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“Some say butterflies are messengers between the physical and spiritual worlds, a small, delicate, divine presence sent from the heavens above by a deceased loved one.”
Life is easier when you believe in the unprovable. Though I was always a proud skeptic — dodging spiritual methods and solely accepting tangible evidence to back up any claim — my cynicism only deepened in the throes of grief.
All the same, after my mom died in a freak accident one late spring day, I couldn’t shake the feeling that monarch butterflies weren’t entirely ordinary. Some say butterflies are messengers between the physical and spiritual worlds, a small, delicate, divine presence sent from the heavens above by a deceased loved one. It’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly it is that I feel about these butterflies. It’s just that — a feeling.
After she passed away five years ago, the world became desolate and despairing. Or, perhaps, it was me who despaired and devolved into a creature for whom the world seemed to fade into shades of gray. I was left with an unfathomable loss and the burden of grieving her fiercely loving and deeply complicated personality. Living with my mom was either sunshine and butterflies or dark cocoons of twisted mania. She was a woman with undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
She would make breakfast for dinner upon request and would take the cushions off the couch, declaring it was time for mattress-sliding down the stairs. When my sister and I argued, she’d fill up a pitcher with water and pour it over our heads to lighten the mood, forcing us to not take everything so seriously. She would turn off the lights during our weekly dance parties and shine a flashlight on our smiling faces to give us a spotlight. She would play the “Leading Ladies: The Best of the Great Ladies of Song” soundtrack on repeat in the car so my sister and I could engrave decades’ worth of creative woman empowerment into our brains. She was our knight in shining armor when we were sick, teaching us how to care for one another even as she dedicated most of her time to long drives to visit my grandmother in Long Island to assist her as her health slowly declined.
But lest we forget, she was also nothing short of a nightmare, insisting that she sit with me in my therapy sessions.
“I hate my life,” she told my therapist one day. “I gave up everything for my two daughters, and they’ve ruined it. I hate them. I don’t have a family.”
“Diane,” my therapist replied, “you seem to have a lot of negative things to say about the way you feel you have been treated by your family, things that Tara is having trouble understanding, and it sounds like you’re dealing with some underlying sadness. Do you have suicidal thoughts?
“I’m not sure,” she would say, glaring at me.
“While living with her tested my mental health, mourning her was an equal battle. I didn’t know how to begin. Occasionally, I felt depressed, but, sometimes, there was comfort in not having to deal with her liabilities. The guilt and dichotomy of feeling a sense of relief while grieving was heavy, and my honesty felt shameful.”
She ripped clothes off their hangers and threw them onto the floor, leaving our apartment in complete disarray during a spell of rage; she told us our friends were not welcome in our home; she sporadically kicked my sister out to live with my dad because she would assert herself more than I would; and she took her anger out on any service worker, waiter and construction worker who dared to cross her.
I can’t say I ever connected the woman with something so delicate as a butterfly when she was alive.
While living with her tested my mental health, mourning her was an equal battle. I didn’t know how to begin. Occasionally, I felt depressed, but, sometimes, there was comfort in not having to deal with her liabilities. The guilt and dichotomy of feeling a sense of relief while grieving was heavy, and my honesty felt shameful.
I was isolated, constantly spiraling inside the familiar prison of my debilitating inner monologue. It was there, in my solitary grief, that I lost the ability to sympathize with others’ woes.
A breakup, a fight with a parent, an irrational boss — no one’s adversity matched mine. I was sure of it. Only months ago, I took pride in the size of my heart and my sense of empathy. Now, I didn’t recognize the hardened person I saw in the mirror every morning. I wondered if I was in dire need of perspective, so I spent an entire week researching various volunteer programs where I could establish an interpersonal relationship. It was this realization that led me to the foster care system.
I became a Court Appointed Special Advocate, CASA for short, a trained volunteer who advocates for foster youth. Our purpose, as CASAs, is to be a constant and amplify the voices of kids tangled within the warped layers of the broken, corrupted and outdated foster care system. We communicate weekly with the team — social workers, therapists, attorneys — and build an alliance with our foster youth. I was paired with a 15-year-old girl. I’ll call her Simone.
By the time Simone was 5, she had no family and was one of the 33,000 kids in the child welfare system in Los Angeles. She was raised with a blurred vision of a bright future and little foundation of what it means to dream. While most of her story is confidential, whatever stereotypical tales you’ve heard about children in the foster care system are incidents that Simone has most likely experienced.
Simone was in her fifth foster placement when we first met at a site that felt more like a bleak orphanage than a proper home. The white walls were bare, the lights bright and fluorescent and it lacked the deep sense of warmth and love that is too easily taken for granted by those who are lucky enough to experience it. She wasn’t comfortable with eye contact, preferred not to be hugged and mostly gave one-word responses. Regardless, she found herself at the top of every AP class, was extremely well-versed in all current events and was a passionate advocate for women’s rights. Her healed wounds and eternal scars screamed louder than whatever it was that tried to hurt her; she was resilient as hell.
