My Mother’s Bridge

The holidays always bring to mind those who are no longer here to celebrate with us. I'd like to share something I wrote about my Mom.

Four young girls, the youngest perhaps eleven, the oldest still a teen, fell sobbing at the sight of the twisted, fallen steel. They had walked for days, hungry, scared, hiding in trees as soldiers searched below. The railroad bridge, the only route across the river, hung creaking, its once strong straight lines now contorted into a sagging, misshapen V over the water far below. They could go no further.

Her memory that of a child grown old, Mom told the story of the bridge many times in her later years. It might have been months, or maybe years after the start of the war, that she and her sisters faced the bombed-out skeleton of the bridge.

Mom was just ten when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Hours later they invaded the Philippines. Days later they took over the city of her birth, Manila, whereher family had lived and prospered for generations. Every aspect of her young life was torn apart,except for the love of her family, and her faith.

As the war went on, Mom’s family had to separate to avoid the fighting, to find shelter, to find food. She and her sisters were sent to stay with relatives in another province and had to cross that bridge.

I remember Mom telling that story when I was a child. Mom used to say they prayed and prayed to God for help, and somehow made it across. I imagined how terrifying it must have been, clinging to jagged, broken metal, trying not to look down as the remains of the railway bridge swayed and creaked and threatened to give way under the weight of their four small bodies.

Growing up, I assumed that was why she was so afraid of heights, a fear I shared without having had anything remotely like her frightening experience.

After the war, Mom met the American soldier she loved for the rest of her life. Dad, the teenaged son of a coalminer, joined the U.S. Army Air Corps and was sent halfway around the world to a place as unlike Logan County, West Virginia as one can find. They went on to have thirteen children. I am the oldest girl, with three brothers before me, a position I often described as the worst possible, but one I wouldn’t change for anything, even if I could.

I left my family when I was fifteen and did not see my mother again until my father’s funeral five years later. Dad died rescuing my four sisters from drowning in a swollen Oklahoma creek. It is the greatest sorrow of my life that he and I never reconciled, that we never spoke as one adult to another, never hugged and said I love you.

The decades that followed were years of joy and heartbreak, of babies and new places, new opportunities, of irrevocable misunderstandings and terrible loss, of grief and healing and growth and new understanding. My Mom and I grew close. We talked and cried and laughed, traveled together and shared meals and family and love.

That is one of the greatest joys of my life.

In recent years, when she talked about the bridge, Mom would simply say that it was a miracle; that they prayed and prayed and the angels must have carried them across, that she had no memory of the physical crossing.

On a few occasions when I was called upon to make a speech, I told the story of my mom and her bridge, as a metaphor for perseverance and strength and accomplishing goals. In my journalistic compulsion for factual storytelling, I would gloss over the part about the angels and miracles, substituting that with the far more mundane statement that somehow those four young girls managed to make it across.

My mom died too soon at the age of eighty-six. I thought we still had many years of sitting in kitchens, of sharing family updates and gossip, of remembering and laughing, of just being together.

But Mom got the flu, and the angels carried her across the bridge to join Dad, and my brother and sister who awaited her. She is deeply missed by those of us still on this side.

My Mother's Bridge was a finalist at the San Francisco Writers Conference contest in the adult non-fiction category.