10 years.
3,650 days.
87,648 hours.
I’m enraged by this loss I have had to endure. I’ve never before honored this anger that sits on my chest like a bowling ball and weighs me down with its burden. The only thing fair about my mother’s death is that her body and mind was finally able to rest, finally able to know peace, finally finished with her struggle that seemed so endless, relentless, and senseless.
I’ve had more optimistic days. I’ve had brighter weeks. I’ve had easier months.
This is so impossible to feel. I don’t want to sit with it. I want to turn every cell of anger that I’ve kept intact with a neat little put-together bow and throw it in the faces of every one. Brutal, I know. I want someone else to relieve it temporarily. The unfortunate thing is, I need to have her or I need to have the grief because if I have neither, than she may as well never existed.
I want to know what it would be like to have her. I just want to taste the feeling. I only need a couple minutes; I won’t need to say anything and neither will she. I just need her arms to wrap around me, let me cry and scream and ask for help. I just need some goddamn relief from this grief that I’m living in. Someone needs to take it from me and take care of it so I can breathe and know, like I usually know, that this is the way that my life is, has to be, can be, and most of all, will be.
Her face is fading and I struggle to hear her voice through the noises of my day and even if I think I hear it, I can never be quite sure. I have no idea what her opinion would be on anything from the presidential candidates, my current career choices, my daughter’s attitude, or what I’m doing wrong when I attempt her most coveted recipes.
I want a number to call. I want an address to refer to. I want to roll my eyes when she checks in on me incessantly. I want to be embarrassed by her but think it’s cute because of her age. I want to cringe when she meddles. I want to call my best friend and tell her how annoying she is when she says “this” and “this” and “this.” I want to know what “THIS” is. I want to buy a Mother’s Day card not in the “for someone special” category. I want to hold her hand. I want to invite her over for dinner.
I want my fucking mom.
I know I have never let myself be angry with this when I regress back to my 16-year-old self: complete with dichotomous thinking and wanting to give this to someone else to take care of. I want to be too busy to deal with this. I want to tell everyone reading this that you can’t attempt to understand this desire for something unattainable and gone…but you probably can. And I want to tell you that I got 16 years out of a probable 70 but I know people who have had even less. I was at Target a few months ago and I told the woman who was ringing me up that I loved her wedding ring. She said, “Thanks, it was my mothers.” She looked at it like most motherless daughters look at their mother’s wedding ring on their own hand and said, “I’d rather have her here than this old ring” and her eyes welled up with tears of longing. I told her I knew the feeling and she smiled and said, “Well, my mother died 4 years ago honey, you’re much too young to have lost yours.” I said, “It doesn’t get any easier when she’s been gone for 10 years.” And than I imagined punching her in the face because she just confirmed that my mom should, indeed, be alive. And on the seven year anniversary of my mother’s death, I met a 71 year old woman behind the candy counter at Macy’s (yes, I asked her age). She asked me what kind of truffles I wanted and I gladly pointed to the three that caught my eye. We got to talking, as chocolate lovers often do, and she asked why my eyes were sad. I shamelessly told her I lost my mom seven years ago on this very day. She closed her eyes and said, “I think I’ll die right along with mine when she goes. I can’t even bear the thought of life without her and she’s 96.” I asked if she’d mind taking advice from a 22 year old. “Please” she said. “You won’t die” I said “You will do the very thing that seems impossible to do which is continue to live despite her death and you’ll shock yourself at the strength you have.” Today, this post isn’t about who has been through it and who hasn’t and what age or how. I’m honoring my rage, finally, and it sucks and I fucking want my mom and you have no idea how much I hurt and hate it.
If I want to work through this anger, there are some things I need to do and one of them is share my first moments as a motherless daughter as seen through my young eyes.
I knew my mom was going to die before I could ever comprehend that she was much too young to be dying. Every single one of my functions was shadowed in agony over when it was going to happen because it was always creeping closer. Its like being in the presence of a hornet 365 days of the year, waiting for the sting to happen. Every day meant another day closer to it. The waiting room for a death to happen is filled with five-minute forecasts and false hope. You will probably find yourself in it one day in paralyzing confusion. If there is a time when your clock stops while someone else’s runs faster; it’s in that dreaded waiting room. Time is irrelevant in death.