At the beginning of working with Simone, I wondered how pure my intentions were. Why was I there? In my experience, altruism is seldom pure. Perhaps it was the only way to check and see if I still had a pulse. Maybe putting my energy into someone else — someone else who knew what it meant to lose a parent — would heal me. Maybe I just wanted to be a good person. Over time, I recognized that by some fortunate stroke of fate and a bit of government bureaucracy, Simone and I had become a relentless team.
“These people never listen to me,” Simone would tell me. “They say they understand, but we all know they don’t. They can’t help.”
I agreed with her. It’s impossible to “understand” the intricacies of someone else’s pain, no matter how empathetic or how similar of an experience you think you’ve had. We bonded over this notion, both guarded, without sharing too much about our pasts, and found common ground in rejecting the healing tools at our disposal — regardless of how different those tools may have been.
“Over time, I recognized that by some fortunate stroke of fate and a bit of government bureaucracy, Simone and I had become a relentless team.”
For me, it was the shrinks, breath work, support groups and Zoloft. For Simone, it was an overburdened social worker — in Los Angeles, case workers like hers work with an average of 30 kids at a time — and a rotating supply of government-appointed attorneys and therapists.
My friends were well-aware of my pessimism regarding getting the help I so desperately needed. They heard all about my final failed experience with a therapist months ago. After chipping away at the wall that separated me from the rest of the world, I finally had a breakthrough. My eyes filled with tears. The warm drops slid down my flushed cheeks as I explained my dilemma to the therapist:
“How do I begin to grieve my mom’s death?” I asked. “Why am I sad some days but grateful the next? I feel like an awful person.”
I had never dreamed of uttering those words aloud. Nevertheless, this therapist cut me off. We were out of time, she told me. She didn’t miss a beat when asking for a new credit card to keep on file, though. I never went back.
She didn’t listen to me. She didn’t even pretend to understand. She didn’t help.
I gave up on healing and sunk deeper within myself. I avoided my feelings at all costs, save for the moments when I heard my mom’s favorite Lesley Gore song, “You Don’t Own Me,” that we used to belt in the car, or when I re-read Alice Hoffman’s “Practical Magic” because the protective, undeniably loveable and eccentric aunts in the novel reminded me of her. Or, when I caught sight of a monarch butterfly. I didn’t know why then, but I truly found solace every time I saw one flutter.
It was then with great uninterest that I accepted my friends’ request to be a guinea pig and meet with them and a medium. My four friends, in the process of creating an animated film, were researching all aspects of spirituality, meditation, breathwork and the afterlife before embarking on writing a script. I didn’t believe in any of it, and I knew nothing would come from it, so why not?
I sat on the floor in front of a computer screen while my friends sat behind me on the couch. Apprehension began growing in the pit of my stomach, refuting my nonchalant behavior. A dinging noise sounded from the computer, and I accepted the invitation for the video chat with deep, sudden hesitation.
After exchanging quick hellos and formalities, Tracy, the medium, launched right into it. Her initial gasps were, in my opinion, startling and dramatic. This was how she located the meandering souls making their way to the afterlife. Apparently. I wanted to stop, but it was too late to back out now.
The blaring gasps were quickly followed by hectic scribbling.
“The spirits come through me,” she said, “into my pen and then onto the page.”
I was distracted by my friends’ high-pitched “oohs” and “ahhs.” I couldn’t tell if they were actually believing it or were just cuing the theatrics to encourage me. Regardless, I caught myself in a daze, thinking about what I was going to eat for dinner and twirling my long, blonde hair into tiny knots like I always do — like my mom always used to do.
“Someone is coming through,” she said. “A woman’s voice. Your mother.”
The mention of my mother’s voice coming through was not surprising, as I had tipped Tracy off about her passing at the beginning of this meeting. What did shift my mood ever so slightly was the way Tracy described my mom.
“She is yelling at me,” Tracy said. “She is talking incredibly fast. She will not let me get a word in. She’s a bit sassy. She’s animated for sure. Definitely has an edge to her.”
Tracy laughed. My friends and I did too. That sassy, vibrant woman could certainly be my mom. If my constant hair twirling was any indication of my consternation, my lip biting, heavy, deep sighs and finger cracking were sure to alert the room that the nervous butterflies in my stomach were preparing for fight or flight.
“Your mom has been waiting for you to connect with her,” she said. “I can barely understand what she is saying; there is so much she wants to say.”
While grasping for dear life to the understanding that we were about to enter the world of nonsense and make-believe, I was able to calm my nerves a bit. Even so, the computer screen magnetically drew me and my friends even closer. Curious, yet suspicious. We began to witness one unbelievably specific validation after another — these declarations were far too wild to conjure out of thin air.
“Your mom is standing with another woman,” she said.
Tracy lifted her notebook to reveal the last name of the woman standing with my mom.
“Does this name mean anything to you?” Tracy asked.
The room was motionless and quiet. No one said a word for a moment. I slowly swiveled my head around, lending a quizzical look to my friends behind me. In awe, the combination of fear, joy and uncertainty caused tears to fall from five pairs of eyes. We simultaneously shuddered at the mention of my best friend Rachel’s last name: Gordh. Rachel was not able to join us at this session, but her mom passed away a year after mine, and we both had to live through this pain together.
