The Surprise Path

I am a goddess of grand gestures. Go big or go home might be my mantra. Or maybe go big WHEN you go home?

  After I moved to Los Angeles at 22, I rarely returned to my motherland without some sort of elaborate surprise attached to my homecoming. I’m a pop out of the birthday cake kinda gal and I started young. I mean I was nine when I planned my first surprise party for my mother’s 30^th. I delivered the invitations, organized the potluck and made the lopsided Betty Crocker cake complete with crunchy pieces of egg shell. Few milestone anniversaries or birthdays for family members have passed without my cooking up a scheme.

  I once showed up at Sacred Heart Cathedral on Mother’s Day because I knew my family would be at mass and I also knew that at the end of the service, Monsignor Joseph would introduce the guests, and when he said “and visiting us from Los Angeles, we welcome Suzanne Lowe” all heads turned and mom, my siblings, the neighbors and the nuns were all crying….I mean seeing ME in church was already a miracle, and I walked up the aisle California Barbie doll tan in a white dress carrying a big bouquet of red roses. Yeah, it was a brilliantly orchestrated scene and definitely quite the surprise.

  Time has passed and I just turned 60, and I’ve been pondering a bit, looking over that highlight reel of surprises in the flickering film of my memories. They still make me smile. But the reality of the disconnection with so many in my family has left me wondering if I should have sat in quietude with my loved ones more often and been less of the planner of PIZZAZZ. Rita Mae Brown once said “the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.”

  I fear that in my case, what I thought was likable might only be liked by me.  It turns out they may not remember my grand gestures so grandly. Maybe I put my energy toward the wrong things and took the wrong path.

  Ahh, but there was this day when a literal path and a surprise intersected. It was the grand gesture of 1999. My daughter was just over a year old and my mother would only be on this planet for four more months. But we didn’t know that then. I was doing everything I could to make her feel enveloped in joy since her cancer diagnosis three years earlier. My husband and I helped her fill her Hawaii bucket list dream. And I traveled to North Carolina with her first grand baby regularly. My husband missed our daughter’s first solid foods, her first birthday, her first steps while we spent probably 4 months of that year across the country giving my mom the gift of the firsts.

  On this trip I enlisted my siblings and father in the surprise. Dad launched the day’s event walking hand-in-hand with my mother along her favorite path around Lake Johnson.

  Dad set out clockwise. After about ten minutes, they encountered my middle sister pushing her baby boy in a stroller.

  “What a great surprise!” mom exclaimed, “Why don’t you two join us on our stroll?” My sister turned around and the four of them walked on under the canopy of oaks and sugar maples.

  A bit later they came upon my brother reading on a bench. “Why this is such a coincidence!” said mom. My brother popped Dostoevsky into his backpack, because he’s dark like that, and joined them on the dappled path.

  As they rounded a bend where turtles tend to congregate in the shallow cove, they came upon my youngest sister and her boyfriend kissing by a tree. “What are the chances?” laughed my mom. Still not getting that it wasn’t chance.

  Now she was part of a herd of humans, a litter of loved ones, a cackle of kin. What a magical day! The only thing that was missing, perhaps she thought, is my eldest child, though maybe before the notion even flickered her fancy, there I was feeding ducks with my toddler and it finally dawned on my mom that this was planned all along.

  Her smile. I remember most my mother’s animated smile as if I didn’t last see it 26 and a half years ago. My uncle Muril took a photo of her laughing, brow to brow in a candid moment with my dad. It hangs in my bathroom, one of the first images I see every morning and a last memory every night before I go to bed. I glimpse the sparkle in her eyes and hear the echo of her laugh across the decades.

But let’s consider for a moment...

a different path. Those points along the way in which I might have had control. I had no power to influence the chemo, the stem cells, the cancer cells, the metastasis. The mother with the warm smile is gone in any version of this story.

  But afterwards, as that first sister with the baby stroller navigated my nephew’s heart condition, divorce and her marriage to a second husband then severed her relationship with her siblings 25 years ago, before having two more children that I never met, was there a surprise I might’ve conjured or a conversation I could have had that might have brought her back? I recently found letters from her when she was a teenager begging me for help when our mom went off the rails.

  I don’t recall how I responded. I’d like to think I called her? Gave her good advice? Wrote her back? Made her feel loved? I know I didn’t move back home to help. Hopefully one day my sister will find letters that show I cared.

  When my Crime and Punishment-loving brother came clean on his 10-year affair, should I have surprised him with my unconditional forgiveness? He did the crime and I delivered punishment, only in that I demanded he take accountability and apologize for the betrayals, but maybe I should have been softer and seen that he, too, was navigating a time bomb.

  When my baby sister told me last week that my memoir which she hasn’t read is proof that my narcissism is out of control, and that I was rude to her at my daughter’s wedding, what I remember is her chiming in on a version of my book cover and saying GO BIG! GO BOLD! What I remember about the wedding is collecting Hawaiian items for the gift basket that I left in her room, laughing at our rehearsal dinner toasts and dancing all night with her and my nieces.

  I hate that someone else’s negative perceptions of me are seeping in and tainting my memories of my favorite parts of myself, the writer, the party planner, the dancing queen, the producer of panache, the magic maker. I don’t want to let the part of myself go.

  My natural inclination is to sprinkle glitter in the dark corners and throw confetti at problems, light candles, carve cakes, serve up precious moments like memory buffets, but maybe I wasn’t listening enough. Maybe I wasn’t noticing nuances my quest for cute. The big splash. The grand gesture. The floral strew path leading to the makeshift altar. The surprise, I guess, is on me.

As shared at Story Salon on May 28, 2026 when the theme was "I Decided to Let Myself Go"