I’ve recently made weekend travel plans to marseille from paris. Me and my two friends are travelling on the fly, uncertain where exactly we’ll stay, whether we’ll camp in provence, etc. It sounds fantastic - young, carefree, adventuresome - a liberty that i haven’t felt since i was twenty, and the idea of the trip had me very excited. Only, as soon as I made the flight reservations I began to have an anxiety attack. And I came to realize, that I expect something bad to happen and I’m terrified to leave the familiarity of my schedule and my home.
I think I became so used to waiting for bad news, for waiting for loss, fearing loss, experiencing it finally (not to mention myriad other non-cancer-related familial trials, deaths, and illnesses) that I’m scared to move, for fear of one more struggle, one more emergency. I’m terrified of the unknown, feeling that i’m walking on the edge of a cliff, if i don’t walk perfectly i’ll fall into nothingness. So to make travel plans without certain lodging, a sight-seeing itinerary, etc. has tensed my heart.
Since my mom died, I don’t feel safe. Safe from what, I don’t know. There’s nothing tangible that I’m afraid of. The fear, the anxiety, has no name. I’m simply afraid of not knowing what to expect. I’m simply afraid of the unknown. Because I guess the unknown, in many ways, means loss. If you are removed from the known, from the familiar, then in a sense you are losing the familiar.
This more abstract fear is met with something very rational, considering my experiences of death and loss: when I go somewhere I’m afraid that I’ll never return. I’m afraid that I’ll never see people again. It seems all too possible that life will end suddenly and good-bye will never be hello again. I’m terrified that going on this trip - harmless and innocent fun that it is - will mean that i never see my husband or my family again. It is paranoid, yes, and I wish I wasn’t plagued by these thoughts, yet they persist.
And then there’s a sense of guilt, as if I don’t deserve to have this fun when my poor father’s at home in the US alone and sad and then my husband is at work. While I was a full-time caregiver for my mom, I used to feel this way even when I just went out one night. I didn’t deserve it, I was a bad person for wanting to leave for the evening, for spending money, for doing things that weren’t an obligation or a responsibility, for choosing to be with a friend instead of spending the evening with my mother. I would feel so badly about these things that I would awake in the morning and vomit, regardless of whether I drank anything or not. I think I continue to feel this way out of habit, and familiarity, if nothing else. These are feelings I’m familiar with, they are my framework, and if I let go of them, then I really am in a different phase of my life - a post-mama, post-caregiver phase of life.
I’ll go on the trip, of course, despite these stupid feelings and in the hope that in facing them I’m renewed in myself and find a way to be able to enjoy life after loss beyond the residues of loss.
I dreamed last night that I found my mom, after hours of looking. She was in a sacred place, spiritual and in some way Buddhist - but right near my parents’ house. She was feeble and still a little sick. I told her how relieved I was to have found her and told her everything that has been happening with my brother (with whom she was largely preoccupied in life). She wasn’t at home with us because she was getting close to God. She was peaceful and waiting for something golden and beautiful to arrive - she was already feeling it inside. I asked her how she knew she was close to God and she replied that she could feel him. That was good enough for me. And I left her in peace, feeling how lucky I was to have gotten to see her, to have found her even though she was all along, right next door.
A few weeks ago I came across a friend’s photo album on (that ubiquitous time-waster) Facebook. In his album entitled “family” he’d included an image of his father’s headstone. I happened to view this image around the time of the 12th anniversary of his father’s death and so “eavesdropped,” if you will, on a posted wall conversation. This friend, whom I’ve known since just after his father’s death, unabashedly adopts this loss as a visible part of his public self-identification and I realized suddenly how very different this is from my own relationship to my loss. And I realized that mixed in with that horrible emotional cocktail of loss is shame.
Since losing my mom this loss and all the weirdness that it entails (moodswings, sudden fits of weeping, social anxiety, neediness, a constant sense of unsteadiness and suspision) lurks beneath a thin veneer of normality like a nasty pustule covered with badly applied make-up. As if I’m trying to pass for someone that doesn’t have the sorrow of loss festering constantly. When I meet new people I feel like this is something I have to confess in order for them to know me: I wait for the right moment and then attempt to slip it in the conversation without provoking the common condolences and awkwardness. Neither of these are usually avoided. Loss makes others feel awkward, embarrassed of their own normalcy, uncertain of what to say. This fact has made it nearly impossible for me to feel comfortable around new people (and of course, since moving to a new country I am constantly surrounded by new people). Alienation has become my new home.
Seeing my friend’s declaration of continued loss-identification on such a public (albeit virtual) forum I realized that on some level I don’t want people to know this about me. Loss has made me weak, different, broken, dark, fragile, uncertain. They are qualities that frustrate and trouble, and I want nothing more than to cover and ignore them. I am ashamed of this elegiac residu and by extension I am ashamed of my loss. I feel that this loss has marked me as something of a social pariah, having experienced things that people - in particular people my age - are largely uncomfortable with.
So, while I do ackowledge my mother’s death on my own facebook page, it’s not as blatant as all that, and doesn’t generate conversation from anyone other than my sister. and even that makes me uncomfortable. I don’t want the loss to be there, to exist, to have happened in the first place, and therefore I want to keep it as private as possible. And of course, this conflicts on the other hand with needing it to be acknowledged, with needing the recognition and acceptance of others.
Then again, I keep this blog (largely imagining that only strangers read it, if anybody).