Page 8 of Don't Tell Me How to Die

“I have a surprise,” she said. “You know all those pictures I have in shoeboxes that I’ve been threatening to sort through one of these years?”

I stopped eating as she reached into the picnic basket and pulled out a thick photo album bound in bright green fabric.The McCormick Familyhad been carefully inked on the cover in Mom’s perfect Catholic schoolgirl handwriting.

“Ta-da!” she said, setting it down on the blanket.

Lizzie opened it to the first page, and there were four black-and-white shots of Mom, Dad, and the Harley Electra Glide, each one taken in a different location.

“These are from 1979,” Mom said. “Your father and I went to the biker rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. It was our last big road trip—thirty-five hundred miles—and I was pregnant with Maggie at the time. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Sounds like the poor kid got bounced around a little,” Lizzie said.

“More than a little. It was almost all interstate, but I had to make a lot of pee stops, and some of those side roads were bumpy as washboards.”

Lizzie drummed on the side of her head with both fists and smirked at me. “Well, that explains a lot,” she said.

Mom turned the page, and there was an artfully arranged cluster of pictures of me as a baby.

“Oh, there’s the little darling now,” Lizzie said.

I put my hand over the pictures. “Stop,” I said. “What’s going on?”

They both stared at me.

“What are you talking about?” Lizzie said.

I ignored her, closed the album, and slid it to the side. “Mom... what’s going on?”

She kept staring at me, stone-faced.

“Maggie, what the hell are you doing?” Lizzie said. “Mom’s finally having a good day, and you’re ruining it.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not used to Mom having good days lately, and I’m trying to ask her if it’s real.”

“I don’t get it,” Lizzie said.

“She got sick in December, and she kept getting sicker, and then she wakes up one day in June, and like Cinderella, she’s all dressed, and her hair is done, and we drive to Magic Pond for a picnic, and now all of a sudden there’s a family photo album, which has been on her bucket list for years, and I just want to know what’s going on. Is this real, or does the Mustang turn into a pumpkin at midnight?”

Lizzie didn’t say a word. She was wrestling with my logic, and I could see in her eyes that my questions were starting to make sense.

She turned to my mother for answers.

Mom just looked at us. Well, she didn’t exactly look. She kind of squared off, sizing us up, like we were about to get in the ring and go fifteen rounds.

And then she said them.

Four simple words that she uttered only once. Yet of all the hundreds of millions of words I have heard before or since, those are the four that will forever be burned into my soul.

I have written them in the margins of countless notebooks, screamed them into caves and canyons so I could hear their taunting echoes, traced them onto frosty car windows and steamy shower doors, and ached as I watched them trickle down into trails of tears.

Four words.

How strong are you?

FOUR

Life is filled with defining moments—those pivotal points in time where your entire world can change in a heartbeat.

By the age of seventeen I’d had a few, but none that I couldn’t handle. It’s not just that I was lucky or blessed, which admittedly I was, it’s more that when things don’t go my way, I have this unique ability to turn them around.

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