Last week, on the way home from visiting my mother-in-law in Perth, Ontario, I stopped at a gas station along Highway 7, at the north end of her town, to fill up before the long trek.
I wasn’t wearing my winter coat, because it’s more comfortable to drive without it, and the wind was bitterly cold. I was distracted, freezing, and fumbling with my wallet, my phone (which I was using to try to be efficient by looking up something trip-related while I pumped gas), the actual fuel line, and my cardigan, which kept flapping open in the wind.
At some point during this ordeal, I placed the wallet on the roof of my car, and thought to myself “I’d better not forget that up there.”
It wasn’t until we stopped to buy the kid some lunch over a hundred kilometres later that I realized that I did, of course, forget it up there.
Colin immediately called his mom, who went to the gas station to look around. No wallet had been turned in, and no wallet was lying on the ground. Not one to give up so easily, Colin’s mom also decided to stop by the local police station, to see if the wallet had been turned in there.
Meanwhile, in the parking lot of a Tim Horton’s in Marmora, Ontario (a town that, coincidentally, features prominently in the novel I’m writing), I made a list of all the items that I would need to replace. My driver’s license, my health card. Two credit cards and two debit cards. My library card, my Presto card for Toronto public transit. Various points and membership cards.
It would be inconvenient, but not difficult. At home, I had a valid passport, proof of address, and all the other things required to replace bits of lost identification. I’ve been meditating recently and practicing my equanimity, so I tried hard not to freak out, in spite of the rock of doom forming in my stomach.
Everything was replaceable, except for one thing.
Three days before my mother died, we had to call an ambulance to take her into the hospital. It was something we’d been through before, something that she was supposed to survive. I said goodbye to her on a Thursday night, confident that she would come home a day or two later. I never saw her again.
When the ambulance dropped us off at the ER that night, I had to give mom’s details to the intake person. I had her health card in my hand, and when the registration process was done, I shoved it into my wallet. That was on November 19th, 2020, and it’s been there ever since.
There was no reason to keep the health card, but I couldn’t take it out of my wallet. Every time I thought about it, a cold dread would wash over me, leaving me clammy and panicked. Mom would have found this extremely silly, and told me to cut the card in half and toss it in the garbage.
Half an hour after we stopped in Marmora, Colin’s mom called to say that the wallet had been turned in at the police station. We were still closer to Perth than Toronto, so we headed back toward the wallet. I didn’t want to be driving without my license, and I was feeling too exhausted to manage the rest of the journey to Toronto. We would try for home again the following morning.
When I was reunited with the now battered-looking wallet (it had clearly been run over by a car or two before it was found), the one thing I wanted to hold in my hands was mom’s health card, the one irreplaceable thing. I pulled out every card and piece of paper and laid it all out in a neat row.
Every item was there, except for … you guessed it.
Did someone take the card? Did it fly out of the wallet when it ricocheted off a fast-moving car, while everything else remained firmly wedged in its folds? Was it a sign from the universe?
I’m not usually a “signs from the universe” person, but I couldn’t deny the bizarre specificity of the card’s disappearance. Perhaps it was time to let go of this one particular flat rectangle of grief. I couldn’t do it myself, so some great, wrenching, unseen force stepped in to help me out. Thanks, universe (or mom).
My wallet doesn’t feel any lighter. Maybe my heart does, a little.
What?! That's incredible.
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