In the Afterlife, My Dad Is at the Races

If Heaven Was a Race Track by Sarah Curl

When I hear the news of the Pope dying, my first thought is that my dad will be so happy to meet him, as if I believe heaven is a real place, and there are only a few dozen people there milling about, greeting the newcomers. The deceased might come together forming two lines, hands outstretched above their heads, fingertips touching, forming a tunnel for the Pope to dash through, as if he’s the star player in a basketball game.

Three years after my dad died, my mom did, too, and I feel like a traitor that I don’t also imagine her eagerly in line to meet the Pope. I picture her, instead, reclining on a cloud while flipping the pages of a Real Simple magazine, a morning show playing too loudly in the background. 

“Come on!” I imagine my dad urging her. “It’s the Pope!”

“You go,” she tells him. “I’m just not in the mood.”

Because, even in the afterlife, my mom would still be my mom.

Days after my dad died, I saw a crushed, empty ginger ale can in a parking lot and, heart overflowing at the site of my dad’s favorite beverage, I called Mom to tell her the news.

“It’s like he’s sending hugs through litter,” I told her, still somewhat delirious from the recent days following my dad’s unexpected death.

The other end of the line was quiet. 

“Mom, are you there?”

Finally, she responded. “I can’t believe he’s sending you signs, and he hasn’t sent me any.” 

After that, I didn’t call Mom to tell her about the owl I saw in broad daylight, about the hummingbird that fluttered at our front door on my daughter’s first day of kindergarten, or about how it seemed like it was 6:53, my dad’s lucky numbers, every time I looked at the clock. I don’t even believe in signs, I wanted to tell her.

She knew, though. She knew I didn’t believe in signs, in heaven, in god; she was always reminding me I was a skeptic, too hard, too judgmental. Mom decorated her bedroom in angels and believed in horoscopes and tarot cards. She didn’t go to church, but thought I should. 

After Mom died, it fell to me, the only child, to clean out the home where I grew up. When I got to the house, I walked into the living room and found the coffee table still pushed to the side, where it had been moved to make room for the stretcher that was rolled in for Mom on that awful night. Through the window to the back porch, I glimpsed my dad’s hoodie on the back of a chair like he had only just stepped out. Overwhelmed, I headed upstairs to start sorting Mom’s closet, thinking its small size would make the task more manageable. Inside the closet, on top of a pile of clothes, was a Mother’s Day gift I’d made as a kid. In one of those small photo albums that used to come with film, I had gathered photographs of Mom and I together and written a poem about how grateful I was for her. She must have been looking at it on those last days. I stood there, photo album in hand, staring. “She loved me,” I think. “She loved me?” I wonder. She was looking at these pictures of us together before she was helicoptered to the hospital. She was reading this poem about us when her heart was giving out. Like a child pulling petals off a flower, I stood in the hallway of my childhood home, thinking, “She loves me; she loves me not,” wondering if the last petal would ever fall, and where in the poem I would be when it did.

When my dad died, my mom kept telling me I didn’t understand her sadness. 

“We were married for almost forty years,” she said to me, almost daily. More than once, she added, “It’s longer than you’ve been alive.”

“I know,” I would say. “It’s awful.” I said this like a mantra, again and again.

“I miss him so much,” I ventured, but only once.

My mom responded, “Not as much as me.”

We had been having a version of this conversation for decades.

Lately, I have been imagining that heaven is a sort of horse track, or off-track betting parlor, even. I imagine my dead dad there in line, his Levi’s just a little too big and sagging at the waist, waiting to make a bet. Neck craned, watching one of the dozens of TVs mounted at the top of the wood-paneled walls, he’s watching the races play out, although instead of horses dashing toward a finish line, he’s seeing bits of my life, waiting to see if I’m receiving his messages. Finally his turn, he steps up to the thick glass window, not unlike one you’d find at an unkempt DMV, but instead of placing his signature six-five-three trifecta, the first three digits of his childhood phone number, he places two dollars down on an orange Ford Escape driving through the intersection of Campbell and James River Freeway at 3:17 p.m. on a Friday.

In cinematic style, my daydream cuts to me sitting in my car, also a Ford Escape, at a stoplight at that very intersection at that very time, watching the same kind of car my dad used to drive pull in front of me. I smile and give my dad a thumbs up, imagining him in the heaven-OTB, fist in the air, shouting, “Yes! Yes!” 

It’s as likely as anything.

I picture Mom on her cloud, reprimanding my dad for his time at the track. 

“It’s been almost four years,” she tells him.

