I’m having one of those weeks where all I can think is: I wish I could talk to my mom.
Granted, I have this kind of week almost every week, but it is especially gripping now, in this moment. I suppose much of that is the date: this weekend is the anniversary of her passing. It’s been 24 years. She was 40 years old. But she was ill long before that—gone long before that. She was, in fact, just about my age when a post-surgical stroke robbed of her of autonomy and brain function—the things that made her real, awake, mine. Those remaining years of life do not exist because she was not alive in the sense that you or I am. And I know she would not want me remembering her that way—face bloated beyond recognition, attached to machines, her memory stuck somewhere in childhood.
Sometimes I feel stupid for how radically I miss her. I know others who have lost people—fathers, siblings, friends—and live in some state of peace. Changed forever, of course. Grieving forever, of course. But not as irreparably damaged as I feel most days. Like fragments stitched together. A sentient blob of emotions I can’t sort out, that spill from me like toys from a chest, air from a balloon. And I know it’s not a competition, Grief Olympics. I know we can’t know how anyone else experiences what is unique to them. And yet, some evil part of me still wonders: why can everyone else move on and I cannot—from anything?
A friend told me recently that we have bits of our mothers in us, literally. That our mothers’ cells stay in our blood, tissue, organs, sometimes well into adulthood. And even as those pieces disappear, the body still remembers the connection. We are our mothers. We began inside of them. We end with them inside of us.
So I guess that’s why I still feel this pain, decades later. Because it wasn’t just my mom who died, but a part of me too. And the bits of her that live in me long for their counterpart. It’s why I always feel just a little bit incomplete. Why I exist in a perpetual state of longing but rarely ever doing. Even now, with my head decluttered, my addictions managed, I can only seem to want the things I can’t have or that don’t want me back.
I can’t even seem to find the larger answers that I so desperately seek. I try to talk to God but all I hear is my own nagging voice. I can’t get out of my own way even when I seek salvation.
I know it is my greatest agony. But I guess it is also my greatest comfort. My great, all-forgiving crutch. I am allowed to be a little bit selfish, a little bit immature, a little bit unrelenting because I have the absoluteness of a Dead Mom. I can bring it into any conversation, relationship, situation. I can pre-absolve myself from accountability because I’m just sad, perpetually, you wouldn’t get it. I can exist in my misery because what else am I supposed to do but be a victim, it’s all I know.
But I guess the other and more honest piece of it is this: I worry that letting go, healing, moving on, finding peace would be an act of disservice to her memory. Isn’t that stupid? The logical part of me knows she would not want that. I cannot in any way visualize her—freshly aware of my incoming existence—hoping that I would spend my life indebted to her absence.
I know, from the stories I’ve been told, that she wanted me fiercely. All she desired was being a mom. She was very troubled, and then I was born, and she was someone new. And I remember that feeling even if I didn’t have the baby words to put to it. I remember how much she loved that I was alive.
So why do I honor her by being half dead?
I guess I just don’t want her to disappear. And in my messed up brain, my misery keeps her fixated firmly in every moment of my life. If I was happy, I might forget her. If I moved on, she might not follow. If I could accept other people’s love, it might replace hers.
One thing I really hate is when people tell me “in another life blah blah blah”. As if I don’t already know, with tremendous intimacy, every inch of my other lives. The lives where she exists in perfect completeness. Where I live down the street from her. Where she is now in her sixties, streaks of grey in her hair—but, like, in a hot way, because she has always been a hot mom. Where I come through her back door and lay on her couch crying when I’m sad and she somehow has the perfect words to heal me. Where I have a cool stepdad who loves her in the way my dad refused to. Where my sister and I have girls nights with her every weekend, just the three of us, swapping our most TMI stories because we’re all perpetual over-sharers.
Where she gets to see the thing she once wrote in my sister’s baby book:
That we do look alike but more importantly we both look like her, different versions of her, as if she split in half and planted new seeds of herself. We share her personality too, and many of her life events. It is eerie how the more we learn about her, the more we can map things that happened to us onto things that happened to her: cross-country moves, mental illnesses, personal tragedies, love affairs. As if my sister and I were destined to relive her life so we might know her, in some bodily way, since we can’t know her in actuality.
