River Shadows: A Passage from Head to Heart

By Carolyn Keith Hopper

In late 2009, Carolyn Keith Hopper lost her father. When her mother’s grief over his death turns to a relentless and misplaced anger, Hopper realizes that his passing heralded another loss: that of the loving woman she once knew. Although Carolyn yearns to grow closer to her aging mother, she finds herself pushed away like a stranger.

Seeking solace from the tension and confusion that are crowding her life, Carolyn turns to nature. Her excursions to the beaches of Cape Cod, hikes on the mountain trails of Montana, and a vision quest in Colorado help her come to a place of understanding and bring happy memories of her mother back into her heart.

"River Shadows: A Passage from Head to Heart" takes readers along Carolyn’s path of healing and illustrates how they, too, can make peace with life’s losses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carolyn Keith Hopper
• Release date: Mar 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9780998329819

Carolyn Keith Hopper

Carolyn Keith Hopper lives in southwest Montana. Inspired by the weather and landscape of the Rocky Mountains, she enjoys fly-fishing, hiking, and writing about her local surroundings. She has contributed numerous articles to “Outside Bozeman” and “Rocky Mountain Gardening.” “River Shadows: A Passage from Head to Heart” is her first book.

Book preview

Prologue

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inversnaid

Four months before my father passed on and two years before I began in earnest to try to convince my mother to move to Montana, I felt compelled to go on a Vision Quest. I was guided in this purpose by a longtime friend and Vision Quest guide. I did not know then that what I felt and learned would be a large part of what would stand me in good stead during the period of my mother’s grief after my father passed. I didn’t learn any skills about parenting a parent, but I was fortified somehow with the knowledge of my own strengths and granted understanding of what and where I would need to turn to in my mother’s and my darkest hours together.

Water—most often rivers—and rough places in mountains have always been grounding for me. From childhood to womanhood, through rough patches and smooth, I’ve canoed in, waded in, swum in, fished in, or rested beside water. And whenever possible, water flowing through mountains. I felt the most physical passion in my body—and one could say soul—ever, during my Vision Quest, so I began beside a lake in the rarified air at eight thousand feet in the Rocky Mountains.

In the rest of my story, like two rivers that join in a confluence and flow side by side for a while before, perhaps, mixing together, I will tell you, the reader, of my mother and me and who we were or might have been as girls and women and of how I have come to know more about what was always important to me. And like two rivers, it is possible that we were separated by the rough topography of a rift.

Three years after my mother’s passing, I can look back on why I began to tell this story and realize that what I believed and how I wanted to show you what I believed has become the mixing of our two rivers. The rivers of two strong, passionate women who sometimes flowed along together like the placid Concord River in the Massachusetts of my girlhood, and at other times catapulted into each like the turbulent rapids of the Colorado River, which I rode through the Grand Canyon.

Through it all, my goal was this: to find a way to let the sad and angry voices in my head, my own and my mother’s, move with gentleness into my heart. The rapids were cold and fierce, and some days I thought I would get stuck. Just as I was going down into black depths, my memories of my mother’s tenderness toward the world pulled me back. It’s been a ride I never could have imagined. In the way I pray to keep my footing while hopping across fast water on rough stepping-stones and still sometimes slip, I made it.

I’ve chosen Inversnaid by Gerard Manley Hopkins as my touchstone poem because it struck a chord in me from the first moment I heard it. Manley could be speaking of how I feel in my connections to nature and how I wish to care for and protect those connections for myself. And how I had hoped, if my mother agreed to move to Montana, that by showing her the beauty of the natural world I loved, I could help her find a path out of her own grief. I was grieving the loss of my mother as she retreated into the shell of her own passing, while she was shaken to her core with the loss of her husband.

***

This story of hers is a memory I now find I can cherish. My wish to sing now with her will never be granted. The woman who loved to sing, but thought she didn’t have a voice, is who she was in spirit. A spirit she closed over with grief.

White Coral Bells

I remember singing ‘White Coral Bells’ with Carolyn when we were together, my mother told me during one afternoon visit when I’d asked her if I could record some of her recollections. I never sang with anyone else, and the thought of making music with someone seemed like such a beautiful activity. In later years I wished I had a voice to sing in a chorus because I thought it was so beautiful to harmonize with someone. Then we met the Hewsons—Betty and Tom—and Betty convinced me I should play our piano again with her. I hadn’t touched my piano for forty-five years. What a joy I discovered! Although I loved the piano and had spent three hours daily playing after college, with Betty I discovered the joy of togetherness at the keyboard!

