Ten Years Later, Remembering my Mother

Ten years ago today, my mother died. As I do with most things in my life, I wrote about it a lot. I wrote about it at the time, I wrote about it later, and I wrote about her life, her death, and our relationship some years later in my sorta memoir, AN ALMOST TOLERABLE PERSON.

I think of her often, and on this, the tenth anniversary of her passing, I wanted to share the most recent reflection on her, which was the chapter in that sorta memoir that was dedicated to her. If you want to see it in context, or read any of the other chapters, it's pretty much free everywhere. including HERE. 

Mom
 
 
It was a clear, cool morning in March. I was completing a volunteer shift at my youngest daughters’ elementary school library when I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. It was not unusual for me to get a call or a text during that time of day, but I was focused on checking out books and getting a hug from my kid before she went back to class, so I didn’t immediately check the phone.

It wasn’t until about twenty minutes later, when I was walking towards my car that I checked the message. It was from one of the nurses at the Heatherwood Retirement Community here in Virginia where my mother had been living for almost two years.
The message was cryptic and strained and asked me to call back immediately, which I did, already driving towards Heatherwood, just three miles away from the school. It was during that drive, just as I pulled onto Sydenstricker Road that I learned that my mother had died.

My mother and I had a unique relationship. I think it’s safe to say that the different versions of me and the different versions of her intersected during some interesting times and places throughout our lives. At its best, the most tolerable versions of me and the better versions of her were pretty well-suited. At other times, there were disconnects, sometimes dramatic ones. She was a complicated woman who stormed through a life fraught with challenges, joys, losses, and demons, all of which she faced, or chose not to, on her own terms. I was in my forties when she died, suddenly and unexpectedly, but in many ways, I feel like we both had been preparing for that day for many years.

While her death was not expected, her health had been growing progressively worse during the last five years of her life. Until we moved her to Virginia, she lived alone in the house we grew up in for over fifteen years. She, like me, tended to thrive on personal interaction and routine, so those years were filled with hardships for her, both circumstantial and self-inflicted. She didn’t take care of herself in a variety of ways and those choices had a demonstrative impact on my relationship with her.

As a child, my Mom was the driving force behind what happened in our household. My parents made decisions together, and I never felt like one parent cared about us more than the other, but it was clear to me early on that Mom was the one “piloting the ship” on a day-to-day basis. She worked hard at it and was a fierce advocate for her family and for causes she believed in. Somewhere, there’s a photo of Mom at a rally in the early 1970’s against the Vietnam War with me, sleeping in a stroller. She was an active member of Trinity Church and deeply involved in their efforts to ordain women during that era. If she cared about something, she truly cared and it got her time, attention and energy.

After pausing her college education after she married my father and started their family, she went back to college, graduating when I was in second grade. I remember taking pictures of the day with my new camera. It was among my first attempts at photography and my inexperience was on full display with the number of shots that failed to include my father’s head. Despite my growing pains as a photographer, I was really proud of her, which was a new feeling for me to have as a child. I got to leave school early for the very first time, so that was pretty cool. In those days, Mom was strong, organized, fearless and engaged. She took care of all of us. This was one of the most dynamic versions of her I ever got to know.

When Dad got sick, seemingly overnight, Mom turned our household into a Cancer-patient-support center. She cared for him with a passion and a clarity of purpose that I’d never seen before or since. She was a force of nature, organizing everything about his care, his treatment, our lives, and more. She put everything that she had into trying to save his life while we all continued to live our own. While it still ended with his death, even that felt as though we’d prepared for it, in some ways. Everything was taken care of, and nothing was left to chance. Afterwards, it was just the two of us living at home with my sister out in the world beginning her amazing career. The months after he died were difficult. Looking back, it seems to me that after his funeral, there was an excruciatingly painful exhale from both of us that was necessary and healthy, but also indicative of the difficult transition that we’d both face as we started a new chapter in our lives as both individuals and as a family.

With my father gone, once I left for college, there was no one left with her. While she continued to care for me and provide for me until graduation, I was only home for school breaks, and generally, not home much during those. In one way or another, caring for her family had been a full-time characteristic of her life since she was a teenager, when she helped raise her three younger brothers after her father abandoned her family. With my departure, she lived alone for the first time in her life.

I think that she was uniquely unsuited to living alone, especially on the heels of yet another tragic loss in a life littered with them. As I matured and my world began to expand with my education, my career, and then with my wife and children, hers began to contract. Many of the friends that she shared with her husband were no longer “in the picture,” for one reason or another. After a series of career changes and attempts to find new relationships in which to grow did not work, she remained alone and fell into several destructive patterns of self-abuse that made an adult relationship with her difficult. While she was desperate to be a part of my children’s lives, we were forced to limit her access to them in response to her behavior and choices. When we chose to leave New Jersey for Hawaii, a move that was necessary for both my wife’s career and for our family in general, Mom took it very, very hard. She saw our choice to pursue that opportunity as a personal betrayal and those years were among the most difficult in our relationship, including one year in which we cut off contact with her entirely. We were able to reach a détente on our return to the mainland and eventually moved her here to Virginia to be closer to us, so I believe the last few years of her life were likely as good as they were ever going to be, but there remained some distance between us.

