The 17th of January marked one year since my mother’s passing. Everyone told me that the first year after a loss was the hardest, that the pain fades and the grieving gets easier. So I expected that, after getting through the holidays and the first anniversary of her death, grieving my mother would indeed get easier with time. But this is not the case.
Grieving isn’t something that runs its course all on its own, it’s a project that one has to devote time to. I suspect that for the greater part of this last year I was in shock, experiencing the requisite sorrow and pain, but feeling distanced from memories and thoughts of my mother in a way that protected me from the pain. And indeed I even suffered memory loss - unable to remember specifics about the month surrounding my mother’s death and the few years preceding. Now, as the shock wears off and my memories come flooding back to me I find that the pain of loss is again as intense as the first day I lost her. I expected that the grief would run its course all on its own, that whatever I instinctively did to deal with it would be the best thing to do. But it doesn’t run its own course, it can hide from you sometimes and then jump out to surprise you when you least expect.
When recovering from grief it’s necessary to confront it, to be certain that you are not trying to escape it or allowing it to become burried. After I got married (about 6 months after my mother’s passing) and moved to France, far away from the objects and spaces that are imbued with my mother’s memory and spirit, it was easy for me to focus on other things, to distract myself from grief. I could even imagine that she was at home waiting for me. But when I returned home from Paris for the holidays, i was struck by my mother’s things, literally feeling as if slapped in the face, by her unmistakable presence in my parental home. The loss was made real to me all over again and I grieved like I did the first few weeks after her death.
Now I’m back in Paris and once again able to ignore the grief if I choose. Only now I know that it’s there whether I pay attention to it or not. If I try to ignore it, as I did this past fall, it’ll only come back to slap me again in the future (Hope Edelman attests to this in her book Motherless Daughters). So I need to force myself to deal with the grief, to continue to grieve despite my compulsion to avoid the pain.
To actively work on grieving I have begun to keep a journal of memories of my mother, writing down sketches of the past as they come to me, to force myself to remember and to ensure that I will ALWAYS remember. I have also begun to look into books which discuss grieving and how to work through the loss, make peace with it.
It’s necessary to feel the pain in order to heal, no matter how unbearable and gut-wrenching it may be. You have to let yourself know the loss and embrace it as a part of you and, like a bad roommate, you just have to learn to live with it no matter how miserable it may be. And one hopes, eventually, that the loss will improve, will lessen, and you’ll incorporate it into a new version of you - it will meld to you and change you and despite its constant presence you may find peace.
We’re fast approaching the holiday season and this will be my first without my mother. Even Halloween is usually spent helping my mother prepare costumes for my nieces and nephews and then watching B movies with her late into the night. And it was last fall that her illness really began to progress rapidly so every day that is increasingly autumnal feels like an unwanted anniversary. Regardless of seasonal change I think of my mother daily, but these days inky images of my own anticipatory loss, anxiety, and my mother’s deteriorated state are laid over diurnal remembering. And I wait with fear as the Christmas season approaches, wanting to start happily afresh with my new mini-family (my husband and I) but afraid I am unable to dam gushing grief. I don’t want this time of year to come around, when I have to remember and relive (what i hope remains to be) the worst season of my life.
But mostly, it always comes back to this simple fact: I miss my mother. I can promise you that you don’t know what missing is until you meet this wrenching and final loss.
I inaugurate this blog on this day that would have been my mother’s birthday, had she not passed this last January. This will be a blog devoted to the experience of becoming a caregiver at the age of 19, the long process of assisting my mother through various cancer treatments for seven years thereafter, and the profound loss and grief that I have suffered along with my family this past year.
Today is strange. I woke up not knowing how to feel, thinking that i should already be profoundly sad. But I think I didn’t realize really how strange and full of sorrow I felt until I went to the studio where I work and could hardly speak and could not at all focus. So I left. And I lit a candle at a church near my apartment. and there i cried, but didn’t weep.
The truth is I’ve had worse days. This is a medium grief day. I have had, and only last week, days where I wept uncontrollably for so many hours that my eyes were nearly swollen shut. Today my grief is not causing me the stomach-stabbing pain the causes me to weep in such a painful way. instead it is dull pain, it is numbness. this is the form of grief where my eyes can’t focus and my reactions are delayed. It is no less painful, but is a different brand of pain. One that is so inexpressible that even the common language of sadness - crying - is insufficient.
