The Long Goodbye

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide & become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable. And because my mother was relatively young -64- I feel robbed of 20 years with her I'd always imagined having.
In the months that followed my mother's death, I managed to look like a normal person. But I was not ok. I was in grief. Nothing seemed important. Daily tasks were exhausting. At one point, I did not wash my hair for 10 days. I felt that I had abruptly arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of the everyday. Why had I not known that this was what life really amounted to?
I was not entirely surprised to find that being a mourner was lonely. But I was surprised to discover that I felt lost. In the days following my mother's death, I did not know what I was supposed to do, nor, it seemed, did my friends & family, especially those who had never suffered a similar loss. And I found no relief in that worn-out refrain that at least my mother was "no longer suffering".
Mainly, I thought one thing: My mother is dead & I want her back.
When we talk about love, we go back to the start. But this is the story of an ending, of death, & it has no beginning. That's what makes her a mother: you cannot start the story.
There is my mother, & then, suddenly, there is her cancer. It begins with a phone call, a scan, a shock. Disbelief reigns. There would be no surgery. The disease had spread too far.
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, it's transactions are exquisitely personal. My grief, I know, has been shaped by the particular person my mother was to me, and by the fact that she died at 64 (the same age my father was when he died). Then, too, I was bound up with her in ways that strecthed beyond our relationship. I now live in the house where I grew up. I always see things that remind me of her.
As I write this, I am hit by a feeling of error, a sense that during my early twenties, when I thought my mother never quiter understood me, it was I who saw her incompletely. I took for granted so many of her seemingly casual qualities.
So much of dealing with a disease is waiting. Except in the waiting you keep forgetting that "it" will really happen - it's more like a threat, an anxiety. Other people got used to my mother dying of cancer. But I did not. Each day, sunlight came like a knife to a wound that was not healed.
Those were strange, delirious days.They'd give her morphine for the pain, but the moment they got it under control, it would intensify, & she'd begin moaning again. When she did wake she was irritable. I kept asking the nurses to give her more morphine. And the nurse said "If she's in hospice, they'll give her more drugs, they'll minimize her pain, but she might die."
I heard a lot about the idea of dying "with dignity" while my mother was sick. It was only near her very end that I gave much thought to what this idea meant. I didn't actually feel it was undignified for my mother's body to fail - that was the human condition. Having to help my mother on & off the toilet was difficult, but it was natural. The real indignity, it seemed, was dying where no one cared for you the way your family should, dying where it was hard for your family to be with you & where excessive measures might be taken to keep you alive past a moment that called for letting go. I didn't want that for my mother. I didn't want to pretend she wasn't going to die.
"Hey baby!"
These are the last words I hear her say. Then she closes her eyes again. Instead of words there comes a horrible pain - pain of a kind I have never witnessed, a shuddering, bone-deep pain that swallows her up whenever the hospice nurse moves her or washes her or when we roll her on her side to change her & get her blood circulating.
In the last few days, she begins to look very young. Her face has lost so much weight, the bones show through like a child's. I hold her hand. I smooth her face. Her skin has begun to feel waxy; my fingers slide dully over it.
As she dies, she opens her eyes, looks at us, & takes one final rattling breath. She has chosen to look at us, to say "Goodbye, I love you, goodbye".
I think she had the most beautiful smile in the world. And she was very warm to lie next to, soft, like a blanket.
And so we sat with my mother's body, holding her hands. I kept touching her face, which was rubbery but still hers, feeling morbid as I did it, but feeling, too, that it was strange that I should think so. This was my mother. For 20 minutes she was warm & she didn't look dead. She didn't look alive either. But she didn't have the glazed, absent expression I had expected. Her being seemed present. I could feel it hovering at the ceiling of the room, changing, but not gone. In a daze, I said goodbye. I kissed my mother's forehaed - waxy, the way it had been for days now. I said, "You were very brave, & I love you".
What had actually happened still seemed implausible: A person was present your entire life, & then one day she disappeared & never came back. It resisted belief. Even when a death is foreseen, I was surprised to find, it still feels sudden - an instant that could have gone differently.
A death from a long illness is different from a sudden death. I have experienced both of those with each of my parents. It gives you time to say goodbye & time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore. A friend said that my mother's death had surely been easier to bear because I had known it was coming. I almost bit her head off! Easier to bear compared to what?
It is human to want our friends & family to recover from pain, to look for a silver lining - or so I reminded myself. But when people stop mentioning the dead person's name to you, the silence can seem worse than the pain of hearing those familiar, beloved syllables. After a loss, you have to learn to believe the dead one is dead. It doesn't come naturally.
In the weeks after my mother's death, I experienced an acute nostalgia. This longing for a lost time was so intense I thought it might split me in two. I was consukmed by memories of seemingly trivial things.
She is gone, & I will be, too, one day. There is nothing "fixed" about my grief. I don't have the same sense that I'm sinking into the ground with every step I take. But there aren't any "conclusions" I can come to, other than personal ones. I'm more at peace because that old false sense of the continuity of life has returned.
I think about my mother every day, but not as concertedly as I used to. She crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye. I think about all the things I never said along the way, about how much her example meant to me. The bond between a mother & a child is so unlike any other that it is categorically irreplaceable.