Tag Archives: loss of a mother

Sep2

Grief: Ha.

Posted on September 2, 2014 by Grass Oil by Molly Field

I plunged a 9″ chef’s knife into a watermelon just now and cut a bunch of quarter slices. I’ve had the melon on the counter for about five days and completely forgot about it and the fresh pineapple I bought over our family birthday-Labor Day-Mimi’s death-anniversary weekend. I just tossed the remains of the birthday cake. My mind has been elsewhere. Waiting.

this is mom holding me in 1968 after i clearly just swatted my older brother. poor guy…

I thought I could deal yesterday. What I did yesterday however, was read. I holed myself up on our deck and read all day after I wrote my post about “clarity.” I see the irony now. When Mom died last year, the day was mostly ebbing. It was just around 3pm when I got the call from Dad, so all our plans of having a home-base Labor Day cookout were toast. No pun intended.

So I guess, you don’t experience the anniversary until you experience the anniversary. Of anything. I remember this after 9/11. Up until the one-year, I remember noticing how my body was gearing up, feeling the angle of the sun and other astral, silent and all-knowing familiarities which unrelentingly tie you to a trauma or event. I don’t remember the date when I saw Bruce Springsteen for the first time, but I remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard about the Towers.

And this is my first go. I have no clue what to expect, other than to know (now) that expecting anything is a waste. That it happened on Labor Day is just … well … what it is. I could judge it all I want. That’s stupid too, judging. I’m so grateful to my husband though because he called me in the middle of writing this post to check on me and to also assure me that next year, Labor Day will be on the 7th and that’s great. I’m really looking forward to next year because the anniversary day and the holiday will be far apart.

That evening, last year, I went for a root beer float at the nearby Baskin-Robbins 31 after viewing her body. I bought two. I don’t know why. I decided yesterday morning, that yesterday was going to be a reinvention, a rebranding of Labor Day for me because last year’s was so traumatic. I was almost literally holding my breath until about 3:30pm. Once we passed that timeline, I had no choice (I suspect) because it was all I could do to not compare: “It’s 3:47 and no one has died. Keep reading.”

I realize now, that our human invention, denial, is really one of the stupidest inventions we’ve ever … invented. Don’t pay the taxes and they’ll go away. Don’t sweat the addiction and it will get better. Don’t cut the watermelon because nothing’s going on.

So when the early evening began last year, I was in it. I had fielded calls from my older brother and his wife; I had fielded calls and texts from my concerned friends and cousins; I had taken a couple calls from my uncle and godfather, Mom’s brother. I had taken calls from my kids.

MY KIDS. “Tomorrow,” the day after Labor Day, was their first day of school. My brother and his pregnant wife showed up. That was hard. My oldest son had told my brother about Mom. I gave the other root beer float to my sister-in-law.

As the sun set, I’d been at the hospital four hours; I stayed with my brother and SIL one more hour and then I was going to leave. My brother was there for Dad now.

The attending ER doc for that shift needed my dad to sign Mom’s papers so he could go home. I’m sure the staff would’ve waited and Dad could’ve signed them later, but … it was all a little surreal… he sort of y’know, a’hem, nudged us to y’know … sign. Release the body to the morgue. Let Mom go. I’m sure I wanted to ask him, “Has your mother died yet? Or your wife of 51 years? This shit’s not easy. … Just checking.” Of course the doctor didn’t want to nudge my father in his understandably granitic and unreachable state. No one nudges my father.

So I had to sort of y’know, nudge my brother. To nudge our father. To y’know … leave. It was his turn. I’d done so much already (not comparing, just acknowledging) by being with Dad when the news broke, by being with Dad to view her, by being with Dad when the doctor had to talk about doctorly things in a doctorly way. I was depleted. Mom was dead. There was no do-over.

As I started out, a nurse gave me Mom’s things: a bag of her jewelry to take from the hospital, so I did. In a white paper envelope was her passport (WHAT?). In a white double-plastic bag with those hard plastic snap-together handles were other effects including pants and the navy blue cashmere vneck she was wearing when she was transported via ambulance; it had a few of her stray silver hairs on it. I’m still trying to figure out what she was doing with her passport. It’s so odd. Inside that white bag was another bag containing her jewelry.

When it came to jewelry, Mom was … thorough. As she aged, her OCD really ticked up and she began to trust no one, very little of her nursing aide. So she wore a lot of her valuables. I think whenever Mom weighed-in at her doctors they must’ve just assessed her pirate’s chest of bangles and ancestral baubles and just let it stay; the hell with it. To take it off her and put it back on her would’ve added 15 minutes to the visit and she’dve never let any of it out of her sight. So the bag I was given must’ve weighed about three pounds. But seeing that bag of her favorite things, her “stuff” reduced to a hospital-issued ziplock emblazoned with “INOVA FAIRFAX HOSPITAL SYSTEM” … It was all too much. So I left. My husband and I left for our house.

