Mother Mother Sticker
Cherie Trojak
Our wall decal material is non-waterproof, paint-safe, and can be removed and repositioned. These re-applicable sticker greeting card photos are excellent for decorating walls, doors, refrigerators, laptops, and desks.
Permanent greeting stickers are waterproof, dishwasher safe, and have a matte laminate finish. Permanent sticker greeting card photos are great for adding a personal touch to your items. Personalize laptops, water bottles, travel mugs, hydro flasks, and more!
Sticker & Co Mother's Day Sticker Greeting Cards are custom sticker card greetings that allow you to celebrate mom, or the mother in your life, by adding a personalized message and a photo to one of our unique sticker card designs. The design with the custom message and the picture are peel-away stickers the recipient can use to decorate and personalize belongings.
The latitude and longitude where she landed, the last words she said to the shuttle bus driver who dropped her at the trail overlook, her mood when she met with her priest just four days prior. I read over the last letter she had mailed to my children. I looked for clues inside this little card with a cartoon penguin drawn on the front, written in block printing so my 5-year-old daughter could easily read it. My mom wrote of riding the Light Rail to a Diamondbacks game, of planting a cactus garden, of looking forward to summer in the already hot days of a Phoenix spring.
I read and reread her last words written in cursive in the tiniest composition book that she had left in her Jeep, as well as the last text she typed, in which she both celebrates life and apologizes for it. I zoomed in on the photo she took with her iPhone from the ledge looking out to the sunrise that lit the canyon that morning to see if the rocks or shadows would share anything new. I replayed our last conversation, and each one before it that I could remember.
I came back to the canyon for answers, or a deeper understanding of life and my mother, or maybe myself. But all I could see were the peaks miles away, the trees greener and prettier than I imagined, tiny dots of figures moving slowly up the switchbacks, and the stillness of the world.
I might take more after my dad; I have his olive skin and eyes that are so brown they are almost black, his look of quiet disdain when I am angry and his need for popcorn at the movies. But I was closer to my mom.
My mom was a retired nurse and hospital administrator with a good pension. She had a book club and friends she hiked with weekly. While she hated that four of her grandchildren had moved so far away, she had four more who lived close and plans to visit the others soon. I needed to find out what I had missed. I needed to know, to understand how someone who seemed so happy could be so sad.
I had learned that when some people decide to kill themselves, they seem more at ease than they have in a long time, because they know that if they show any suicidal signs or too much distress, others will try to talk them out of it.
My sister and I had talked and agreed on a few things: I would write the obituary, our mom would be cremated, the service would include a full Mass. We called it a Celebration of Life, as if there was such a thing in the moment.
I wanted to ask my grandmother what happened, what she knew, the parts of the story she understood, her truth. Not right then, maybe later that week. But when I saw my grandma, she looked at me, my husband and our four children and she waved us off.
For a while, Henry, Luke and Lucy each received a note from my mom in the mail. After we moved, she had sent cards and stickers, silly presents from the dollar store like stretchy rubber bunnies and colored beads, clutter that got caught in the vacuum cleaner, that I simultaneously loved and hated.
The summer after she died was the most difficult. I was working and taking the kids places and making dinner most nights, but even when I smiled or laughed, I was empty. I pretended I was fine, posted happy photos of my children on Instagram, and thought if I told friends that I was OK often enough it would be true.
I was crying. I told the kids I just needed to leave, to get out of the house for a bit. I was certain they would be better off without me. Theo handed me a note, I slid it in my purse without looking at it. I drove away.
I picked it up, glancing around to see if anyone was watching. There was the story of John Wesley Powell, the first to explore the river cutting through the canyon, and the TWA and United airplanes that collided over the rim in the 1950s and led to the creation of the Federal Aviation Administration.
We walked down a concrete path along the canyon, juniper trees on the left, a ledge and waist-high metal pipe handrail on the right. I could see a short fence and jagged limestone that formed an overlook. When we neared the spot, Shannon pulled yellow caution tape from her bag and cordoned off the trail.
I focused on the facts. The trees and rocks, how the Colorado river snaked below almost exactly 1 mile down into the earth, the sound of a raven and the light rain that was slowly growing heavier and turning to snow.
My mom took just one day off from work, and we drove to the canyon on a Friday morning, sharing a double-bed in a hotel overlooking the South Rim. The next morning we woke before the sun to hike the South Kaibab Trail, 7.1 steep miles down.
That night we sat in a circle under the stars and listened to a ranger share a story about a mystery on the Colorado River. I leaned into my mom, her hair smelling like Ivory because she washed it with a bar of soap, and fell asleep.
Had she been sick her whole life? Sometime after the funeral my sister and I discussed the day when we were kids that our mom set a fire in a bathroom garbage can. My mom put it out before it spread. Soon after, our grandmother and her grumpy miniature Schnauzer moved in with us.
After my mom died, we each tried to understand what happened and what we knew. My sister shared that at some point when I had been in middle school, my mom drove to a parking lot after her night shift at a hospital with a handgun she had bought for self-defense. She changed her mind.
The first call to the park that April morning came at 7:15: A woman was threatening suicide. My mom had called her husband, telling him that this was it, she was ending it all. She told him she was at the canyon. He called the police, who alerted the National Park Service. Three rangers quickly searched 12.2 miles along the South Rim. By 10:45 a.m., as the weather cleared, the rangers launched a search helicopter. Within 15 minutes, they spotted her body.
The next morning the same ranger hiked back to her body and waited until the same helicopter hovered overhead and dropped a basket. By happenstance, my friend Megan had hiked to the bottom of the canyon that morning. She saw condors, rare to see at the canyon, swooping close to the rim.
Earlier that week my mom had stopped to see her mother and given her one of her favorite turquoise necklaces that she made, looping a tiny silver heart into the clasp. We would learn that she had also recently moved her house into a trust for my sister and me and written her financial information and passwords in a green notebook. At the same time, she wrote letters full of hope and sweetness to her grandchildren. She went to Mass and talked to her priest.
And on a late summer night this year, after I walked the 197 steps from the shuttle bus stop to the point at which my mother jumped, after I learned every detail down to the height of the railing, I returned to the canyon with my daughter.
On a night without moonlight, you can just see a blanket of stars, more stars than sky it seems. At night the canyon is just a deep, dark hole, and in some ways it feels more impressive than in daylight, the emptiness of it all.
Updated: Laura Trujillo and her four children live in Ohio. Laura is now the managing editor for Life & Entertainment for USA TODAY. Her book based on this story, Stepping Back from the Ledge, was published by Random House in 2022. Buy the book at Amazon. Purchases you make through our links may earn us and our publishing partners a commission.
c80f0f1006