I play this recording over several times as well as others I made of my mother’s happy stories. It helps me remember that I do wish my focus would stay there. I still love singing White Coral Bells. It’s an old and simple English round that begins White coral bells upon a slender stalk, Lilies of the valley line my garden walk . . . , for me best sung around a campfire with girlfriends. I remember singing it with my mother, sometimes during a long drive. But I also remember not wanting to sing it with her at home. The rebel in me caused me to chafe against her desire.

Beginning

Boulder, Colorado

August 2009

Repeat after me: ‘I, Carolyn, am a Goddess, a Healer, a Warrior, and a Priestess.’

I, Carolyn, am a Goddess, a Healer, a Warrior, and a Priestess.

My heart pounded. I looked up into my friend and mentor’s face from where I was standing waist-deep in one of the small hot pools circling Gold Lake above Boulder, Colorado, at Gold Lake Resort. The white peaks of the Continental Divide shone in the distance against the clear blue sky. How does he know this? I thought as I held his gaze. I was caught off guard by his assurance. No one had ever said anything like these words to me before. When I had looked in a mirror that morning after four days roughing it alone at a small campsite perched on the side of a valley a half mile away from where I now stood, I didn’t think I looked any different than on the day I had begun my Vision Quest. I’d just finished telling him that I’d felt waves of passion flooding through me for the four days I’d been alone. That I’d felt connected as never before to the natural world as its own entity—as lover and beloved.

I broke off my gaze into his eyes when a shadow passed over us. We both looked skyward to discover an osprey flying above us, carrying a fish in its talons.

We looked back down and then at each other. I sensed a great calmness in him, as if it could pass into me.

Carolyn, no one I’ve ever guided here on a Vision Quest has ever told me that they understand that everything is connected. This is what you take home. This is what you carry in your heart. You could say it this way: ‘Everything is Love.’

I shook as I asked him, How do you know this? What do I do now? I remember thinking to myself, How can this be possible? I don’t feel special, or anointed, or anything else related to being chosen. I don’t feel I’m especially bad, but I’m not shining goodness all the time, either. My question to myself over the years—Who am I and why am I here?—took on new meaning. But I didn’t know what it would mean later.

You keep what you have felt in your heart. You have to trust that you will know when to speak of it and to whom.

I looked out toward the Continental Divide. I’d never felt so alone.

I remember that more questions surfaced in my thoughts, like a trout rising through the afternoon sun’s reflections on the lake. I wasn’t certain when I had chosen the place to pitch my tent in the circle of young fir trees that it was the best place. Or when I had told a close friend I felt called to go on a Vision Quest that I had been completely honest with her or with myself.

After a few minutes, I looked back into my mentor’s eyes. I felt welcomed and safe.

Come on, he said. It’s time to go.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth

Turns and twindles over the broth

Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,

It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inversnaid

Will She Move?

In 2009, my husband, Dan, and I spent Christmas with my mother in Connecticut. It was a month after Dad had passed on, and we had become concerned about her living alone in her big house with only aides for company and help in caring for her, preparing meals, and driving her where she needed to go. She was ambulatory and able to take care of her own bookkeeping, but it seemed to us that the upkeep of a hundred-year-old house and landscaped yard with only occasional help would later, if not sooner, be a challenge that could overwhelm her. The aides had no knowledge of what was needed in the care and maintenance of the house, nor of the little amenities she appreciated in the care of her personal belongings, such as how she liked the table set or which utensils she liked to use.

My grown daughter and son were with us for the holiday, and we had all decided to try to talk about moving with her the day after Christmas while we were still together. We had settled in her family room off the kitchen when I began the conversation I knew would not be easy for any of us. She’d already said right after Dad’s passing, I’m never moving.

Mom, Dan and I would like you to reconsider moving out to be near us in Bozeman.

Mom frowned.

I can’t move. Dad’s here, she said. Then she looked around the family room that he had added to their colonial-style home in the 1970s. A fire crackled in the fieldstone fireplace, and lights twinkled on the scant Christmas decorations we had put up for her. Dad had this addition built after he himself had completely gutted and rebuilt the original part of the house in 1956, shortly after we all moved in when I was ten.