I had to switch gears, as much as possible. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to deal with the ordeal, it’s that I needed to switch gears. I needed to get out of that pumped-in, fake white light, I had to get away from the Muzak and I wanted to get away from the well-intentioned security guard who simply didn’t know how to look at me.

I had to retrieve my children from their various locations. I had to put my kids to bed. I had to hug them. Inhale deeply and smell their heads, squeeze their bodies and wipe their tears, and press my forehead into theirs as I held them by their jawlines and tell them through tears and sniffles I was sad but that it was all going to be OK and that Mimi was in a better place now and that even though it doesn’t feel like it, things were really going to be OK in a few …

So later that night, around 10:00, Dad, my brother and his pregnant wife showed up at my house. I’m not sure when they left the hospital. It was a way station, I guess. I see my deflective madness: that whole plan, to have Dad not sleep here, but it was all I could deal with at the time. “We are animals in moments like these,” I remember thinking to myself, rationalizing.

My brother and I rallied and took Dad back to his house to get some things for the overnight. Dad stayed in my car. It was then that I saw the plate of uneaten breakfast on her side of the bed. She wasn’t feeling well that morning. Dad knows this now, but the signs for heart attack or dire cardiac trouble for women are totally different than for men. We don’t feel tremendous pressure, as though we have an elephant on our chest (that’s a normal feeling for us), we feel sick, nauseated and generally weak and profoundly unwell. Sadly, these symptoms also remind us of fatigue and gastrointestinal distress, from which Mom suffered a great deal. But it was unrelenting, this discomfort, but she didn’t want to go to the ER, she wanted to get ice cream. Dad obeyed; they were going to get ice cream. Then she fell.

I knew that logistically it was best that Dad be here with me, because I live the closest to him and Mom, but … I’d been on this task for almost eight hours by this point. I was also not rational: I was terrified, frankly, that her spirit would come to my house looking for him. I wanted to reduce that liability. I was also comPLETEly terrified that he would live here in his grief. I wasn’t ready for that. I wasn’t able to deal with that. I was and can still be a selfish person (I learned from a very early age that relying on others was a precarious endeavor, so as much as I’ve tried to stay aware of it, primal moments like these can make me unhinged, so I go with “selfish”).

So I dug in my heels and it was just me and my team in my house that night. Of the immediate surviving family, I knew that no one would be really getting much sleep that night, but I didn’t want it all here. I also knew my home was going to be ground zero for the next day or so. I just knew it. Dad went home with my brother and his pregnant wife.

The next morning, my other brother flew to DC and we started to rally. That afternoon, Tuesday, Dad and my younger brother came back to the house and we continued and combined our own singular efforts to have Mom celebrated in five days. Out of state. Five hundred miles from where she died. We did all this on my deck with our various laptops, iDevices and phones. We did all this amongst the buzz and presence family and great friends who couldn’t suppress their support for us and their instinct to lift us up in our loss. I see now, a year later (and I sensed then but didn’t really have time or interest in indulging in the time) how Herculean that entire effort was, but true to form, we achieved it. We were like a newsroom.

I needed to write about this today. Fighting these urges to write and share is “crazy talk” as my brother would say (jokingly). I simply couldn’t have had a normal (ha!) day without doing it. Maybe reading this is even helpful to you. I have no clue about where this train will stop. I see now that it’s an unrealistic ambition to say ‘On this day I will end my writing about Mom and my memories of her and my life.” New stuff or old stuff in new suits occurs to me daily. I didn’t sleep well last night; I was afraid she’d visit me. When I did wake, I was sweaty and unrested. So I needed to flush some things out. I feel better now. I always do.

Processing… It’s part of my recovery to allow myself to look back on that day and then see 1) it’s over and 2) how far I’ve come. Without that perspective and ability / allowance to reminisce we would be lost.

Thank you.

Aug30

Grief: Anniversaries, Distraction, Deflection, Freedom

Posted on August 30, 2014 by Grass Oil by Molly Field

Standard

Monday will be the one-year mark for Mom’s death.

I feel like a twerp for even going on about this, given the hurt and chaos in our actual, living world.

But I will indulge and as usual, I will be candid.