“You could come, too,” he says. “Wanna place a wager? You know it’d mean the world to our girl.”

“Nah,” she says, flipping the pages of her magazine.

Some of my earliest memories are at the track with my parents, definitely before I was old enough to be allowed in. I’m still not sure how my parents managed it, but I suspect it had something to do with my dad’s charm. People often bent the rules for him, without his asking or realizing it had happened.

My dad loved the races the way he loved church. He loved the way a two-dollar bet could change the course of a day, the way people slapped each other’s backs like old friends, the smell of the grass, the sudden hush before the gates opened. It was ritual, a form of communion. The grandstands like pews, my dad would shout with strangers, leaning forward with the crowd, united in a kind of faith—in a horse, a prayer, a hope that something good would come. He somehow managed to make gambling wholesome.

Mom and I would watch him scribbling odds in a small spiral pad, pacing, murmuring, cheering, his folded racing form sticking halfway out of his back pocket. We were mesmerized by the blur of energy that was my dad. 

Where he was movement, Mom was quiet and steady, unmoving in the midst of commotion. We’d sit at a table, Mom with a cigarette and cold one, helping me sound out the names of the horses. I’d borrow a pen from her purse to doodle on napkins or the back of discarded tickets. If I pleaded, she might indulge me in a game of tic-tac-toe, but mostly she drifted away without even leaving the table. Mom never seemed to want to be where she was, and I felt that weight, even as I felt gratitude for the popcorn she’d buy me and for the chair beside her. 

To this day, I don’t remember what Mom or I thought about any of the actual races. That was never the point. When the horses rounded the final turn and my dad would rise to his feet, Mom and I would too. 

In the months following Mom’s death, I went through boxes and boxes of old letters both to and from my parents. Sitting on the living room floor I read and read, slipping back into my childhood self. Letter after letter, Mom and I wrote to each other, always apologizing about something, always professing how much we loved each other, worried, I think, that it seemed otherwise. 

Many of Mom’s letters to me address me as “Sweet Pea,” a nickname she gave me in high school that was mostly without meaning, except it was her favorite Bath and Body Works lotion scent. 

“I want to have a nickname for you,” she told me simply, and it felt like she was auditioning for the role of my mother, like it was nothing more than a performance.

I was not gracious about it. “It doesn’t even mean anything,” I told her, annoyed, and then instantly felt guilty. 

“Fine,” she said, refusing to talk to me for the rest of the day.

Still, the nickname stuck. I could never hear it without being bothered. Was that why she did it? Or was it truly a term of endearment? I felt like the one at fault, questioning her motives. Why couldn’t I accept what she was offering? What was she offering? 

My letters to her were declarations. “You must love me!” they nearly shout without actually saying anything at all. I trotted out everything she’d done for me, every memory we shared. “Remember watching Full House together those Tuesday nights?” I’d ask. “I love your homemade pizza,” one note would say. “Thank you for getting me a new outfit,” would be on another. Or, “Your no-bake cookies are the best.” I would pile up the evidence, and all of it would be real. 

It wasn’t perfect, but it was something. 

I was trying.

Mom was, too, in her way. She used to make most phone calls in the walk-out basement, where she would smoke in secret, assuming I didn’t know that she had picked up the habit again. After she died, I found a pad of paper there, scribbled with notes of our phone conversations. She had jotted down dates of a big work project I had, the title of a book I was reading, the name of my daughter’s teacher. On the top of the page, underlined three times, she wrote, “Call Sarah.” It both filled and broke my heart. I know she felt like calling me was a chore, something she needed, rather than wanted, to do. But wasn’t it enough that she called? 

A week before the paramedics moved the coffee table to the side of the living room, Mom mentioned she felt like she had the flu. The next day I called to check in and she said her shoulder blades and upper spine hurt. She said her left arm had been aching.

“You need to go to the emergency room,” I told her. “It sounds like it could be a heart attack.” 

“Stop it,” she told me.

“I’m going to call someone to take you to get it checked out,” I said.

“If you do, I’ll never talk to you again,” she said, hanging up the phone.

I stood there, stunned, phone quiet in my hand. Mom sometimes said things for effect, whether or not they were real. Even after a lifetime together, I could never separate what was true from what she wanted me to think was true.

Before I could call her back, my phone lit up with a text.

“I wouldn’t be here right now if it was a heart attack,” Mom wrote. And then, “I know. It’s scary for me also. XOXO.”

I responded instantly. “If it’s scary for you, please let me call someone who can take you. You can either feel fine and do nothing, or feel scared and do something. You shouldn’t feel scared and do nothing.”