I miss him. I asked God to take me first. Her shrill voice hurt my ears.

I looked at Dan, my daughter, my son, pleading for help.

Grammy, my daughter began, if you move out to be near Mom and Dan, I’ll come visit often. Me, too, my son added.

Mom, I continued, if you move out near us, we can do things together.

Like what? she asked, skepticism lacing her voice.

I dove in. I felt as if I were making up a story as I went along and could convince myself it was true. I’d been concerned about her safety for months. Concerned, too, about how many trips I would have to make to Connecticut to determine if she was staying safe. I knew I could sound selfish. I didn’t want her to believe I would try to control her life if she lived near me. I did wish for her that she would find some happiness if we were living near each other. I quieted, for a time, my own dark thoughts about how my life could change if, or when, she made the move.

You’ll love the Bozeman Symphony performances. We can go for drives up in the mountains to see wildflowers. Share tea in our garden. You love classical music and haven’t had much opportunity to attend any concerts for ages.

I looked at the other players in the scene. My daughter was looking out the window. My son studied the floor. My husband was looking at me. Outside, a bright December sun was low on the horizon. Cardinals and chickadees pecked at seeds under bare bushes.

Can’t you hear my plea for help? I wanted to shout.

I wondered if concerts and drives in the country would be enough of a lure. She and I both loved wildflowers, and I hoped it would be a joy we could share. I wanted to remind her about how she loved to arrange her lunches and dinners like a garden on a plate, but I kept quiet.

I’m just fine here. I know you’re worried about me. But I have Kathy, Crissy, and Jimmy to help out. And the women from Ghana the agency sends to live with me. You think I can’t take care of the house.

Afternoon light glanced through the family room windows, shone on Mom’s silver hair, still bright at ninety-two, outlined her shoulders, and caressed her face in a warm glow. She dropped her chin and closed her eyes. I could picture her lifelong ramrod posture through shoulders now rounding with age. When she opened her eyes again, she thrust out her chin.

Grammy, my daughter began.

Why do you all want me to move? I don’t need help! I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Mom frowned, then flailed her arms in front of her face. I was afraid she’d hit herself. I did not know this mother.

I looked around the room at my husband and children again. I couldn’t think of another thing to say at that moment. I felt as if my life experiences of raising my children, running a bed-and-breakfast in Maryland, making it through a divorce, moving to Montana and remarrying all counted for nothing. I couldn’t imagine what there was left to say now.

Briefly, I recalled what I’d seen and felt during my Vision Quest four months earlier. Now, in my mother’s house in December, I didn’t feel like a Goddess, a Healer, or a Wise Woman.

Mom limped out of the family room and down the hall to the chairlift she and Dad had installed two years earlier after our first attempt at suggesting a move for the two of them. As she pressed the lift button and ascended the stairway, I had no idea what she might have been thinking.

At some point she had begun to view me more as an enemy than as a daughter. Maybe it had been my father who planted that seed, back when Dan and I first brought up the idea that they move out to Montana. I never dreamed it could be possible for my parents to view me through that lens—a loved daughter transformed to someone they perceived as a threat to their independence. My stomach was in knots. It appeared a new chapter was beginning, one in which I was becoming the dangerous stranger—and dangerous strangers were becoming like daughters.

That Christmas, long bandaging strips of anxiety and worry wove themselves around my own desire for self-preservation. A chasm was growing inside me with each round of discussion—and there were a couple more before Dan and I and my children headed home in opposite directions. I didn’t know when this chasm had opened; maybe it was when I heard Mom had been left alone in the house during a hurricane after one of her visits to Dad in a hospital several years before.

My memory bank has a robber.

I’d begin after breakfast when we were alone for a few minutes. Mom, can we talk a little more about the idea of your moving to be near us?

Her pinched face and steely blue eyes would meet mine. Why do you want to talk about this? Why are you so worried? she would demand. You don’t think I can take care of myself! The last was more a shout than a question.

I felt I needed schooling—a school for middle-aged daughters to help them communicate with elderly parents, one that would help children better understand what happens when a parent loses a partner. No one at that time was offering any resources for help. I felt too consumed with coping to ask. When you’re in deep waters you have to swim—or drown.