I’m trying desperately to look forward through that lens. That I have not only relived her life, but I can live a life she never got to. I keep attempting it. Every time I want to quit, give in to my comforts, paralyze in my fears, I think of her in that hospital bed. My age. And how lucky I am to be here, typing this, breathing on my own—how dare I take that for granted?
I put this idea into practice recently. Almost canceled something because I feared an associated heartache. But then I thought of her. How I know she would tell me: Go, feel the things, take the risk, live through it. The heartache is worth it for even one moment of joy. And so I did it. And the heartache came, like I knew it would, in great thunderous waves. But so did the joy. That is life. That is living.
I think she’d be proud.
And yet… here I am, wishing with all the ferocity I can muster that she were here to talk me through whatever comes next. That she could tend my broken heart, tell me how she fixed hers when it was snapped it in half. That she could distract me by gabbing about new movies, movie lover that she was. (I can’t explain why, but I feel like she’d love Timothée Chalamet?) That she could make me my childhood comfort meal, buttered bread with cinnamon and sugar. That she could sit with me in bed and pet my cats and look at my sister’s newest art on Instagram and I could watch as she read the essay I’d write about this moment in life, where I feel stuck, heartsick, grief-stricken, motionless—but where I know I have the tools to start making something out of it, even if it takes a while.
I know, too, that I must let go of this silly notion that getting well means losing her. I think, actually, that moving on might make her more pronounced. I have heard people say that they feel more connected to their dead loved ones through things like getting married, having children, making families of their own. And I always thought that was kind of bullshit, truth be told. And kind of a dumb reason to have a kid. Create a whole life that will also hurt and grieve, keeping that torturous cycle alive… why?
But I’m starting to realize… that’s kind of the whole thing, right? We keep the cycle going because it keeps the dead alive, ever and ever on. Not that I need a kid to do that. I do it in many other ways. In writing these silly little newsletters in case even one person might find community in my attempts to be honest. In posting pictures of my mom on Instagram so others might learn her face. In bringing her up in conversations where she doesn’t even fit, just because I want to.
But I no longer see the family thing as some selfish act. I see it as the bravest act of them all. Living in spite of knowing what’s to come. Seeking peace in a battering ocean of pain. Accepting the heartache for those moments of joy, even if they’re fleeting, because they’re what we’ll remember at the end of this journey. Not the days we sat safe on a couch, but the days we spent in the company of others, in the possibility of a new adventure.
If that all sounds a bit maudlin, well, I suppose it is. And I suppose I don’t really care. It’s not a particularly organized thought. And this is not a particularly organized post. Just a snapshot collection of the things I’m thinking and feeling right now, in this exact moment of life. Me being me. All of me. Messy, inquisitive, a little manic, indecisive, free thinking, honest to a fault, perhaps incomprehensible to others, especially in one of my moods.
But my mom wanted me alive and so here I am. Doing it all at once and bringing every bit of me to the table.
It’s hard without her. But it’s not impossible. I don’t need to think of those other lives anymore because she’s right here in this one, in these words, in my mistakes, in my ponderings, in my prayers, in my everlasting yearning for the more that I know is out there, waiting for me.
So yes, I wish I could talk to my mom. But then again, I already am.
I'm sorry for your loss and your pain and I hope writing this brought you some relief. I know writing about losing my dad (almost 20 years ago) felt like lifting a weight — not letting go, but carrying it lighter. I love the idea that we literally have parts of our mothers in us, that's really beautiful and such a comfort. Keep talking <3
Oh, borrowed child, how brave and painful and wonderful this is. I'm struck by the image this conjures of you, a spinning electron without the atom of your mother to orbit. It IS brave to dare to be happy, to seek contentment, little joys, to carve a life for yourself. Never forget that your mother is stamped into your very DNA, she walks and laughs and hums a little song in every single cell in your body. Every new cell your body creates can only do so with her original guidance.
And if you're ever my way, I've got buttered toast with cinnamon waiting for you. <3