its side before I could say “gravity.”
“Why didn’t you use the tractor?” my husband asked me later.
Using the tractor’s bucket might have saved me some soreness, but if I had, I would pass that rock each day knowing I didn’t know the intimate truth of its wholeness.
The very next day, I changed my mind about that entire section of yard and about where the rock needed to be. It was the biggest. Its placement mattered most.
I picked up the rock again, this time without the wheelbarrow. Even as I staggered, half squatting, crab-walking and—oh, shit—realizing my phone was in my front pocket, I could tell the rock was lighter than before. Or maybe, just maybe, I was that tiny bit stronger.
No one was there to see me do it, probably a good thing. Carrying the rock wasn’t a test of my strength or my resolve. I have lifted heavy loads before, but I have also not lifted them: when I didn’t feel like it, or when there was someone around who was stronger and more invested. I am used to doing hard things, unloading a ton of slate from the back of a pickup, spreading a dump truck load of road mix. Five times, I’ve dug through sod by hand to start a new garden after we’ve moved. The secret is to break the work into small, manageable parts: one piece of slate, one shovel-full of gravel or dirt at a time.
But what about when the smallest piece of something is tremendous—like my rock? There was no way to lift less than the entirety of it.
And what about forgiveness, a thing so colossal I’m afraid it might require strength beyond my capabilities. Is there a way to forgive incrementally?
They say that to forgive is to let go. To be free. But what if I need to carry it all with me? What if that is the only way I can understand?
*
There is another tale about a man who runs over a beggar with his horse and cart. This bump in the road, as it were, throws the man from his seat. He isn’t hurt, but, oh, is he angry. He goes over to the man he has knocked into the ditch and heaves him up by the lapels of his threadbare jacket to berate him face-to-face. The man continues to act like an ass throughout the rest of his life, and when he later dies and shows up at the gates of heaven, he’s brought to task for all of his many acts of meanness and greed. As the list of his trespasses grows, the man shrinks into himself, ashamed.
In the end, though, the gates swing open for him, and he is stunned. “Why?” he asks. The answer: before scolding the man he had run over, he had brushed the mud off his jacket. This time, one small gesture of kindness offsets a lifetime of cruelty.
This tale and the other suggest forgiveness is based on a balance of some kind, one the gods, at least, can discern. I am not sure, as a human, I am calibrated that way. I do notice the arbiter in these tales is not the one who suffered harm. Of course, forgiveness can be earned by making amends. That is not what I am dealing with here in this story.
I am an imperfect mother, a mother who would take back some of her words if that were a possibility, a mother who would choose differently in hindsight, a mother who hopes she will be forgiven. It is almost worse because I know this, and still.
*
I consider the possibility that my relationship with my mother is as fluid as a rock. Everything about her, except her actual shrinking body, feels heavy and unchanging. I know now that I can carry it all, not with grace, never with grace, but I am strong enough. Still: why would I carry it? Do I want to?
The fluidity of a rock is in its story. Every mile of bedrock under our feet, every boulder sitting stolidly at the end of its roll, every stone in a child’s pocket or pebble in a shoe is constantly changing. We just don’t have the distance of geological time to see the progress. I consider that my relationship with my mother could change, could lighten, could flow. Earth doesn’t need to forgive; it just needs to survive long enough.
