Halloween Haunts: When the Line Between the Living and the Dead is at its Thinnest
By Amanda Worthington
My mom had had a good day the day before and we were all unusually optimistic.
The strains of my conversation alone with her drifted back to me –
“If it ever comes to life-saving measures versus comfort measures, I want comfort-measures.”
Those words were heavy, but I drudged them up from the deep as the heart monitor let out its disparaging whine.
The next moments are a blur, even now.
Cancer is a bitch. And it made her a corpse that day of all days.
I like to think death could only take her when the line between living and dead was at its thinnest.
I sobbed and then I was quiet with the shock of it. I ate wings that night and didn’t really taste them. It’s weird what we remember. What we don’t.
***
I was in the third grade and clever. Way too clever. I was an amazing reader but bored out of my skull. Almost everything I encountered academically was too easy or uninteresting or poorly plotted. For me, the hard part of school was the bullying, the popular girls giggling together and planning their next cruelty.
I still hear them sometimes in my head.
You could be so pretty.
Could be.
Huh.
Maybe I would have had a better chance if they hadn’t put glue in my hair on the school bus. I spent an hour in the poorly-lit bathroom crying and picking gunk out of my hair. It pulled where it stuck to my scalp. A girl named Christine helped me. I don’t think I’ll ever forget her name. We have a tendency of remembering kindness.
I came home to a mother who made my brother and me sit down at the kitchen table and work on homework. If we had no homework, we could read. There was always something to read.
I don’t remember when I professed how boring I found the passive act of absorbing the meaning of words on the page. I do remember the pain on my mother’s face.
“You can pick out something from my bookshelf if you want.”
I came back with a book with a shiny cover.
“No. Not that one.”
I tried again.
“Better,” she said.
That better book was Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot and it was the beginning of a love affair.
I’ll let you wonder about the book I was not allowed to touch just then.
From that moment on, I loved horror. Craved it. Delighted in finding it in unexpected places. Realized that reading was far from passive when the reader was engaged.
My mother died on Halloween of 2011. I’ve never been the same and I never will be. I’m learning to accept what that means. And I’m learning to tell the stories I’ve been carrying inside of me for decades now.
I still don’t know how good I am at it, but it brings me joy. A sense of home I’ve seldom had since her passing.
***
The last three years have been some of the hardest of my life. I essentially thought I lost everything and then had a friend pry the remainder of my faith forcibly from my arms where I cradled it to my chest.
Still, I’ve continued to write, stood back up every time I’ve fallen, and refused to throw in the towel.
Halloween is an anniversary of a life lost too soon. And it is a celebration of enduring. I find it darkly funny that it’s when the world is filled with masks that I can finally take mine off.
This is me, 41, a shadow of my former self. Gathering strength after the storm. Determined to leave my mark on the world. Authentically myself. My mother’s daughter through and through.
Clever. Funny. Daring. With big dreams.
I’ve waited my whole life for this.
Happy Halloween.
Amanda Worthington is a writer and editor from the Kansas City metropolitan area. She is the author of the novella-in-verse No Quarter as well as several short stories. She is the founder of the Heartland chapter of the HWA and served as its inaugural chair. Most recently she edited the anthology Nightmerica: Corruptions of the American Dream with Dragon’s Roost Press. She is currently working on her debut novel, tentatively titled Every Woman You Know as well as a new collection of poetry called, Love is an Ocean.
She can be found on Facebook at @HeldTogetherByCosmicGlue84 or on her website at https://amandaworthington18.wixsite.com/amandalaeffect.
