The Fairy Tale Ends

My carefully controlled world was changed forever by a phone call I received on June 13, 2004. It was a Sunday, which is the one day my shop was closed, and I was home when my husband answered a call from my brother who wanted to speak to me. The room began spinning as I listened to him tearfully explain that our mother had been killed earlier in a house fire. I remember screaming at him during some point earlier in this call, “Don’t you tell me my mother is dead! Don’t you dare tell me that!”; However, my screaming could not stop the words as they spilled from his lips. I crumbled on the floor in tears. I remember feeling scared and lost at the thought of never seeing my mother again. The next couple weeks, I walked around in a hazy fog of sorrow. Although I spoke at her funeral, I felt my body was performing without my mind. Through the investigation, we learned the fire was started by an electric potpourri pot, which she had purchased from my shop. Her death devastated me. She was my best friend. I found it hard just to get out of the bed in the morning, and I elected many times to not even try. My shop, which I once loved, became a thorn in my side. I could barely stand to be there because it reminded me of her and the reason she died. I began to rely on others for its day-to-day operations, thankful for the fact this freed my time to wallow in my grief. Everyone was worried about my condition, but none were able to help wake me from this state. I was disconnected to everyone and everything around me.

I had a lot of “what-ifs” that I constantly ran through my brain during this time. She was at my shop the day before her death and toyed with the idea of spending the night, what if I had insisted she stayed? What if she had never bought that pot from my shop? In fact, if I never had the shop, she would still be alive. I also thought of the Mother’s Day flowers that I did not send the month before her death. By the time I had stopped for a moment from my busy schedule to place an order, I could not find a florist that could deliver them in time. I waited too late. I toyed with the idea of sending them anyway, but decided I would just wait and send her some for her upcoming birthday in July. So many times I wished I had sent those flowers.