A Place to Breathe

When my mother died on December 18, 1983, my childhood ended.

I was twelve years old.

The first Mother’s Day afterward, my sister Carol and I were in a department store together when I told her we needed to buy Momma a card. I said it instinctively, without thinking. For one brief moment, life returned to normal. My brain reached backward into the world as it had once existed and grabbed hold of an ordinary task.

Buy Momma a Mother’s Day card.

I think Carol may have thought I was trying to be funny at first. Maybe cruel in the careless way little brothers sometimes are. But then it hit me.

I remembered.

Not gently, either. It all came back at once. The hospital. The loss. The finality of it. The horrible understanding that there would never again be a card to buy.

Carol had to lead me out of the store because I couldn’t see through the sudden onslaught of tears, and I suddenly couldn’t breathe.

That moment stayed with me for years. Decades, really.

Sometimes grief does that. It waits quietly behind ordinary things. A greeting card aisle. A smell. A song. A holiday. Then suddenly you are no longer standing in the present moment at all. You are twelve years old again, reliving the exact second your world split into Before and After.

I think that’s part of why Phoenix affected me the way it did. Childhood trauma didn’t happen to me there. I’ve never been a drunk there. People didn’t abandon me there. Quite the opposite, really. It was healing, and acceptance. Adoption.

People hear me talk about Phoenix and assume I’m chasing fantasy. But the truth is much smaller and much more human than that.

I don’t dream about luxury high-rises or wealth or becoming someone important.

I dream about peace.

I picture a modest apartment with history in its walls. The kind of place a person slowly transforms into home. I picture early mornings and long workdays and neighbors who know my name. I imagine children in the neighborhood eventually calling me Uncle Ray, or maybe even Tío Ramón - if I’m lucky enough to earn that.

I imagine desert sunsets painting the sky behind the silhouettes of palm trees and mountain ridges. The feeling of light and life and renewed hope. I envision possibility.

I see freedom.

Not freedom from responsibility. Freedom to finally exhale.

Because that’s what the desert gave me the first time I arrived there. Not excitement exactly. Not escape.

Relief. Rest. A sense that it was okay to be broken, and also possible to be healed.

For the first time since childhood, I felt my spirit unclench.

Every time my plane leaves Phoenix Sky Harbor, I feel something I struggle to explain to people. It reminds me of my sister leading me out of that department store all those years ago. That same ache of being pulled away from the place where, for one fleeting moment, everything felt whole again.

But I think I finally understand something now.

Peace is not betrayal, and wanting joy after grief is not abandonment.

And if my mother were here today, she would not tell me to stop dreaming. She would probably already have me packed and halfway to Arizona.

I often picture her there.

Happy.

And somehow, when I picture that version of her standing beneath a desert sunset, smiling because her son finally found a place where he could breathe again, the guilt disappears for a little while.

Maybe that’s what healing actually is.

Not forgetting the people we lost.

Just finally allowing ourselves to keep living after they’re gone.