We had shared her bed the last year of her life; I took the left side and she took the right but during the weeks leading up to her death, I slept on her side of the bed. She was in her hospital bed next to me on the morning she died. The rattling sound that her lungs made that drove me to experience abrupt and immobilizing panic attacks had stopped hours before. She hadn’t puked the remains of her stomach – black foreign matter that I imagined was the chemotherapy violently leaving her body – in days. The end was surely arriving and her body was shouting it to us over the loud speaker. I was sleeping, or rather catatonic, in her queen-sized bed when my mom finally died. There was no one in between my bed and hers other than a two-foot lifeline to childhood. I heard my cousin Veronica say, “Grandpa is waiting for you Mary, it’s okay to go be with him now.” When I opened my eyes, I saw my mom take the smallest but largest breath ever heard. It shook the room. It crawled up my spine. It grew hair on the back of my neck. China fucking heard it. We waited with our tired eyes transfixed on her chest waiting for it to rise and fall once more. I knew it was over. I knew that another breath wasn’t coming but I waited anyway and even when my Uncle walked over and picked up her wrist and said, “that’s it”… I still waited.
I remember squeezing my eyes and taking a snap shot of the last three weeks: the swollen ankles, the emaciated body, the fluid in her lungs, her black and blue fingernails, the morphine, her swollen ankles, her protruding sternum and tailbone, the hospital bed, the oxygen, the nurse, the colostomy bag, the ice chips, Tiger Balm, and the rest of the heaviness of death. How could this have all just happened? How, after 8 years of preparing and agonizing and crying and attempting to defeat it, did she just go in the swiftest of one tiny and obsolete breathe? This was THE moment we knew was coming, the one we talked about incessantly and prayed about ruthlessly. I was expecting a waterfall of tears. I thought the room would shatter around me when it happened but it didn’t. The only thing different from the moment before she died and the moment after she died, was that she died. Everything remained the same externally while catastrophic things were happening internally.
She died in a hospital bed in her bedroom at 6:31 in the morning. Or maybe it was 6:26. I get my mom and dad’s time of death confused sometimes. Insert: more rage.
Travis was asleep next to me before she died and I had no idea that he wasn’t there when she died because her breathe was so quick that I didn't have a moment to assess who was in the room. I looked for him afterward, thinking he was behind me and had seen it and felt it but he wasn’t there. I went to find him. He was in the bathroom with the door open. He looked defeated. His shoulder’s hung meters away from his head, his eyes were tired from rubbing the tears from them, and his bottom lip drooped as if in a constant pout at the unfairness of everything. I stood in the threshold and told him she was gone. He didn’t say anything but stared at me trying to read the truth behind my statement. I don’t know if anyone told him before I did or if he was still waiting like I was for the final blow. He let me fall weak in his embrace and I stared at the framed pictures my mom had made and hung in the bathroom. His hug felt better than crying. I eventually let go of him and continued on, ready to tell the next victim of motherless.
Taylor was sleeping in my bed. Veronica was walking down the stairs to tell him but when she saw me she said I needed to be the one to tell him, if I was up to it. I opened my bedroom door and a beam of sunlight covered his face. My purple comforter enveloped his body, tucked in up to his chin. I didn’t make sure he was awake when I told him because I knew he was retreating from the chaos and not sleeping from exhaustion. There was a mile long silence between my statement and his question, “is she really?” His eyes were still closed when he asked it. I crawled into the warmth under the covers and sobbed in the sunlight. His silence was as loud as my tears and with no other words; he crawled out of bed and found his chair next to her bed upstairs. He wouldn’t move from that chair for over an hour.
The difference between my brothers is astronomical but the sameness in my brothers is minute. Taylor retreats internally from the heaviness of our life, whereas Travis thrives in the warzone. They both suck at dealing with it and they both think they deal with it better than the other. Taylor becomes immobilized in shock: the muscles in his face tighten dramatically, his eyes fall distant from reality and further into the depths of his pain, and he becomes a sort of stalwart – unhuggable, untouchable, uncommunicative, and bitter. Rightly so, I would say. Travis can bear the unruliness in the moment, or at least other people’s unruliness. He can comfort and soothe and has shocking insight that only prevail under extreme stress. When alone, he can’t stand the pain that is truly destructible to his spirit and he has no mechanism for caring for himself. Pain sucks the life out of both of them. We all felt miles away from one another that day because even though we all lost the same mom, she was the very thing that held our worlds upright. We were crazy tops spinning out of control. We were each on our own, biking into the future without our kickstand. We were in an everlasting disbelief, a denial that penetrated reality. I often still feel miles away from them; centuries even.
