Saturday, September 11, 2021
9:05 p.m., 9 minutes
Mom FaceTime called to tell me she was going into Hospice.
She kept asking me “Do you need more time?”
It was hard to understand some things. She told me that she loved me very much. She said she was sorry for how she had hurt me “when [she] was delusional.” She asked me if I had anything to say.
I was not very talkative. I felt stunned, and I was crying.
When I see her face, it’s like I freeze. It happened at the hospital in June, too. All of my brain just goes quiet and I don’t know what to say.
On the call I cried, tears falling from my eyes. I told her that I loved her. I told her I thought she had to be strong to get through all she had been through in her life.
She said something about how I had a butterfly tattoo on my shoulder (I don’t, but an ocean wave) and she was talking a bit about butterflies. I mentioned that I had her butterfly paintings. Including the blue one. This was relevant to her as she was thinking about the blue butterfly sticker they put on the door for hospice.
When she ended the call, she said “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” I still don’t know why she said that. Maybe she was certain that I would come to her bedside. But, I didn’t go. – from “Grief Journal” Sept. 11, 2021
“some things you can’t know while your mother is still living
I take her letter I say thank you and then I peel the skin from my fingers and light it in the flame of the stove” – notes from a poem circa 2015
Loss vs Lost: I thought I tried to write about this after my mom died…tried to capture the feeling. Instead, I wrote: My body is a grave where memories are buried.
I thought I wrote about the way the cold encapsulated me on the last days she was dying. And clung to me after her death. The chill that wouldn’t go away.
My body of water, my body of memory.
I couldn’t tell you the last time she was “my compass” and yet after her death this flood swirled into my head and made me wonder if it was worth it to keep living. I felt lost, not just loss. It’s hard to explain. She was my mother and even though we weren’t very close and we didn’t know or understand each other, it was like a piece of me broke off. This piece that had spent my whole life trying to navigate the world of her…to know her direction in the world. I didn’t know that this piece of me still clung to old dreams and old possibilities that would never be. The things I “knew” would never happen that somehow, all the while that she was still alive, must have had a little bit of hopeful breath left in them.
At her death all that she was or wasn’t and any secret desires I had, all stopped.
And there was a person that I would never be that was gone, too. Whoever “she” was….the guiltless daughter? The daughter that forgave so much that nothing hurt anymore?
In the night I swirled in the sleepless grip of grief, and in the morning I would wake up and wonder: what is the purpose of living if she was dead? And I felt stupid, or maybe ashamed (and definitely abandoned) for thinking/feeling that way. She was never an anchor in my life, was she? And yet, all those poems and stories tethered to her…
“…as though inside i
hold a thought locket all night
staring across the gap vast country
threading my brain to her flash all night” – from “The Road” Coniston Prize finalist, 2016
But she was my mother through all those growing years, teaching me “how to be” even if that person she molded felt broken, flawed, suicidal, self-depracating. So many harmful thought patterns imprinted into me, into the water of me, beginning (possibly) from the moments in her womb.* So many years later I was still undrowning myself, finding my breath and my will to breathe.
Something I wonder: Did my mother ever love herself?
For more than half my life I’ve lived with the version of my mother who lived in my head, in my imagination, and on the page that I created. And one thing I don’t think I have ever imagined her as was happy. The mother in my head always struggles, always feels uncertain, isolated, distrusting.
I guess that’s why she held so tight to faith. When I was younger she shared that all her prayers were that God would come and rescue us (me, her, and my sister) and take us to his island paradise. It would just be us and the bible. All her prayers that I would never have a life outside of her and god…of course, I could never be that girl. She lived her life with a version of me that lived in her head. And I wonder, did that version love herself?
*the body is 90% water. According to research in 1988 by Jacques Benveniste, water has memory. And according to the book Mother Hunger we start empathizing with the mother’s physical and emotional states in the womb.
Rachel Sahaidachny 