I’m Older Than My Dead Mother

Twenty-one years after my mother chose to leave, I’m choosing to go.

Last night, I booked a round-trip ticket from Seattle to Paris. Thirty days. I have never intentionally left my life for an entire month before.

I am 51 years old. My children are grown. My stepson is almost 16. I have a husband I adore, a home I love, work that matters to me, and for the first time in my life, I can kiss everyone goodbye and leave for a month simply because I want to. Not because I am escaping my life, but because I finally built a life I don’t need to escape from.

I am officially the happiest, healthiest and wealthiest I have ever been. There is something about saying that at 51 that stops me in my tracks, because my mother never got here.

On September 21, 2005, at 50 years old, my mother ended her life. This September, 21 years later, I will be on a pilgrimage in France. I am now older than my dead mother. That is a sentence I never knew I would have to learn how to carry.

For a long time after she died, I was lost. Dissociated is probably a better word. The years between 2005 and 2011 are difficult for me to explain because I was functioning, but I wasn’t really living consciously inside my own life. Eventually, I started seeking help.

I put myself into treatment to get a handle on my self-medicating. When I found some footing, I began rewarding the version of myself who was choosing to stay awake. I started a company in 2012, and somewhere in those early years of rebuilding, I gave myself the gift of yoga teacher training. Something inside me opened. My curiosity came alive, and once it did, I couldn’t stop asking questions.

Next came Kundalini teacher training, and then I just kept going. Over the years, I have accumulated somewhere around 2,500 hours of certifications, trainings and study across different healing modalities and traditions. I studied the psyche, the nervous system, trauma, somatics, consciousness, religion, mythology, Jung, the unconscious, the body and the soul. Mostly, I think I have spent the last decade and a half trying to understand one enormous question: Why do humans do what they do?

Perhaps underneath that was another question I didn’t know I was asking: Why did my mother lose her way, and how do I find mine?

Yesterday, I spoke with my mother’s AA sponsor. Twenty-one years later, I am still learning things about her. I learned that my mother wasn’t particularly forthcoming about her bipolar diagnosis. In fact, she wasn’t particularly forthcoming about much of her internal life. She kept things hidden.

I don’t say that as judgment. I understand hiding much better now, as I study the shadow. Shame hides. Guilt hides. Fear hides. Pain hides. Families hide. Cultures hide. Religions hide. And sometimes the things that are buried don’t disappear. They simply wait for someone willing to dig.

Maybe it’s no accident I ended up calling my work The Dirt Codes. I’ve spent most of my adult life digging around in what gets buried.

Not only through my mother’s story, but through my own. And along the way, that search led me somewhere unexpected: to a labyrinth.

Years ago, I became fascinated by the pattern of the labyrinth and eventually decided to build one on our property. Mine will be about 60 feet wide when it is finished. It has taken years just to understand the foundation and begin creating it. It still isn’t finished.

Neither am I.

Then one day I walked into Churchill’s, a century-old bookstore in my neighborhood, and found a book about labyrinths. I looked up the author, and that led me to an international labyrinth community documenting thousands of labyrinths around the world, and eventually to facilitator training.

I could have taken the training in the United States, but there was another option: Chartres Cathedral in France, a place whose medieval labyrinth has been walked for more than 800 years. So I decided to go there.

I will spend five days in Paris before traveling to Chartres for the training. I want to understand the labyrinth not simply as an object or a beautiful pattern, but as an experience. A way of walking with ourselves. A way of entering, circling, confronting, surrendering and returning. Eventually, I want to be able to invite others into the labyrinth I am building at home with more understanding of what the journey can offer them.

But two days of training hardly seemed like enough reason to cross an ocean, so I gave myself 30. Next, after Chartres, I am heading south, and that is where another thread of my studies begins to reveal itself: Mary Magdalene.

I have spent time studying the Gospel of Mary and the seven powers the soul encounters in its ascent. I have been fascinated by how ancient descriptions of the soul can sound remarkably familiar when placed beside Jungian psychology, ego consciousness and the modern language we use to describe the unconscious. Different centuries, different symbols, different ladders, and yet human beings seem to keep discovering versions of the same interior terrain.

Who are we beneath what we have been taught to be? What happens when we encounter the parts of ourselves we fear? What is left when identity begins falling away? And why have certain ways of understanding the human experience been buried, excluded, forgotten or destroyed?

Those questions have led me to Mary. So after Chartres, I will begin my own Mary Magdalene pilgrimage through southern France, including the cave at Sainte-Baume where tradition says Mary Magdalene spent the later years of her life.

I know what I have come to believe about Mary Magdalene, even if we can’t prove every piece of her story. I am interested in what survives. I am interested in what got buried. I am interested in the voices that disappear from official stories and somehow continue whispering for centuries anyway. I’m going to France to walk closer to that story, not to decide what I believe, but to deepen what I already know and share what I discover with others.

I am interested in what Mary and Jesus were discussing in these early texts about consciousness, attachment, fear, matter, spirit and liberation. I am especially interested in why those conversations still feel so recognizable inside a human being living two thousand years later.

Maybe that is why this trip feels less like a vacation and more like a continuation. My labyrinth is unfinished. My studies are unfinished. My understanding of my mother is unfinished. And now I am beginning my own memoir, Maya. Kali. Mary.

Those three names have become markers for the different ways I have come to understand my own life: the material world I lived inside, the destruction that forced me to see differently, and the return to something deeper underneath it all. I didn’t set out for Mary to become the bookend of this story. Yet, somehow, after all these years of searching, she did.

Twenty-one years ago, my mother’s life ended. For years afterward, some part of mine ended with hers. Then, slowly, I started coming back. I studied. I built. I failed. I succeeded. I lost things. I found things. I questioned everything. I learned to enter the places in myself that I had once been afraid to see.

And now, at 51, I get to do something my younger self could never have imagined. I get to pack a bag, kiss my husband goodbye, leave my adult children to their own lives, walk through Paris, walk the labyrinth at Chartres, walk toward Mary’s cave, write, study, wander, listen, and stay gone for 30 days simply because I have finally reached a point in my life where I can.

There is something profoundly selfish about this trip, and I mean that in the best possible way. It belongs entirely to me.

Perhaps this is what it means to become older than your dead mother. I stopped wanting to discover why her story ended the way it did. Instead, I realize I’m already standing beyond it. And I get to decide what happens next.

Twenty-one years after my mother chose to leave, I’m choosing to go.

Cheers to an 8/8 Lion’s Gate purchase and my next adventure into the unknown.