The Amethyst

I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents you will miss them when they're gone from your life.

Maya Angelou

My mother is a unique person. Or, as Little Edie might say in the haunting documentary Grey Gardens, she’s a “staunch character.” As such she is obviously not one to be messed with. But life, and the vicissitudes thereof, do not seem to give a damn if she is a staunch character or not. In fact they are letting her have it. My mother has had a rough year. In the past ten months, and at the ripe old age of 89, she has suffered a stroke and three very serious falls. These tumbles have resulted in two broken vertebrae, one broken leg, one broken hip, and an enormous amount of time spent in hospitals and rehabs. I’ve been by her side through it all. This is easily the most time I have spent with my mother since I left home decades ago for college. Even when I lived at home I don’t remember us spending much time together. During those years she’d be doing her thing while I did mine, separately. So it was awkward at first, being in such close proximity day in and day out, but now we are used to seeing each other several times a week and have therefore settled into an easy peace. 

I have moved my mother out of her New York City home and into a lovely assisted living facility near my house. Sadly, with all the falls and recovery periods since she moved up to my neck of the woods, we have spent more time in hospitals and rehabs than we have in her new sun-drenched assisted living apartment.

She still owns her place in the city though, and occasionally I will go in to dust and make sure the water is still running, or to get something for her. Some books, a pair of glasses, photographs for her new abode. I was there last week at her request, picking up her old Jackie O style sunglasses, when I saw a walnut-sized amethyst geode sitting by her bedside table. This triggered a memory so long-buried that when it resurfaced I actually felt dizzy and had to sit down. Once I felt stable I put the stone in my pocket and left.

The next day I almost ran into my mother's room at her rehab facility. As I pulled the chunk of amythest out of my pocket I put it right in front of her face and said “look! Look what I found in your apartment.”

“What is that?” She reached up to take it from me, her hands shaking with the fatigue of being almost 90 years old. “Oh. It’s a piece of amethyst,” she replied, not waiting for my answer.

“Yes!” I was laughing now. “Don't you remember your crystals phase?” I asked her.

She gave me a dirty look and said, in her most dismissive tone, “I never had a crystals phase.”

“But you did,” I insisted. Don't you remember the amethysts in the car? To keep us safe? And then they did? That was crazy!”

“What are you talking about?” she grumbled as I felt myself emotionally sinking.

“Oh my God,” I sighed internally, getting frustrated now. Does she remember nothing? Have I become the keeper of her memories? Will it be me who has to remind her of what her life was? Who she was and what she accomplished? Who she loved and who she did not? This was all too emotionally complicated so I just launched into the tale about my mother and her amethysts while she lay in bed and listened.

When I was in high school my mother drove an old rusted-out stick-shift VW Rabbit. It was, in bygone days parlance, a real jalopy, and decidedly NOT fun to drive. But drive it I did - if and when she would let me borrow it. One day I asked to take it to the library. “Fine,” she said, not looking up from her newspaper. When I got into the car the sun hit something sparkling aggressively right by the gear shift. The intense blast of light made me blink and once I opened my eyes I saw what it was that had near blinded me. It was a lovely amethyst geode, about the size of a walnut. I picked it up and examined it. It was beautiful, the crystals clear and bright, the color a sharp and clean purply-lilac. That night I asked my mother about the stone in her car and she said distractedly “oh, that will protect us. That’s why it’s there.”

“What?” I said, with all the derision and scorn a teenage girl can possibly muster.

“Well,” my mother began, “amethyst is a very protective stone. It's very sensitive, very attuned to the person it’s near. It can absorb…”

But I cut her off. “Mom..!”

This new-age gobbledygook is exactly the kind of thing that a seventeen-year-old girl does not want to hear coming from her mother’s mouth. What I would have liked to have heard was “how are you doing?” or “let's go shopping,” but that, alas, is not who my mother is. 

“Let me finish,” she snapped right back at me. “The amethyst is the stone of spiritual protection. It can absorb negativity coming toward its bearer back into itself. It will actively sacrifice itself for the good of others. It's an amazing source of protection.”

“That's nice,” I told her, once again wishing that my mom was like the other moms in town. Normal.

