I’m pretty sure my mom was a witch
Ruth Daniloff: 12.03.35–1.20.24
We said our final goodbye to my mom last weekend. These were my parting words:
I’m pretty sure my mom was a witch.
She believed in all manner of otherworldly things — ghosts and Ouija boards and shamans and the like. She introduced me and my sister to the supernatural as kids. She told us that three witches lived behind the walls in our grandmother’s old ramshackle cottage in northern England. As evidence, we discovered chocolate coins covered in gold foil scattered in random places whenever we visited. For me, it was the thrill of every trip. Looking back, I believe my mom was simply opening the door to the possibility that magic exists, and that we need not be afraid.
I first realized my mom might be different when I noticed eyes on the side of her head. She’d lay on the couch in a sauce-splattered apron, a wad of Kleenex balled up in her sleeve, and Walter Cronkite on the tube. But instead of looking straight ahead at the TV set, she took in the news or some episode on Masterpiece through a sidelong gaze, watching from the corner of her eyes, her head oriented elsewhere, toward the windows or the front porch or whatever shenanigans I was cooking up in the next room. One second, she was watching the latest on the Iran hostage crisis and in the very same second, she’d catch me in the act or marvel at a pair of cardinals circling outside. It was like she was in two places at once. In my eight-year-old eyes, it was confirmation. She had powers.
Side note: her TV-viewing style also speaks to how she approached life. She paid attention to the mainstream; she didn’t necessarily trust it. The important stuff, the real stuff, was off screen, often overlooked and unheard. My mom instilled in me a love for the unseen, the unheralded, and the unwell.
She taught me to look for the answers at the end of a banana. She demonstrated by slicing off the little black nub at the bottom, revealing two or three seeds embedded in the flesh. Sometimes the pattern of those seeds resembled the letter “Y” and sometimes an “X.” It was like a magic eight ball you could eat. Even though I quickly abused the power by repeatedly asking if I’d become rich and famous, spoiling plenty of bananas until I got the right answer, those little discs were as comforting as they were wondrous. To this day, I eat a banana every morning. I still don’t have all the answers, but I learned that revelation can be found in the mundane. Or maybe Mom was just making sure I got enough potassium.
And it didn’t stop with bananas. Mom sometimes took me along on her reporting assignments. One time, I accompanied her to Virginia for a story about a community of dowsers, the ancient practice of seeking water sources by hovering a Y-shaped stick over the earth and if it vibrated, you were standing above a potential well or underground rivulet. When we got back home, I spent hours in the backyard with a divining rod, seeking watery treasures beneath my feet, waiting for my branch to tremble. I was enchanted that a simple stick could contain such power, that I might contain such power.
Then there was the dark room. My mom was an amateur photographer and set up a dark room in the corner of our basement. Sometimes she’d invite me in. I’d open a door, pull apart a pair of heavy black curtains, and step into a small room filled with red light. It was like a secret world. The chemical smell choked my nostrils. In one corner, plastic jugs of liquid, a funnel, and a box of clothespins. In another, my mom, bathed in a red glow, stood over trays marked “Fixer,” “Stop Bath,” and “Developer.” At nine years old, I had no idea how it all worked. I watched her slide a piece of paper around in a tray with a pair of tongs and an image slowly materialized as if from the bottom of a lake. After a few moments, she handed me the tongs. I swished a blank sheet around in the liquid and watched a pair of elderly women appear in a field. Something in my chest bloomed, too.
As the mother of a shy kid full of anxieties, perhaps she worried about the shape my mind was taking. While she couldn’t fix everything, she could show me that wasn’t all there was, that we could conjure whole new worlds from the unexpected, or from nothing at all. Perhaps I’m romanticizing all of this now that she’s gone. But whether she was intentionally soothing my fears or not, she believed in hidden forces, so I believed in hidden forces.
Of course, as I grew older and began forging my own identity, my lens on the supernatural narrowed. I rebelled against my mom. She was a teetotaler, so I drank like I was on shore leave. I embraced American football which she saw as nothing more than a garish homoerotic ritual. I dismissed her offbeat notions, even though a part of me still believed. But she never wavered. It’s as if she spent her whole life with her divining rod, trying to detect all the buried stories and secrets, identifying the places to dig. Even after she moved to an assisted living facility, her curiosity remained at full throttle. She embraced medicinal pot, psychics and psychedelics, and ancient forms of healing. She called out any and all coincidences as cosmic interventions, and continued to chase a sense of wonder through her keyboard despite her shaking hands.
Some time in the middle of the night a few months ago, my mom’s divining rod trembled for the last time. She came upon the ultimate hidden reservoir, discovering the source of life’s greatest mystery — where it ends. It was somehow fitting that she died with a deck of Tarot cards on her bedside table, dressed in black with a pair of black Hokas with orange laces on her feet, as if she knew it was time to go. She looked about as peaceful as a person could look, you could almost touch the absence of her hum.
I will miss our chats on the phone and our meals at the local Indian restaurant. I will miss her love of chocolate and gardening, and her latest story idea that she always insisted I should write… for The New Yorker or Netflix, of course.
But it’s her magic that I will miss most of all.