My anxiety deepened. My elderly mother—ninety-two at this time—was living alone in a large old house that was beginning to fall into disrepair. Worry, a close cousin to anxiety, haunted me when I looked around the two acres of her yard of rolling grass. The aging arboretum Dad had designed with great care over decades, which included dogwoods, birches, and magnolias, was being pulled to earth more and more with each hurricane and blizzard. Not only were branches falling on the roof, but uprooted maples and holly trees leaned precariously against one another. I worried because Mom’s hip, which had been bothering her for ten years or more, wasn’t getting any better, and she was in near-constant pain. I told myself I wanted my mother living near me. But even so, other thoughts intruded, ones I found difficult to face: How will I cope with her grief if she does live near me? I began to tune in to another voice, as if inside me a sleeping woman was now being awakened. Your life will change.

Why Did I Move?

Why did I move two thousand miles away from Annapolis, Maryland (a four-hour drive from New Canaan, Connecticut, where my parents were living), to begin a new life in Montana after my divorce? I wanted to establish my own sense of home at a great distance from their concerns about what I might want next for my life at age fifty-five. Their concerns were reflected in terse comments: So far! So forlorn! So wild!

Why did you have to move so far away from us? my mother demanded one day after she had moved to Bozeman.

Did you think I was going to move back into your home? I answered. Her face folded in on itself. I fell in love with Bozeman while I was visiting from Connecticut with you and Dad in 2002. You helped me find an apartment while we were here. Remember?

To this my mother replied in a strident tone: My mother always told me I could come home if I had trouble in my marriage. Why didn’t you come home?

In other words, why couldn’t I be like her? No answer I could ever give satisfied her.

Some energy deep in the rivers in Montana called me, reminding me of my father’s cowboy stories and songs of the West. Songs like Cool Water and Let the Rest of the World Go By. I loved those songs when I was growing up. I visited out West several times with Mom and Dad—as a girl, and again a year before I made this move. Here I feel like I have the best of three worlds—falling in love with a new man who became my husband, discovering the passion of tango, and wading in cold streams or hiking high up mountain trails into thickets of wildflowers.

I was as free as I wanted to be until my father passed on, and I began to persuade my mother to move out here, into my world. Here, she trespassed against me. I can’t believe that was my mother’s intention when she let me talk her into moving. Yet to this day, I don’t truly understand what drove her to ask questions of me that so often felt more like accusations: Why do you have to spend so much time hiking in the woods? Why aren’t you spending more time with your husband or me? The seeds to those questions lie buried. I do not know what fruit they will bear.

In the middle of the muddle of rifts and cross-purposes, I remember one of her stories of our happy times together.

Connections: Stories and English Gardens

When you were little, Mom would always begin, "every night you would ask me to read The Happy Family—it was your favorite Little Golden Book."

Like a tiny pebble creating small ripples in the pond of memory, these words lift the dark stories of the end of my mother’s life into thin light. Sparkles glance off the waves. I feel their warmth. It might be that we were both happy being together when I was little. Happy and connected—although the connection was more mother to daughter than woman to woman. However, it was a beginning. I remember laughing together when we were picking blackberries in a friend’s brambly patch, eating almost as many as we saved in the bucket for jam making. Between picking and sampling warm, ripe fruit, our fingers and tongues were purple. And I remember choosing, at fifteen, what I wanted for someday when I’m married—Royal Worcester Lavinia bone china with the blackberry design, most likely because of the fun we’d had.

But blackberry brambles can scratch, too. Like my mother’s defenses if I questioned her about her parenting.

I did the best I could, she’d always say if I challenged her about any of her parenting decisions, particularly during my teenage years. I know she cared deeply about doing her job well as wife and mother. I always wanted to be a good mother, she often said. But I wasn’t sure that we connected outside the mother-daughter relationship.

If I could wave a magic wand, I would return to one spring fortnight in the south of England in 1977. Mom and I had joined a group of ladies from a garden club in New York for a tour of English gardens. We had talked about wishing to do something like this, and then I found the perfect tour package through a friend at my own local garden club. Off we flew to London, where we met twenty other women at a beautiful, new Edwardian-style hotel—a style that I have always found appealing. For me, it evokes romance and a more gracious era, including elegant clothes.

I can’t say that I remember what we chatted about over continental breakfasts of croissants and coffee, but if I had to speculate I would say our conversation went something like this: Isn’t this lovely! Aren’t we special! I wonder what the gardens we’re visiting today will be like? We pretended