With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love

My mom would be chuckling right now, as I write yet another post on death and funerals and loss. When her own mother died, it was weeks and weeks of morose and moribund sermons from the pulpit that nearly drove her as crazy as the Oklahoma winds. But here we are go again. I am not sure what in the hell is going on in the universe, but it's been a shitty week for too many friends.

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For my dear L.T. Love you.

 

I have an image of my mother and her sister outside of the church in Beloit, Kansas, wrapped against the cold wind in fur coats, clutching each other as they followed their mother's casket down the path and into the hearse. They were both sobbing, their handsome, strong beauty crumpled from weeks of grief and pushing against the inevitable that a late-stage lung cancer diagnosis for a vibrant and remarkable woman brings. I don't remember much but that intimate moment, my grandmother's legacy stitched up in the space held by that embrace.

I can imagine that my mom felt the same push and pull that I did in those final days of my mother's own life, the real-time grief nearly impossible to process, the guilt-ridden wishing that this part would be over so that she would be free and so that we could move on to mourning her given that she already was a shadow of herself. The hardest thing to process was that she was never going to go back to the way she was, that it was reality, that it was over. And that's what we all mourned in real time, that space of anger and sad, that glimmer of her old self in between the days of losing her moment upon moment. The winding down was hard,  unfamiliar, not sudden like it had been with nearly every one before. And the winding down was slow and then fast and then too slow in its fastness, which doesn't likely make sense unless you've lived through that interminable time of ending.

There are a million things I want to tell my friend tonight, my girl L.T. who texted me in the wee NYC hours to tell me that she had just today lost her mother, an extraordinary woman with fire and depth and sparking adventure and deep love and good strength, so much good strength, for her family. 

I want to tell her of the things that I learned from Marie Howe about the spaces that are made by loss in which I learned about myself, so many years after she had gone: 

     I had no idea that the gate I would step through

     to finally enter this world

     would be the space my [mother's] body made.

And how I wish now that I had written a jar full of memories to keep for myself, a scrap for each, that I could pluck out and savor, some fit for my kids, many only fit for the curious adults within belly-laughing distance. And that I wish I had recorded those stories told in the numb days after when we all walked around with dead eyes, tracing the thin, worn path we had too many times before, knowing that it would be five days before the smoke cleared and we could begin to see what damage had been done.

And that in the blackened landscape, shoots peek through and life comes back to itself.

And that letting those shoots grow is important. Really important. Live.

And that good music helps. Often on repeat.

And saving that thing that smells like her in the back of the closet. That's the best. Do it.

And how five years, five years after she left, I can still be knocked nearly breathless by a poem from May Sarton that comes across my desktop without warning, kismet in far too many ways:

An Observation

True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root,
Must let their hands grow knotted as they move
With a rough sensitivity about
Under the earth, between the rock and shoot,
Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother's hands grow scarred,
She who could heal the wounded plant or friend
With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love;
I minded once to see her beauty gnarled,
But now her truth is given me to live,
As I learn for myself we must be hard
To move among the tender with an open hand,
And to stay sensitive up to the end
Pay with some toughness for a gentle world.

So, sweet friend, so many things and nothing all at once. I wish there was more space to tell you right now, right in this time where everything and nothing is there. It's too much, all of it, and there is so much more to write.

Love you, L.T. 

Little That is Noble

My mother's biggest fear was going old and senile, of losing her marbles before her body shut down. She would, from time to time, remark that she wished there was a bottle of that "special Tylenol" in the top of the cupboard, referring to the Tylenol cynaide scandal of the early '80s, just in case she started to slide into dementia. Those jokes were kind of half jokes / half wistful thinking living in a state where any sort of assisted suicide would be seen as punishable to the greatest extent of the law.

My mother, brave and strong and tough as nails, weathered some of the greatest heartaches life had to dole out, the final coup being a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer one week shy of her retirement. She dug in, for us, and tried to stave off the cancer that would inevitably kill her. She tried, beyond probably her own desires, to stick around as long as possible.

And the end was a shitty one. The entire process, honestly, was a shitty one of doctor's appointments and side effects and loss and not knowing, really, when to say "when". She did it for us, true to her form of putting her own desires last, loving the people who needed the comfort of a few more months or days more than her own need for peace.

We talked through the "special Tylenol" options, downloading Final Exit only to discover that the options were to put her physician friends in professional peril or die of suffocation, her worst nightmare. I remember sitting on the ottoman of the big chair where she spent most of her time, walking through the options with my sisters, her shaking her head at each one. That was about the time when we decided hospice was the best option and things went downhill on icy skates.

In my mind, there is little that is noble about the way we treat the dying in this country. There is little noble about asking someone to suffer a horrible end or to be drugged nearly unconscious until her/his body fails. There is always the question of when to say goodbye, because there is always false hope. There is always the question of what to do, how to be, what to say, who to involve. I brought David and Ava in to say goodbye to my mother in the final days of her life. Ava clung to her father's neck crying "That's not my grandma! That's not my grandma!" while David buried his head in my waist. I don't know that I can forgive myself for that failure as a parent, for giving them that fearful last look at someone who loved them so deeply, who was hilarious and full of energy and love all of their lives. Instead, my mother was a shadow of herself, incoherent and frightening. 

What a beautiful thing it would have been to have had her pass on her own terms, our small family with her, her having said her goodbyes in her own way. She could have kissed and hugged all of her grandchildren, she could have had a final drink with her sons in law, she could have given each of us girls a special kiss on the cheek and held our hands as she did in quiet moments. Yes, that night would have been one of the hardest in all of our lives, but she would have gone out strong. She would have been herself. For those of you who knew my mom, you know what I am talking about. On her own terms, just like she lived her life.