I have been on vacation the last couple weeks and I’ll own it: I’ve also been reluctant to write about anything, because I know it will lead me to writing about her. So I rationalized, during my insidious stint of writer’s block, that if I don’t write about anything, then I don’t have to see the reality: that she’s been dead a year, so that way I’m not legitimizing it. I’m denying it. But that’s not fair, because so much of my life, even before she died, was so confused in its balance; sometimes she weighed quite heavily, other times she was like the ether.

My kids each have a different appreciation of me, based on our relationship. It’s impossible to treat them all the same, but by and large, I do try to manage them all equally, unless a situation requires a different influence.

My brothers and I have readily admitted to one another and allowed of the other the basic fact that we each had a very different version of our mother: firstMom, angerMom and then sandwichMom. I had mostly angerMom.

What this past year has given me, with all the ups and downs, all the grief and all the guilt, all the confusion and clarity, all the repressions and all the disclosures is the following: freedom.

My mother, whom I loved very much, but who was a terrifically complicated and distant person, is now dead a year and I am free.

I am free of disappointing her.
I am free of reminding her.
I am free of being dismissed by her.
I am free of conflicting with her.
I am free of worrying about her.

I don’t think she ever wanted to be married. I said that to my father today. He told me he found a picture of her at her brother’s wedding. She had caught the bouquet. She was not smiling. She was grimacing, almost frowning, he said.

This is not to suggest in the least, that I was a mistake or that I was not meant to be here. I can say this with conviction because I believe these things occur, these folds in time and wrinkles of “happenstance” with absolute destiny, with intention. I am one of those people who believes that there are no mistakes in the universe, that everything is as it should be. I believe this because the alternative is folly. That believing there is somehow a better or more appropriate circumstance than what we are experiencing, ever, can be maddening.

Of course we can change our circumstances, once we come of age. And that’s the trick: once we come of age.

As a child, I had no choice. I had to do what I was told, and I had to endure the circumstances before me. When I came “of age,” however, I was not 18. I was more like 23-ish.

I remember when I bought my first car. I came home with it. Home was my parents’ house. I was commuting to college because that was the hand I was dealt. Things were tenuous in my home, regarding my mother’s grip on reality and sobriety, so naturally being the only girl in the house, I took on a maternal energy and tacitly performed the management of the house. Not when I was 23, but when I was 5. That duty stayed with me until I moved out. The day before I married my husband of now 20 years.

Back to the car. After I graduated from George Mason University, I had a well-paying editing and writing job. I was about to be engaged, (but I didn’t know it), I ~~bought~~ financed a used (by 2 years) 1992 Eagle Talon TSi. It was electric blue and it had huge tires; probably 10″ wide. I loved that car. It was fast, nimble, responsive. It had electric windows and a CD player. Its seats made you feel like you were in a cockpit, the dials were abundant and the dashboard lights were red-orange, like a BMW’s. I loved that car. It loved me.

My then-boyfriend drove it home and I drove my parents’ car home so they couldn’t say I let someone else drive their car. It was a Saturday. My father was home, not working.

My mother saw me get of their car and Dan get out of my Talon. She thought he’d bought a new car. She commented to Dan on what a “smart-looking new car” that was and he said something along the lines of it not being his and her eyes went straight to me. I smiled and said, “It’s mine. Isn’t it beautiful?” and she turned on a dime, like a viper, and in minutes, my father came out in a lathering rage, yelling and telling me that I was going to wind up penniless and that I just ruined my credit and that my life would be a wreck because I had acted recklessly and bought such an impractical car.

That was not the reaction I was expecting. I was hoping for something along the lines of “Oh wow, honey. That’s a big responsibility, that’s a big step; are you sure you’re ready?” Not the gesticulating, wild-eyed, operatic invective I received.

I tried to love that car after that evisceration as much as when I first drove it, but I’ll admit that experience muted it for a couple years. Two years later, I was married and out of there and we eventually traded it in for a Ford Explorer in 1997 after we’d experienced an unusually snowy winter and simply couldn’t get to work in a low-profile sports car.

Until we bought the Explorer, I had to bum rides with my boss who drove a 4×4 and was never fired. My husband kept his sports car though. Hrmph. My credit was not ruined. My score is fine. I have not wound up penniless and destitute. Yet.

I mention this story because until my mother died, or until last week anyway, I would’ve been afraid to tell it. I would be afraid even of speaking out in a way that was seemingly against my parents. It’s not speaking out, it’s just telling a truth.

I was speaking with my father the other day about Mom. We were sharing memories and reactions to those memories. I was my usual defiant and candid self. He said, “This sentiment contradicts with what you say on Facebook, when you posted a few months ago, ‘I miss my mom.’ What was that?”