At any rate, my writing is right now sub-par exhausted, as I am from trudging through - making it through- this day without a complete breakdown. This day is to reflect and remember my mom, to start - I hope - to help other young people like myself (and my sister) grieve and acknowledge that to know loss before the age of 35 invisibly ages you and presents you with challenges most others in our age group have not yet faced.
Here, for my mother’s birthday, is an excerpt from the amazing eulogy my sister compiled:
“Among the many wonderful, and deeply appreciated remembrances that have arrived since my mother’s passing last week, is this story from a former administrator at the school where my mother taught for over two decades, a story that my sister and I particularly cherished. The letter related how each morning, on her way to the class room, my mom would stop by the window of this administrator’s office, wave and bring her smiling face so close to the glass so that she deliberately left an imprint of her nose, then pull away and laugh before heading off to teach.
My mother was funny and warm, quick to strike up intimacies, easy to talk to—she was a great listener—and so easy to like. She loved cooking for a crowd, talking on the phone, flower gardens, foot rubs, the beach, Mexican food, swimming, midnight snacks, looking at the stars, the conversation of children, ice cream, Star Trek re-runs, Art museums, and the collective cinematic achievements of Sandra Bullock. She loved making things—from her gorgeous paintings and stained glass, to bread from flour she’d ground herself, exquisite Halloween costumes for her children, a beautiful dollhouse she and my father made for me one Christmas, filled with furnishings she’d also assembled and sewn. And once, I came home from school to what seemed to me a small miracle: homemade donuts just coming out of a deep fryer I didn’t even know we owned.
Although she wouldn’t have considered herself an intellectual, my mom was incredibly smart. She really got things. And she knew so much. It seemed to me she had a natural acuity about everything worth knowing—not least of which was a very specific understanding of how best to be in the world. I was often surprised by just how much my mother knew about so many things, how many things she knew how to do; as a small child habitually awed by what seemed the limitlessness of my mother’s “knowing”, I devised a theory of her intelligence—I thought that maybe when you became an adult, you just naturally knew more. Overnight. Or else it happened during pregnancy—the vast knowingness of mommies. Of course, I now know that I got the adult part totally wrong; I’m not placing any bets on pregnancy either.
My mother was also an intense person, possessing an innate focus, drive, and passion that revealed themselves in her very best traits—her loyalty to friends, her commitment to students, her gifts as an artist, her immense creativity and curiosity, her essential joyousness, and most of all, her vast love for her family and tenacious will to live. She taught us, her children, to be independent, to think critically about the world around us while also relating to it through compassion and love. She was deeply ethical and really believed in being a positive force in the world. She had a strong sense of social justice and believed in cultivating rather than merely tolerating diversity as a central value. My mother was also very spiritual. She believed, especially, in the importance of ritual, the tangible affirmations and renewal of faith, the connection to a cosmos majestic in its mysteriousness, and to a universal love that was among her deepest convictions.
So exemplary, strong, inspiring, truly amazing—these are some of the terms that regularly come up in conversations about my mom. I know that many people consider her the most singularly heroic person they’ve ever met. Too, I know that my mom is remembered by many children, some of them now adults, as the best elementary school teacher they ever had. What distinguished her teaching in part was her creativity—the unique projects she devised, her efforts to make the classroom through its aesthetics as well as the curriculum a lively, engaged, and exciting space for learning. For my mom, teaching wasn’t just about learning objectives—the particular skills or knowledge she needed to impart—but about the process, the journey of learning. I suspect that for the students who remember her with special fondness, it’s because of that journey. Not what they learned but how they got there with her.
I cannot begin to do justice, here, to what an extraordinarily wonderful mother she was, what a privilege and gift it was and is to be her daughter. It will suffice to recall how each night of my childhood, before I went to sleep, she would sing to me, say prayers with me, patiently talk out whatever worries were crowding my mind; she kept up the lullabies well into my pre-adolescence; and for years now, my parents’ phone bill has been a record of how that cherished habit of talking out the day’s vexations continued into my adulthood. These past few months of deterioration robbed her, among so many other things, of the strength to be “a mother” in the way that I have always known. But what that loss gave me was an appreciation for how much I loved her as ‘Barbara’, beyond her very particular, very central role in my life. She was so amazing. And she meant the world to me, and now I can’t imagine being in it without her.”