Our Farewell

A year ago tonight was my mother's last night in this life.

Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of her passing. "Dead Mom Day," I've taken to referring to it in my characteristically vulgar fashion, as if by putting it as baldly as possible, I will lessen the complicated sadness of this whole fucked-up experience.

In many ways, I was much more upset with Mom's initial cancer diagnosis, the surgery, the prognosis, than I was with her death. I certainly cried much more when faced with her possible demise than when faced with her actual demise. Yet, as the months go on, I find that grief presents itself in odd, yet sharply poignant, ways. An increasingly unbearable homesickness. A silly wish that one of my sisters decides to have children. The absurd desire to know what her young adulthood was like. A heaviness in my center that just feels like a melancholic, spiritual sadness.

We never said farewell. And if I don't tap into this well of muted sorrow that seems to grow deeper by the day, I don't know that we will ever say our farewell.

She and I, we weren't close in the traditional sense, particularly after I grew up. When I was ten, I went to go live with her parents, and at the time--for two decades--I didn't question it or feel it as a rejection. Only after her diagnosis, when certain truths could no longer be ignored, did I begin to see and feel things differently. I was her youngest daughter, and when she sent me to live with my grandparents, perhaps it was because I was the one who needed the most when she was able to give it the least. Because, you see, she was Elaine before she was my mother, and Elaine was troubled.

My sisters will be the first to tell you that their bonds with her, their knowledge of her, came at a steep price. It was all about Elaine, all the time, every day. I didn't grow up feeling her increasing demands upon me, so I never felt obligated to cede to them, the way that my sisters did. You want a piece of the Mom? You better be willing to give her a bigger piece of you.



Well, I suppose it's water under the bridge, or some other dismissive figure of speech. She's gone--or maybe not so much? When I was in Florida, my sisters and I went and visited a psychic medium in Cassadaga, and while the woman we saw certainly muttered a bit of balderdash, she said quite a few things that let us know that Mom was "there." It was an odd and emotional experience, but at the end, the lady said to us, "She visits you all the time."

At the time, I found that a bit hard to believe, seeing as how getting her to visit anyone or answer the phone was difficult enough when she was on this fucking plane of existence. I'm still not sure that I believe that she visits me. And yet...

Maybe she does. Maybe she does it when Hermione, her cat that I hauled back to California, who meows and mrrrrrps at the oddest times. Maybe she does it when I hear the folksy strains of Judy Collins or Peter, Paul, and Mary. Maybe she does it every time I utter a foul word, for who else did I learn my language from? Maybe she visits each time my sisters and I come together.

Or maybe she does it all the time, hanging out in my bedroom or my cubicle or hell, even in the shower, and I'm just as oblivious and estranged from her now as I was when she was alive.

The Darkest Hour...Is Just Before You Leave for the Airport

But coming in a close second is the hour (or two, or three) before the point just before you leave for the airport. That’s the time that I am experiencing right now. It’s a little after midnight, and I have a few hours left before my brother-in-law drives me to the airport and deposits me into a post-holiday melee, loaded down with an unhappy cat and a bagful of a few of my mom’s possessions, most of which she acquired during the last year.

My sister wrote something beautiful to describe her initial processing of the death of our mother. It was a piece filled with raw honesty, insignificant details that stood out, and all the pathos that you’d expect from a piece of prose describing the death of a parent.

What the hell could I write—can I write? How can I explain how my initial reaction was not heartbreak but rather startlement? There were no ruminations about the coffee my mother would never drink. There was only a few moments of dizziness, a gritting of teeth, a hasty decision to limit who I told the news to for a while. Later, there was my good friend NavaJo swooping in to see how I was doing, my husband picking me up so I wouldn’t have to drive home, three ill-advised martinis at Acqua Piazza (NavaJo joining me again). And then, a few more days of work before I could catch my already-scheduled flight home.

For all her flaws, my mother deserved more than how I was and am able to mourn her. And that will be a shame that I must own and shoulder.

We do the best we can with what we have. We play the hand we’re dealt.

With this in mind, I wrote the Remembrance that my sisters will read at her service tomorrow. It’s the one thing, other than sorting through her paperwork, I felt like I could do. For all I know, it might be the only closure I can get. So I slapped it together tonight while Mary sorted through Mom’s paperwork and found her bucket list and cried and Sarah looked on and kept watch over us. And then Mary went to bed, and I listened to the sound of her broken sobbing, and occasionally glanced over at Mom’s checkbook, which seems like the saddest reminder of what has happened—the only thing sadder was eating the prime rib that she had bought for us for Christmas dinner.

And underneath it all is the greatest shame of all—I love my mother, but I am terrified, fucking out of my mind terrified, of becoming like her.