The End of the World as I Know It

My mother died during COVID-19. How to make sense of the world now that she’s gone?

It was 1:51 AM on April 21 in Istanbul when the call came in. “She passed away,” my brother said. I had jumped out from my sleep when the phone rang and, instinctively, already knew that my mother had died before I answered it. The world as I knew it was gone. Now I had to make sense of a world where my mom did not exist.

As I sat in the couch into the wee hours of Tuesday, I felt the devouring nature of the emptiness her death had left me with. A pain unlike any other. She was in me, she was a part of me, and now everything was going to be different.

My mother had her childhood taken from her before she could walk. Her parents divorced by the time she was one and she was given not to her mother, not to her father, but to an older lady, my grandfather’s aunt. Her godmother, as my mom called her, treated her with love and did her best to provide for her until she turned eighteen. What she could not give her was the love of a parent. My mother would live the next 65 years trying to come to terms with her absent mother and father. She saw psychologists, priests, therapists, spiritual gurus, and, psychics. A few helped her, most did not. And a lot were charlatans.

Her pursuit for parental love never ended. I called my dad every day when she was on her deathbed in the hospital. She was hallucinating from pain and screaming “mom, dad, help me.” A last desperate call to the love she never had. “You are going to be okay, mom,” I said. “You just have to stay calm.” Futile advice when you are in so much pain. It did not work. Only morphine did.

I inherited some of her insecurity and fear of loss as a child. I was my mom’s first-born. She had no idea what being a mother was like. She had no example herself. So, she did what she knew was right. She overprotected me and gave me everything I wanted. My mother was a beautifully altruistic person. She was a giver and she was a lioness protecting me and my brother from the world. I grew up a fearful boy. I was afraid of other kids. I was afraid of speaking up. I was afraid of trying new things. It was not her fault. She did not mean it that way. And, with time, she would flip that coin and show me a different world.

If my mom learned one thing from her younger self was that she had to fight to get what she wanted. Her father’s rejection drawn her even more toward him, often in an idolizing manner. She wanted to be a lawyer like him and sought his approval. He said it was not a career a girl should pursue. She went to study English instead. Twenty years later she would have a second degree, this time a law degree. What goes around comes back around. She developed a strong sense of justice that would go on to define her career, her life, and my life.

As years passed, the fearful child in me started giving way to a strong, principled man. A reflection of my mother in many ways. I grew up watching her fight relentlessly for justice, helping people even when they did not have the money to pay her as their lawyer. I witnessed her fighting our own fight, when my dad lost his job and she worked day and night to prove it was an unfair dismissal. Lawsuits are soul-crushing. It’s a long, demoralizing process where the scales of justice not always tilt in your favor. “Life is not fair,” she would said to me, “but we still have to fight for justice.”

I never forgot that. It gave me strength. It made me into who I am. She is in me.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer in October 2015. There are three moments in my life that I can never erase from my memory no matter how hard I try. That was the first one. I was crossing Amsterdam Avenue in New York City, thinking of grabbing a coffee before my next class in my master’s degree, reading the message from my brother and sinking a little deeper into the asphalt beneath my feet. “Mom has breast cancer,” it said. My brother is a doctor and the bearer of bad news. Three and a half years later he would call me to say the cancer was back, this time in her lungs. I was sitting in my bed in Istanbul, feeling that the world around me was collapsing in slow motion.

And then there was that 1:51 AM call three weeks ago.

I was a late bloomer. I did not open up to the world until my early twenties. My mother, on the other hand, embraced life with all its imperfections. Maybe it was the fear of loss from her childhood that motivated her to live life to the fullest. She was the heartbeat of the family, the thread between me, my brother, my dad, and the rest of the world.

She used to tell me I was too serious, that I needed to live life a little more. I always brushed it off. And then she would win me over. She usually did. We are both very stubborn.

I started to see the world through her eyes and the idea that life is not fair, but we must keep fighting. I understood how privileged I was to be raised in a middle-class family that, despite all the highs and lows, provided me with an education. From that moment on, I knew my purpose was to make life a little bit easier for people who had not had the same luck as I had.

In 2016, my wife and I started Re:Coded, an organization that works with youth in conflict-affected countries. It was the year my mom was going through chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Starting a company was one of the most difficult things I have done. There were so many lows, so many people telling us we were not good enough. I sought my mom for emotional support and advice. I thought selfishly that my problems were the center of the world. She needed me more than I needed her. Yet she was there to listen to me and say that everything was going to be alright.

By the time COVID-19 hit the world, my mom had had two brain surgeries, a thrombosis and pneumonia. The year since the cancer metastasized had been a punch in the stomach and the toughest of our lives. By end of March, it was in her lungs, brain, skin and bones. She spent her last weeks locked up in an apartment because of coronavirus lockdowns. The pain started to get worse and her mental state deteriorated. Still she found strength to put on make-up and a wig to join a video call for my wife’s birthday in April. The last time she would say Happy Birthday to someone.

Eight days later my dad called the ambulance. The pain was excruciating. It was a Friday. She died on Monday. She died with my dad. He bore witness alone in a hospital room.

Until that weekend, COVID-19 had only changed the little things in my life. Work from home, more cooking time, wearing a mask, washing hands. Repeat. Then it came knocking on my door.

When she went to the hospital, my wife and I looked for ways I could go back home to Brazil from Istanbul. Drive to Izmir, catch a boat to Athens, fly to Lisbon and then cross the ocean to Sao Paulo. Except there was no boat and no flights. I could feel my mom’s life slipping through my fingers.

My brother had the coronavirus at the same time my mom was in the hospital. In a different world, he would have driven the six hours to the hospital to be with my mom and dad. There was nothing he could have done but to surrender and weep.

I always imagined that my mom was going to live a long life and die old with us by her side. Cancer stole her life. COVID-19 stole the moment. I should have been by her side, holding her hand, and telling her it was okay to go. That’s how it goes, right? I will never get that moment back.

Now hundreds of thousands are dying alone. I can feel the suffering in the world and it is agonizing.

After my mom died, I stumbled upon Joan Didion’s book “The Year of Magical Thinking” where she writes that “the death of a parent…despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago.”

The death of my mother is the end of the world as I know it. I have to make sense of this new world.

I have to make sense of a world where my dad has to live without his companion of 42 years. I have to make sense of a world where my brother cannot go to his mother when he’s feeling down. I have to make sense of a world where my wife will not learn Portuguese from her mother-in-law. And I have to make sense of a world where my children will never meet their grandmother.

Nothing will ever be the same again.

It’s Mother’s Day and if my mom was alive she would have told me “son, say something nice about your mom on Facebook.” Mom, this is for you.