I was still lying in my bed when I made phone calls to a few friends confirming her death. It may as well been a recording of a “she’s gone” statement. I don’t remember any response on the receiving end of my statement. What can you really say that will make the circumstances lighter and easier to carry? Probably nothing. What can you say when you know that I fought to keep my parents close just as hard as you’re fighting to get away? It’s a paradox. I needed my friends but I felt so far away from their experiences as teenagers. I think the loneliest time on my journey was in that moment of telling my friends of my mom’s death. They were getting ready for school and I just witnessed a death they likely won’t experience for decades. I’ve always felt different from my friends but I always had my mom’s life to hold onto and her death gave me a whole new reason to feel alien like. The word loneliness doesn’t do my feeling justice because I saw a snapshot of how the rest of my life would look. Tragedy doesn’t like company.
I left within the hour of her death so I could shower because I was encouraged by family to try to maintain some normalcy to the day. My mom had made her own funeral arrangements, so too her burial, but we still had to meet with her priest to discuss and process her life and death. And of course, my dad who was cities away in a nursing home needed to be told of his wife’s death as well. I knew it was going to be a long day and I specifically left at the time I did with the knowledge (or rather assumption) that her body would be gone when I returned back to the house.
It wasn’t gone.
I knew her body was still there the moment I walked through the doors of her house. The family members around tried everything they could to delay my arrival or encourage the coroner’s timely arrival because they could sense what was about to happen to the peace and quiet of her death. It took no time at all for me to go back to her room. I needed to be with her body and I was furious that nobody was sitting with her. I sat with the vessel that carried her. The moment that I touched her hand is the moment I could have never prepared for. No one, not even Hospice, told me that her body was going to be cold and stiff. I left her body being able to lace my fingers into hers, and I came back to those same fingers except they were curled into her palm and they were unbendable. This was the second shoe to drop. It was the rage in the permanence of her death. I had been much too calm and cool and comfortable with it all. I experienced an uncontrollable, physiological response when I touched her body; my chest tightened, my head spun, my knees throbbed, my ankles went weak, and my hands made tight fists. My tears were unstoppable and my anger was not of my control. I grabbed my mom’s shoulders and shook. I begged her to wake up. I screamed at her. I climbed into bed with her body and buried my face in her lap. I hit the mattress. I remember saying “No” repeatedly. I have no reference for how long I was so merciless but I remember someone standing in the hallway telling me the coroner had arrived. The rage continued to consume me and I started screaming at the coroners to go away. Someone summoned Travis into the bedroom to control me. I told Travis to go away. I told him not to touch me. I told him I hated him. I said to him, “She’s dead. She’s really fucking dead.” He told me I needed to calm down and I told him I wouldnt have to calm down if they could have just done their job and arrived on time. One of the coroners got sick of my screaming and walked back into the bedroom to take a look at my mom. He snapped a glove on his hand and said, “ Tsk, tsk, tsk. The poor thing.” I could hear his shitty comment even in my screaming outrage. I called him a fucking asshole. Travis stood between the coroners and me. Travis methodically preyed on me, waiting for me to become vulnerable before he pounced and restrained me. He grabbed both my arms, pulled me near, and bear hugged me. I wrestled in his arms until I gave up. I screamed into his chest. One of the coroners said to the other, “Let’s just get her [the body] out of here as quickly as possible.” I begged Travis to let me go but he wouldn’t. I watched intently in his arms as they did their job. They wrapped her bed sheets around her body, carried her in the makeshift sling through the hallway, and than placed her on the gurney. The bag they zipped around her body was white. I heard the zip and I lost it again, finding the arms of my cousin and screamed again in disbelief.
I miss my mom like you wouldn’t believe. Sometimes I miss her more than ever; sometimes I’m mad that I don’t miss her more. Lately, my missing has caused me intense sadness. It’s a sadness that desensitizes me even to the greatest joys of life. It’s too great to overcome and incomprehensible to describe and I have to live with it the rest of my life. Maybe this is what I’m sadder about…that I still have the rest of my life to miss her. It’s not supposed to be this way. I’m not supposed to have to miss my mother for more years than I had her on earth with me. We age and grow older with our parents so we don’t have so many years to live without them. It’s easier to miss your mom for 30 years than it is to miss your mom for 70 years. I have this idea in my mind that there will come a day when I will curl in the crook of her arm like I used to and talk about never having to say goodbye again.
My mother handed me her courage the day she died and today I’m scraping the bottom of my soul to find the rest until it fills back up.
