Wherever you are, you will always be in my heart. –Mohandas Gandhi
It feels like whole galaxies separate me from this first day back at work and the last time I was here. Sitting in my boss’s office a little more than a week ago, saying words that I had refused to say to her before that moment. Refused to give them voice, because speaking them made them real. And making them real meant there was no return.
My mother is dying.
I don’t even remember what else I said to her after those four words. It’s all wiped, bright and blurring as a camera flash. All I remember from that moment on are snippets. Driving home to pack. Gassing up Sammy for the 5-hour drive. Halfway absorbing podcasts before switching over to music because none of the words I was hearing made any sense anymore.
Walking in to my parents’ bedroom and seeing someone lying in the hospice bed who didn’t look at all like my mother. Not at all like the woman I’d just seen that previous Monday, who even in her steadily diminishing state, had held on to me with a strength I didn’t expect. Held on like she was never going to let go.
I didn’t recognize the person in the bed. Worse yet is that she was already too far gone to recognize me. I talked to her, but she only stared through me, stared at something far beyond whatever it was I was babbling to her.
My mother was dying.
Whether or not I gave voice to those words didn’t really matter. She had already begun to leave us all behind. All I had done was delayed my own acceptance as well as my arrival before she’d gotten this far along.
There’s no point in giving details of that final day. You don’t need to know and I don’t need to remember. Truth is, I can’t forget. The memories wait right there at the edge of everything, and they do not rest.
The worst of it all was how she struggled to breathe. Everything about my mother’s life was a struggle, everything a fight right to the very end. But she was a stubborn woman, iron-willed and defiant in everything she did and everything she was. Even in her final hours, she wouldn’t relent. The hospice nurses didn’t understand how she was still going. I didn’t have to question it. She was my mother. I’d come up against that stubbornness all my life. I knew she wasn’t going to let go until she was ready.
My mother died.
And I can’t remember that house ever sounding quieter than when I walked back inside after the ambulance had pulled away. No more respirator. No more labored breaths or unconscious vocal exhalations. Nothing.
For 24 years, my father and I had watched my mother’s downward spiral, her slow but unstoppable journey toward this moment. Never would I have imagined her end would be like this.
The chaplain who spoke at her service referenced C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, in which he writes of his wife’s passing from cancer. In this book, Lewis wrote of how memories of those we lose begin to fade like the melting of snowflakes. The chaplain wished for all of us the melting only of the darker memories, to allow the good to once more shine through.
Memories like how my mother loved Christmas with the fervor most of us lose to the passing of childhood. She loved family vacations and silly movies and singing along with the radio in a voice clear and strong as a perfectly tuned orchestra. She loved jigsaw puzzles and latch-hook rugs and every animal that ever came into the house instantly became hers.
She loved my father for 37 years. Knew that he was her husband, her guardian, her protector. Knew that “for better or for worse” weren’t just words to him, but a binding promise that he would never break. Knew that no matter what, he would never leave her.
She loved me with everything she had. Even through all the tangles and barbs of our complicated relationship (even more complicated than the mess that most mothers and daughters make of it), she loved me. My father has often said to me that I was the greatest success my mother ever knew in life. That makes me inexplicably sad, because all it does is makes me that much more aware of all the ways I felt I failed her. She had expectations for my life that I never wanted for myself. I realize now that they were more expectations for her own life that she knew she’d never experience for herself. So she wished them for me.
But I am my mother’s daughter. Her stubbornness runs strong through my veins. So I shut her out, closed down to her wishes, and tucked everything away that I thought would disappoint her. Wrapped myself so tightly that even I’m afraid of what will happen when the unraveling begins.
The cruelty of hindsight is that it’s only when it’s too late that you realize all the wrong choices you made.
Truth is, no matter who I was or what I did, my mother was my biggest fan. And I was never the fan that she wanted needed deserved.
No one will ever say my name the way she did, with that strange country twang that I never could understand coming from a woman born and raised in the D.C. area. No one will ever fill a room with laughter the way she could. No one will ever again respond, when I answer the phone, with the simple declarative, “It’s your momma.”
No one will ever love me with her same fierceness or pride.
No one.
