Getting Somewhere

The search for my mother’s soul after her death

I took her cell phone knowing she’d want the photos to be saved. When I’d finished importing them to my computer, I navigated to her texts. I knew that when I turned this phone off, there’d never be a reason to turn it back on. That was something I couldn’t accept yet.

About her health, the texts revealed nothing I hadn’t already known. What I did learn was that my brother was just as desperate to talk to her again, though we had different ideas for next steps. His post-mortem text to our mom read Please come back to me. Mine read Take me with you.

Death leaves so many questions in its wake. Where was my mom’s soul now? How could I get to her?

Along with her cell phone and Christmas tree earrings, another thing I took from her house after the funeral was a small book I’d made for her in college. I was taking a bookmaking class and wanted to put my new skills to use. For the cover I used a soft green fabric, her favorite color, and inside were the lines to an acrostic poem I’d written for her.

It was called Somewhere and it was about robins, her favorite bird:

Standing on a naked tree limb sprouting
out of a grassless knoll, were two still robins
making eye contact. They were sick,
engulfed in some sweeping illness
wrapping their tiny lungs. They stared silently for
hours — the only sound, a heavy autumn wind.
Evening came, tucking the earth under a blanket of frost.
Red breasts burning in the cruel air, one robin said to the other,
“Even if we are lost somewhere in the dead of winter, I’ll remember you.”

Why my young adult brain thought to make her favorite birds so sick, and this poem so grim, I simply don’t know. But ten years later, this little book still sat on her nightstand. Maybe it was the last thing she’d read before going into the hospital. Maybe it was how she knew.

I had to take it with me.

The lonely months that followed were filled with a deep need to locate my mother’s soul. I found comfort in researching the afterlife, learning about people’s experiences communicating with the deceased, and how to contact spirits who’ve crossed over. I read “The Afterlife of Billy Fingers,” but got frustrated every time I wasn’t awoken by the booming voice of my mother with updates from the beyond. I’d beg the lights to flicker or the floors to creak — possible signs that a spirit was in the room. If a cardinal landed nearby, I thought maybe that’s her. If it was a robin, I was even more certain.

But no matter how many birds flew by or lights flickered, I still couldn’t feel my mother’s presence.

As I became more desperate in my search, my own fear of death grew duller. I stopped running up the basement steps after switching the clothes to the dryer. Just let the ghosts grab me and take me to their homes, I reasoned. Maybe my mom will be there.

After reading “The Light Between Us” by certified medium Laura Lynn Jackson, I contacted a local medium for my own reading. I learned about my spirit guides and past lives, but there was little mention of my mother. The medium told me that my mom was grieving, too.

Four days before she died, my husband and I moved from an apartment in Chicago to a house in suburban central Iowa. As soon as we pulled the Uhaul into the driveway, I got a call that my mom’s health had taken a turn, and that I should get on the next flight to Philadelphia.

She never got to see more than a Google Street View photo of this house. Had she been looking for me all this time but didn’t know where to find me? The thought sent me into a depression deeper and more muddy than I assumed possible.

She died in September. By the following spring, not a crumb of zeal for life remained in me. I had no energy and every bone ached. I took lengthy naps almost daily — what I called grief naps. I didn’t seek out any more medium readings. When the lights flickered, I figured the bulbs needed changing.

I sat at the kitchen table one evening watching half a dozen robins search our backyard for bugs and seeds while the setting sun bathed the scene in deep orange. My husband asked why I was crying.

“I have no way of knowing if she can see this beautiful sunset,” I said. “I can’t text her a picture. I can’t describe it over the phone. All of those robins that seem to come to our yard and no one else’s, I don’t know if their visits mean anything at all. Everyone says she is still here with me, but I can’t feel anything. Honestly, unless a robin tries to strong arm its way into this house, I won’t believe they are anything more than just a bird.”

Though typically one for solid evidence over sentiment, my husband had graciously listened to my musings about the afterlife many times. I thought this search of mine was a solo journey, but perhaps I hadn’t realized he was my pit crew all this time.

When he woke me from a grief nap one afternoon with uncharacteristic urgency, I didn’t hesitate to follow. “Come downstairs,” he said. “You need to see this.”

At the bottom of the basement steps, in a shallow window well just ahead of us, a tenacious robin pecked incessantly at the glass, jumping up and down in the thawing leaves.

“It’s been doing this for at least an hour. I had to wake you.”

I gasped. “It’s trying to get in!”

“It is. Today of all days?” he mused in disbelief. “I just feel like…it’s gotta be her.”

I felt it, too.

It was March 22nd, my mom’s birthday.

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This essay originally appeared in Human Parts.

Delaney Gibbons

is an artist and writer based near Des Moines, Iowa. She’s spent her post-pandemic years leaning into a passion for visual storytelling—creating autobiographical work about complicated grief, not choosing motherhood, mental illness, self care, and some funny stuff, too. Her comics, essays, and illustrations have recently appeared in Body: An Anthology, Breakwater Review, Modern Women, Human Parts, The Belladonna Comedy, and more. She chronicles her process and explorations through her weekly Substack newsletter, Daydronk. Discover more at delaneygibbons.com.