The Hymn That Ambushed Me in a Mall
Between escalators and discounts, a childhood song found me crying.
Grief ambushed me between a phone case kiosk and a mannequin in a Santa hat, and it was wearing my mother's favorite hymn.
This was November, eight months after we buried her, and I had not cried once. Not at the hospital, not at the funeral... not in the car afterward when my sister sobbed so hard she had to pull over and I sat in the passenger seat handing her napkins like a well trained assistant. People kept telling me how strong I was. I organized the flowers. I wrote the obituary. I returned the casserole dishes, washed, with thank you notes. Strong is a word we give people whose grief has not located them yet.
Mine located me at a mall, on a Saturday, while I was holding a discounted waffle iron I did not need.
I had come to buy Christmas presents because that is what functional people do in November, and I was extremely committed to being a functional person. The mall was doing its usual November impression of itself: tinsel on the railings, an inflatable snowman by the pretzel stand, a seventy percent off sign that seemed to be apologizing for something. And then, underneath the crowd noise... a melody started that my body recognized a full three seconds before my brain did.
It was Abide With Me... Some instrumental arrangement, strings and a synthetic flute, the kind of version that is supposed to be furniture. Music you are not meant to notice.
My knees noticed.
I had to set down the waffle iron and sit on the edge of a fountain, next to coins holding other people's wishes, while eight months arrived all at once.
Here is what nobody warns you about religious music: the memories are not stored in your mind, where you could manage them. They are stored in your body. In my body, that hymn is a pew that needed varnish, third row from the back, left side. It is my mother's alto going flat on the same high note every single Sunday of my childhood, so reliably that flat note became the true melody and the hymnal became the error.
It is her thumb moving over my knuckles during the sermon. It is the peppermint she would sneak me from her purse at the second verse, a bribe for one more hour of stillness, the cellophane crackling like a tiny scandal.
She sang it while doing dishes. She hummed it in waiting rooms, which I only later understood was her way of being brave. She asked for it at the end, in the hospital... and the chaplain sang it alone because none of us could, and I stood there strong as a fence post while the last verse said the thing about the darkness deepening.
And now a mall was playing it at me between a shoe sale and the food court, and I was crying so hard that a security guard slowed down, assessed me, and mercifully kept walking.
But here is the turn, the part I still cannot quite explain.
The song did not end. It stopped.
Mid phrase, wrong place, and then started over from the top. No mall speaker does that. I stood up, wet faced, and followed the sound past the pretzel stand and around the inflatable snowman, and found, in the open atrium by the escalators, a middle school choir rehearsing for a holiday concert. Forty kids on portable risers in mismatched socks. A conductor with her sleeves pushed up, stopping them every eight bars.
They were getting it wrong. That is the thing. They rushed the third line. A boy in the front row sang an entire verse a beat early, alone, and turned the color of a stop sign. The conductor said, "Again, from measure five," for what was clearly the ninth time, and my mother's holy deathbed hymn hiccuped and restarted, hiccuped and restarted, like grief itself learning its part.
I stayed for the entire rehearsal. Forty five minutes on a bench meant for tired husbands.
Somewhere around the fifth attempt, a girl's voice cracked on the high note, the exact note my mother always missed, and I made a sound that was half sob and half laugh and fully unhinged, and the woman next to me offered gum, which is the mall's version of communion.
Grief does not make appointments. It waits in public places, holding the one song you forgot to brace for.
By the final run through they had it. Clean, together, the boy in the front row redeemed. And I discovered I did not love it as much perfect.
The wrong versions had my mother in them.
I drove home without the waffle iron and did something I had been avoiding since March. I opened the box of her things and took out her hymnal, the maroon one with the broken spine that fell open to the same page out of habit, the way old dogs return to a warm spot. Her handwriting was in the margin. Not a prayer. A grocery list. Eggs, thread, birthday card for R. I sat on the kitchen floor and read a grocery list like scripture, because that is what it was by then.
That night I wrote for three hours. For eight months I had written around her, careful little pieces about autumn and time, and that night I finally wrote into the grief instead of around it: the flat note, the peppermint, the chaplain singing alone. It was the least strong thing I had ever put on paper, and the truest. Later I read that this is how it works for most of us, that memory hides in the senses and waits for a key, and the key is almost never the thing you would have chosen. I would have chosen her voicemails, her perfume. I got a synthetic flute at forty percent volume near a pretzel stand.
When I felt brave, I entered the poem in a monthly poetry contest, not because I thought it would win but because my mother believed hymns were meant to be sung in front of people, badly if necessary, especially if necessary.
I go back to that mall more than I should. I have never once heard the song there again. The rotation moved on, the choir graduated, the snowman deflates every January like the rest of us. But I keep peppermints in my coat pocket now, the same brand, and I do not eat them. They are for stillness emergencies.
And when Abide With Me finds me these days, in the car, in a church I am only visiting, I sing along and go flat on the high note on purpose.
Some inheritances you protect.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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