“Do not push this any further,” she texted. “You just hit a high nerve button. If I wanted you or anyone else to take me to the ER, I WOULD TELL YOU. Don’t be mad at me. I don’t need that.”

This was the hand Mom and I were always playing. She could be scared and upset, but I could not. Over the next few days, she would not call me or answer the phone. Instead, she would send texts of her symptoms, each a sign of a heart attack, as if she had googled an article about it, and chose a section to send me each day. It felt like a game I couldn’t win. Any time I would bring up the idea of a doctor or emergency room, she would ignore or chastise me. “I don’t need this from you,” she kept saying, and yet, my phone kept pinging with her maladies. 

Finally, after several days of this, I decided I needed to drive down to see Mom in person. When I told her my plans, she said I shouldn’t come. This was often what she said when I asked about visiting, though she would complain she never saw me. For once, I ignored her. My six-year-old and I drove south and arrived by lunch time. After a while, my mom pulled out a paper grocery sack filled with Barbies from when she was a girl, a whole collection of toys I had never seen. The three of us crowded around the coffee table and my daughter designated us each a doll with the assignment to see who could come up with the best outfit. We sifted through the clothes from the sixties and seventies, some of them hand-sewn by my mom’s mom, and my mom told us stories from when she was a girl. I sat there, soaking it up, my mom there in front of me, happy in my company, sharing things I’d never heard about her life. It was like an exhale, sitting there between my mother and daughter. My anger, oddly, never bubbled that day. Not once that afternoon did I feel upset that Mom’s texts about heart attack symptoms were seemingly false. This, I remember thinking. This.

And yet. The symptoms were not false. Mom had had a heart attack. Just hours after that almost perfect afternoon, Mom’s heart failed.

The night when the paramedics were lifting Mom onto a stretcher, I was dreaming of my dad, only my third dream of him in as many years. It was just a glimpse, his floating torso telling me a sentence I have tried and tried to remember, but can’t. Had he lined up at the heaven-OTB to be there that night? Was he already getting ready for Mom, making a spot for her on his cloud? 

Sometimes I think about my parents’ notebooks: Dad’s steno pad filled with wagers and Mom’s list in the basement for our phone calls. Both, in their way, were records of odds—what could be won, what could be lost. My dad would hurriedly scrawl his notes, tracking the wins—if not the horse he had bet on, then at least the way the sunlight slanted across the dirt. Mom, though, would mark the losses, both real and imagined.

When loved ones die, people often want to tell you that the person is better off now, in some blissful afterlife, but I can only imagine my parents as they were when they were alive. I see my dad grinning hugely—high fiving the Pope and hitting trifectas all day, which is the sort of energy he exuded in life. And while I would like to think Mom has finally found a place she wants to be, I still just imagine her as she was, sitting at the table like old times while my dad goes to place a wager, only this time the chair beside her is empty.

“Sarah would hate this,” I imagine my mom saying to my dad, arranging porcelain angels on a shelf in her new home. “She was always so cynical.” Because, of course, Mom would still be Mom. 

She’d finish settling in while my dad polishes his boots, and then they’d set off to the track. Mom would order a Red Bull, and perhaps borrow my dad’s Daily Racing Form to study the entries.

“Thinking of making a bet?” my dad would ask her, and she’d look at the empty chair beside her. Maybe she’d remember a game of tic-tac-toe she never wanted to play, or maybe she’d still be thinking of that young girl who used to pull petals off of flowers—she loves me, she loves me not. She’d pause, picturing the photos in that old Mother’s Day gift.

“You know what?” she’d say to my dad. “I would like to place a wager, after all.”

After Mom’s death there were no ginger ale cans in parking lots, no hummingbirds at the front door. I walked around my childhood home in a daze those weeks, sorting through three lifetimes, never imagining both of my parents would be gone before my fortieth birthday. I donated boxes to Goodwill, gave things to relatives, and brought the bag of Barbies home to my daughter. 

Like everything, it wasn’t perfect, but it was something. 

Then one day when I was feeling especially depleted, I walked down to our mail box. There among the bills was a single Real Simple magazine I never subscribed to, addressed to me. Mom’s at the races, I thought to myself, holding a thumbs up to the sky for Mom’s win.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was something.

At the track, I picture my parents as they’ve always been. They wander outside for the last race, taking in the smell of the turf and the sounds of the horses being loaded into the starting gate. The last horse is in just as my mom and dad reach the rail. Dad pulls up his Levi’s and Mom leans against the top rung. And then, at the sound of the bugle call, they both lean forward, the announcer bellowing, “Annnd they’re off!”