Several months later during a snowstorm I was in the only car accident I have ever been in and God willing ever will be. It was a freezing cold day, snowing and icy. We had just experienced two back-to-back blizzards (as we used to do before the world started melting) and the roads were treacherous. As I made a turn onto a street near my house the car started to fishtail and then to turn full 360s on the ice. The car spun around and around, like a graceful ice skater. As I pirouetted down the street and I had a slow-motion moment of clarity where I was very grateful that there were no other cars on the road. Eventually my car hit a thick patch of solid ice, swerved dramatically and then slid down an embankment. The hood of the car slammed into a tree but because of all the snow everything felt soft and cushioned. The impact was loud but not jarring and after several minutes of simply sitting there stunned I wriggled my way out of the passenger side door and walked the ten minutes to my house. When I got there I told my mother what had happened. She walked back to the car with me, assessed the damage, and then we walked back to the house, through the snow, in silence. Once home she called a tow truck, gave them our phone number and the location of the car and said “we will come by tomorrow morning.”

I expected her to be furious but she was not. How in the world were we going to afford a new car? Even an old used one would be a stretch. But she wasn't angry. In fact, she seemed, like me, to be disassociating from the entire drama. The next day we went to the garage where they informed us that the axle was damaged and the car was “most likely a goner.” “You better get all your stuff out of the car if you're going to leave it here,” the mechanic said as he handed us two large black garbage bags.

We grabbed everything out of the car and the trunk and threw it into the bags. When we got home I dumped it all out onto the floor and started to sift through it. There was so much car detritus I didn't even know where to start. Was there anything worth keeping? I looked through old papers, ancient cassette tapes and loose change. I also found (from the trunk) a tattered beach chair, a bag of rubber bands and paper clips all tangled up, and some old text books. 

Finally I was through it all, and as I went to throw almost everything away I realized that there was something left in the bottom of one of the garbage bags. Something small and heavy and by the looks of it from the outside, spiky. I reached my hand in and to my delight I found the piece of amethyst. “Ha!” I wanted to crow from the rooftops, and especially in my mother's direction, “guess the old protective amethyst trick didn't work after all.” I held it up to the light and that is when I got the same shock that I had just last week in my mother’s apartment.

This was the same amethyst that I had seen in the car before the accident, but it was also not the same. That amethyst had been clear and clean and bright and sparkling. This amethyst was clouded and grey, barely purple and no longer translucent. In fact it looked clouded and yellowish - as if it had been exposed to cigarette smoke for a thousand years. But it was what was running straight through the stone that took my breath away. There, right down the center, was a long jagged black streak tinged on the edges with a noxious bile-colored edge. This violent gash made the crystal look broken and ominous - mean and diabolical. I couldn't believe it, and I certainly didn't want to give the ol’ mother any credit, but it was too late. She was standing right over me.

“Let me see that,” she said as she took the crystal from me. “Good thing this was in the car - look how much worse it could have been,” she said, pointing with one long elegant finger at the horrible slash cutting the stone in two. 

“Well, we will just have to get another one now,” she said as she threw the damaged stone into the trash. “What are you doing?” I asked, surprised.

“That stone did its job,” my mother replied calmly. “It protected you during your accident and absorbed the harm meant for you. It’s no longer protective. Its job is done and you are safe.”

I couldn't argue. I had admired the stone only three days earlier and at that time it had been the same as always. Perfect. I knew without a doubt that the damage done to the amethyst was done on the day of my accident. That my mother, for all her “crazy” ideas and conspiratorial beliefs might have been right about something after all. 

As I recounted the memory of my mother's “crystals phase” and the story of the life-saving amethyst, my mother looked mildly engaged but also distant. We sat in silence for a bit before she said “well that certainly is an interesting story.”

“Do you remember any of that?” I asked her.

“No. Not at all,” she said simply. 

We absorb things from our parents, whether we want to or not. Thoughts and ideas and beliefs - wonderful and biased and crazy and everything in between. When they pass on they leave us a legacy. Good or bad or indifferent. When my father passed he left behind a legacy of getting sober and becoming the man he wanted to be. Once sober he lived his life gently and without drama. He didn’t complain and if he didn’t have something nice to say he wouldn’t say anything at all. That, I think, is a wonderful legacy to have left.

And now my mother is nearing her end. She knows it as do I. The end sits there in the room with us, day after day after day, hovering like a hungry vulture just waiting for the perfect moment to pounce and whisk my mother away. I don't know what legacy my mother will leave when she departs on her next great adventure.  

What I do know is that all three of my children and my husband have had something hidden away in any car they have ever driven - or will ever drive - whether they are aware of it or not.

One small piece of that amazing and beautiful crystal - the amethyst - to keep them safe from harm.