I wanted her to take better care of herself. I wanted her to take her health more seriously and to make choices that demonstrated her dedication to her grandchildren, if not her own children. I wanted her to ask for help with problems that were clearly, at least to me, still haunting her from a lifetime of avoiding them, but as I said, she chose not to, and when she chose something, it remained chosen. She was unapologetically an individual and she was not going to be told what to do by anyone: not her children, her brothers, her mother, her doctors, or anyone else.

That was hurtful at times, especially after her unexpected death, but she’d earned the right to make choices in her life, and I have learned that that power of choice does not go away because your child doesn’t like your choices. At least no more than my power to make choices was affected by the many, many choices I made as an adult that she didn’t much care for. She wasn’t shy about telling me or anyone else what she thought about pretty much anything.

Writing her eulogy was a very different challenge than writing one for my father, partly because I had her help with the first one. Also, I was in my forties as I wrote for her and I’d had the chance to have an adult relationship with her. I was seventeen when Dad died and my eulogy for him reads very much like something written by a seventeen-year-old kid who really didn’t understand much of anything. In Mom’s eulogy, I talked about how my parents met down the shore in Wildwood, which remains a vitally important place to our family. I talked about how she and my father would sometimes dance after Saturday night dinner if The Platters or a good Frank Sinatra song came on the radio. I talked about how she threatened the Sisters of Mercy at Saint Paul’s School with a protest from the ACLU if they didn’t allow me to do a history paper on Malcolm X and Nat Turner, which they’d barred me from doing for reasons of historical bias and ignorance. They are great stories, all of them, and they continue to resonate in the retellings since she passed. There was laughter and nodding of heads as I spoke about her on that partly sunny day in March when we held her memorial. The hymns, the readings, the music at the reception were all very much in line with what she would have wanted and we all knew how to act. She’d taught us that during her life and we’d paid attention.

As I look back on the loss of my mother, especially in the context of reconsidering the other losses I’ve discussed in this book, I find that I’ve learned something. That’s a good thing for me both as a person and as a writer, since it’s kind of the whole point of this sort of thing.

As I look back at my mother’s life and at the life we’ve lived since she died, I find myself thinking more about the example that she set, both positively and negatively, more than the funny stories, the shared wisdom, or even the things that remain different in a world of which she’s no longer a part. The way that she cared for my father and the rest of our family during his illness became the template for me for how you’re supposed to face a family crisis: with complete and undeniable love, grace, and humor. And it helps to get organized, ask questions, and to be honest with yourself and those around you. She encouraged me to keep my relationships current with the people I cared about, so that even if time and distance kept us apart, there was something foundational that we could always return to. That was a valuable lesson that I have always tried to remember.

The way that she advocated for my sisters and I became the template for how one advocates for their children, something that I’ve had to do many times over the years at school and in other settings. Mom would fully prepare herself for such advocacy meetings and she would suffer no fools in the process. She always endeavored to be the most knowledgeable person in the room on whatever the topic was. You might have disagreed with her, but it was unwise to underestimate her and impossible to ignore her.

The way that she refused to treat difficult topics, like life and death, among others, as unsuitable for children to discuss became the template for how my wife and I talk with our own children about difficult things. We talk through things and try to, as Mom did, make it clear that sometimes, it’s OK not to know the answer. Sometimes, as she told me once as she shared her own journey through grief, “the answer is that there is no answer.” I still don’t totally understand how one is supposed to live with that answer, but I know that one does. Despite the fact that death can be an awkward and difficult subject, it remains one of the few experiences that we will all share as human beings.

As I’ve looked back, I see pretty clearly now that some of the more cautionary tales and negative examples of her life became templates for me as well at times. Mom had many unresolved issues and traumas from her childhood for which she refused to seek help in processing. In addition, she faced challenges later in life that were deeply troubling from the pain of loneliness, the difficulties inherent in moving on and finding purpose, and generally avoiding addressing anything that was difficult. Those challenges were largely ignored and pushed aside in hopes they’d just go away, which they did not. It turns out, I did the same thing in the years after Dad died. We talked about that earlier in this book, but I’d never really connected the dots between my failures in those years and her own later in life. I isolated myself in those years, much as she did. It was bad for both of us. I understand that differently now than I did when she was alive. I think we had more in common than I thought.

My family dealt with her loss the way that she taught us to. We honored her, took care of her affairs, respected her wishes, celebrated her life, and we did so while continuing to live our own. When she died, my children were little and didn’t understand at first why there were so many people visiting our house, bringing food and drinks and telling stories. I remember telling them, “this is what you do when someone loses a loved one. You show up.” Later, they didn’t understand why I was working though a big box of Grammy’s papers, already organized and ordered for us to manage in the weeks and months after she passed. When they asked, I simply told them “this is what you do when someone you love dies. You take care of things for them.”

In the years since, when our family or our friends have dealt with a loss, I’ve been pleased with the fact that the kids no longer ask why we’re doing something for them. Whether it’s attending a memorial, sending a text, baking bread, or mowing a lawn for a friend while they’re out of the house, they don’t ask why anymore. They understand that those things are simply “what you do.” And what you do really, really matters, not just immediately after someone dies, but later too.

My children understand that now. I’m proud of that. I think Mom would be proud too.

The above was originally published in AN ALMOST TOLERABLE PERSON: Uncommon Thoughts on Life, Loss, and Looking Back