“Your moms want to know if you’ve been receiving their signs,” she said.
At this moment, despite the small voice in my head that was pleading to accept this as a coincidence, I allowed myself to tentatively reach toward the space of belief and comfort.
“Monarch butterflies for you,” she said, “and white birds for Rachel.
Rachel and I, hesitatingly, understanding how ridiculous it might sound, had spoken about our connections with these specific animals to each other numerous times. Never knowing exactly what the feeling was or how to articulate it; it was constant.
I saw them everywhere. These monarch butterflies, with their dainty orange, black and white wings, followed me on walks, circled my car as I drove, landed on chairs or benches when I sat outside, hovered outside my window when I opened the blinds and occasionally situated themselves on my hand or arm. I began to lose count of how often I encountered them.
The session continued and a flicker of hope began to grow. I felt less isolated than I had in years. My friends were by my side, and in a major turn of events, this medium had somehow gained my trust, and two lost mothers fluttered lovingly in the void around me.
Tracy relayed more chilling messages.
“Are you writing anything right now?” she said. “Your mom says she wants to talk to you about what you’re writing. She read it.”
The overwhelming emotions I felt congregated in the middle of my throat, drying up any words I might have thought to say. My hand slipped as it tried to mask its shaking by twisting strands of my hair.
A week before this meeting, I completed a piece about growing up with and then grieving my complicated mom. It was a rebuttal to the thoughtless eulogy given by the rabbi at her funeral and my candid thoughts about idolizing the deceased, regardless of their convoluted past.
Speaking the truth is hard, especially when half of it is ugly. But I longed for a connection with others who could relate. The thought of hurting my family in the process and disrespecting my mom with my honest review of my challenging childhood was daunting. It was unclear if I could go forward with publishing it.
“Your mom is crying too,” Tracy said. “She is saying that you cannot hide the past to protect anyone. Share your truth and beautiful things will come from it.”
The first piece was published a few months after my mom gave me her blessing through Tracy.
“I saw them everywhere. These monarch butterflies, with their dainty orange, black and white wings, followed me on walks, circled my car as I drove, landed on chairs or benches when I sat outside, hovered outside my window when I opened the blinds and occasionally situated themselves on my hand or arm. I began to lose count of how often I encountered them.”
To my surprise, at that moment, Simone was all I could think about. I began picturing her — heavy black eyeliner, silver nose ring, thick dark hair with blue streaks, quiet demeanor — sitting in front of this screen, opposite the medium. It occurred to me that because CASAs are meant to keep their life private in order to set boundaries, I had shied away from mentioning my mom’s death. I felt guilty that if there was anything in my life that could make her feel more connected to me, less alone, it was probably this.
I found myself replaying our mutual hatred for those who don’t “understand.” Perhaps what Simone and I feared most when accepting help was ultimately having to face the reality of our own pain. Suppression is only a short-term term solution, and, maybe over time, we could help each other see that. Maybe the opposite of isolation isn’t some tangible idea of “understanding.” Maybe it’s simply a willingness to let someone see you as you are.
A week after meeting with the medium, I drove an hour north of Los Angeles to visit Simone at her new foster placement. I knocked on the slightly chipped, white door and she answered the way she always does: head down, eyes darting, a bit uneasy. I could sense her masked excitement when I told her we could have lunch at the sushi spot down the street.
“Did you finish �Gone Girl’? I asked.
“Yeah,” she replied.
“How is track going? Your scores are getting better and better.”
“Good.”
“I’m so sick of this mask mandate.”
“Yeah.”
“How is your art class going? Are you working on anything cool?
“Yeah.”
We were silent for a moment. I wondered if I should let down my walls and quit the small talk. I twirled my hair and bit my lip, nervously racking my brain for the next sentence that was going to come out of my mouth.
“You know, by the way, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it to you before, but my mom passed away a few years ago,” I said. “You don’t have to respond to that or say anything. I just wanted to share.”
I could feel her gaze burning a hole through my head as I continued to drive. She wouldn’t take her eyes off me for a few long seconds. She switched her gaze to the window.
“You didn’t mention it,” she said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Simone barely said a word at lunch, yet her demeanor toward me adjusted on the car ride home. Her hardened layers began to peel. She asked me a question for the very first time.
“Are you reading anything good?” she asked.
I couldn’t help but smile.
“I am,” I said. “I’m reading �Running with Scissors.’ It’s a pretty wild memoir.”
I pulled up to her foster home, and she got out of the car.
“Goodbye, Tara.”
“Bye, Simone. See you in a few weeks.”
Before I put the car in drive, I heard a knock on the window.
“I made something in my art class,” Simone said. “Can you wait a second? I’m not sure why but I felt like giving it to you.”
Simone came back holding a canvas. The deft brushstrokes revealed a monarch butterfly perched on a white windowsill, looking into a home. Spectating. I can’t say for certain why she decided to give this painting to me, but I have a magical theory.
Read part 1: A Daughter’s Eulogy to Her Flawed Mother: Four Years Later
ABOUT CASA LA: CASA of Los Angeles organizes the community to take action and advocate for children and families in L.A. County’s overburdened child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Learn more here.