I thought, “you must not read much of what I write” (which relieved me), and I answered, “I have always missed my mom. I have always missed the idea of a mother, a true compassionate leader and balanced supporter. That’s always been missing.” He nodded, seemingly to let it process and said, “Oh.”

I just finished “A Watershed Year” by Susan Schoenberger. It’s about a woman whose best friend and unrequited love dies from cancer and how she goes on to live with his pre-death missives sent to her posthumously via an email program. Inspired by the first of those notes, she decides to adopt a four-year-old boy from Russia. (This is before Putin really went off the deep-end.)

In her anticipation of finalizing the adoption, she waxes about what motherhood meant to her. Schoenberger cites numerous examples: tissues in the purse, band-aids, school plays, under-the-table-with-teddy-bears tea parties and the like. The most poignant example to me was that a mother who’s on a strict diet will share a half gallon of ice cream with her daughter after a jerky college boyfriend dumps her.

I thought romantically about such examples and then was quickly jerked back to reality and cited my examples of the bare minimum I would have liked from my mother: getting out of bed consistently and feeding me consistently. Then they grew on each other: picking me up from camp, not competing with me for my friends, not flirting with my boyfriends, not embarrassing me on the school bus, not cruelly disclosing embarrassing personal events, not asking me about people who hurt me and then telling me she enjoyed their style, or their company, that she saw nothing wrong with them… so many simple examples; but the most simple of which: just getting up. We never had band-aids.

I see this list above I’ve required of a mother and I can say with 100% assurance that I’ve absolutely complied. That in itself is such a fantastic feeling, that I’m really NOT becoming my mother, that I can see now I’ve made it.

My oldest and I finally went to get his driver’s permit last week. This was the day after we toured Georgetown University and bailed on the George Washington University tour. He wants to go to GU. Granted, it’s only the second college he’s ever toured after my alma mater, but he’s in love. He has something to strive for now, a prize to keep his eye on. We will tour UVA and W&M and some other schools up north, and maybe Duke, but I have my sister-in-law to thank for starting this process early, when he still has a good amount of time to apply himself academically and altruistically. I am NOT telling him to stay nearby, I am NOT envious of his friendships, I NOT competing with him in the least. I am NOT telling him he must take care of me in my old age, as my mother did and father has proposed throughout my life. I am free of that comparison now.

Being balanced and normal to my sons is not hard for me. It’s a pleasure. I don’t worry about my being obsolete in their lives one day, I sort of count on it, in a measured sense. I want to play ~~second~~ eighth fiddle. I don’t want them living in my basement all their lives. Trust me. I am free of that specter.

So what this freedom has granted me also is a sense of balance that my feeling guilty for any of the blessings life has given me, is really stupid because I have worked hard for all of them. My presence of mind, my college degree, my jobs after college, the house I own, the kids, choices I’ve made, all of it. I did it all and I can write what I want and say what I want and be cool with the things I have. I have almost always felt gratitude, but not without the weight of Catholic Guilt which requires you enjoy what you have, but only a little, because Jesus sacrificed so much for us and the nuns and priests take these vows of chastity … (I’m a really shitty Catholic.)

My 47th birthday is coming up in a few weeks. It was on my mother’s 47th birthday that we moved into a house in the D.C. suburbs and the fragile, remaining wisps of her functional life broke away, like dandelion seeds, and never ever returned. If ever there was a chance of getting her back, her deep-seated, and languid reaction to our move to Virginia made certain that would never happen.

So yes, Labor Day is going to be hard for me. But not too hard. I will think of her, and of the day, and of the circumstances and of my final vision of her, and how I dealt with it all. I will say a prayer, for all of us whose lives she affected, and then I will move on some more. As I said in my first post after she died, “it’s complicated.”

I have many wonderful memories of my life, even with Mom. I read in Psychology Today last week that the human brain needs five positive experiences to cancel out or compensate for just one bad one; this must be why we tend to hang on to or remember sadnesses more than not. What I’m unsure of (because it wasn’t detailed) is whether the circumstances need to weigh the same. If the good:bad ratio must be with the same person or the same intensity, then Mom is hosed. There simply weren’t enough or enough intensely good times to cancel out the bad. That makes me a little wistful; but this is the deal my soul made with me, this is the life I was given.

I’ll do what I can to ensure that the balance of my life has more positive than negative. I hope five times more positive… wouldn’t that be nice? I think it’s possible. It’s up to all of us to do what we can, always, to see even a potential good outcome from any considered morass. Short of mental illness, it’s about free will. How we perceive everything is all on us.

Thank you.