I watched this video from this beautiful young woman who is now living in Oregon so she can end her life with dignity, vibrant and true. People faced with a terminal illness want and deserve a choice in the matter of how they live out their final days. I can't say this much better than it's described in the video, but I honor her choice as it may some day be my own. 

Gravity pulls us back

My mother and I had a sticky relationship. Two people could not have been more different in many ways, our political beliefs unbending, our ways of arguing about things loud and confrontational. This was years in the making, journeying through high school and college and beyond up until the weeks preceding her death when the soft reality of a short time gave us the space to not so much talk things through, but just to be attentive to the love that we had for each other, the love that underwrote all these things.

People that know about my hard relationship with my mom always wonder, sometimes aloud, sometimes with their eyes, about how we wrapped things up. I shuffle my feet a bit, uncomfortable with the question that implies what it does, that we wasted many years in disharmony only to be robbed of a future together.

But in these past few years that my mother has been gone, I have realized that our relationship was what it was and would have continued to be so until something catastrophic happened that would have changed everything. And then likely changed nothing.

Because behavior in relationships is incredibly difficult to change. The gravity of the well-worn path pulls us back to what we know and are accustomed to, even if it's not what we want in our heart of hearts. That pattern may be the inability to admit that we are wrong or the hurt at another freezing us out. It may be the lack of courage to have hard conversations, to say that we are sorry, operate on a different level and in a different behavior pattern than we had before. But it's just really hard. And it may not mean that we don't love the other person, it may mean that we just don't have the capacity to make that change. Changing behavior in relationships takes time and near constant attention. It takes intention and tending. False starts and failures chip away at the surface. Sometimes it feels safer not to even start. Sometimes the disappointment feels like more than we can bear.

And you can live the rest of your life sick to your stomach that this never happened, riddled with guilt that you squandered your time with something so precious as your mother's time in your life. You can let that eat away at you, blame yourself, wonder what you could have done. Or you can realize, as so many relationships in life, that it was what it was, mine the time that you had for the good, push past the regrets and move forward. You can take this realization into your relationships that are alive today, have expectations for people and for yourself, live according to what you need and how you need to be loved and to recognize your own role in how that all works out. Because that is what she would have wanted, honestly. I think she'd appreciate that most.

This one.

[I wrote this piece ages upon ages ago when I was really struggling with how to be a good mom, how to be present and attentive and there but still be here, with myself, in my own being. It felt right to post tonight].

She is my girl, this one.

This girl is all lanky limbs and big brown eyes and a witty retort or an observant question. When she wraps her arms around my waist, I can feel her little bird heart beating double time against me.

She's got her eye on everything, she cackles with laughter one minute and pulls the saddest face ever the next. Being with her cracks my heart right open with love. I fear for things that will hurt her, moments when she will bump up against sadness or loneliness or hurtful words dished out by mean women who take delight in pummeling her tender and precious heart.

I carry a lot for this girl.

It's an intense thing to be the mother of a daughter, here in this space of being a motherless daughter myself. I remind myself that everything she sees gets imprinted. I remind myself that I don't have to be a perfect mother, but one that she can rely on. I remind myself that the most important things I can give her are love, proof that I have her back, willingness to sit and talk and work things out, insight into the myriad of things coming her way. I remind myself to tell her that she's dynamite, because she is and nobody needs to hear that more than a small girl.

There is a little part of me that wants to run away from this responsibility. I'm not sure if it's the fear of disappointing her or screwing up or not being the woman that she needs me to be. I'm not sure if it's the desire to balance my one precious life with hers, to give her a legacy of a mother who didn't have to follow the conventional path of sustained sacrifice but found a middle ground.  I don't live the life my mother led, so how do I know how to do this and do it well?

Her small back curved to my side tonight as we read a book, talked and mostly just sat in each other's company. Little spine, hair a tangle down her back, eyes flashing. My heart is so full with love.

Motherless Day

For Denise, in particular.
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I am declaring a new National Holiday, Motherless Day.

It's a day where the legions of us motherless daughters will meet in a beautiful place to grieve. Tents will crop up with signs outside that say "Lost The Best Woman Ever", "Unresolved Shit", "Denial", "Guilt", "Sadness", "Struggling to Be the Woman She'd Want Me to Be", "Grief", "Will Never Be the Same". Inside there will be Listeners who know when to nod, when to hand over tissue, when to comment. Listeners are alumnae of the former year's camp who come back year after year because it's never over. Because nobody knows like another motherless daughter.

There will be special sessions on "Surviving that Fucking Hallmark Holiday" both for motherless daughters who have no children and have to suffer through a day of total reminder of every inch of loss and for daughters who themselves are mothers and have to plaster on the smile knowing that their own girls look to this day as a day to love someone who someday will be no more.

Screw the Avon walk. I want a Motherless Day.

At night we motherless daughters will make mad feasts of our mothers' finest foods. Comfort food like Velveeta and rotel or Chicken in Wine sauce or delicious tenderloin cooked to perfection and topped with a cold bernaise. We will tell stories of how we learned to cook at our mother's elbow, just as I taught my girl today, or how our mothers were lousy cooks but could order like champs. 

We will make the first toast to our lost mothers with their favorite mother's little helper: chablis, cheap scotch, valium... spanning the years of Halston dresses and power suits and jogging suits and nightgowns that we remember from our youth.

But most of all, we will wander this space of lostness, of being cast slightly adrift in the absence of that anchor that moored us. But we won't be alone.

It's a big tent. Come on in.