The Secret Club

There were two people on this earth who have known me from the moment I took my first breath. Were. I lost one of them in 2010.

I won’t go over the details of how my mom died. I’ve done that a few times already and thinking about the particulars, about how human error took her life, makes me angry. I don’t want to give space to that anger right now. That will be later, maybe. I’m in a different space right now. Right now I am thinking about how it feels to lose a parent.

My mom’s birthday was just over a week ago. I get really emotionally weird around the major dates related to her. Her birthday. The day she died. Really weird. Huge mood swings. Emotional wreckage strewn about. It’ll pass, it always passes in a couple weeks. Maybe a few weeks. Maybe a month.

I had the following thought recently and wrote it down in the journal I keep in my purse:

I look at things I wrote/said/did 5-6 years ago and wonder where that person went. The happy, cheerful, always joking person that I think myself to be now. I compare myself to that person and the differences are stark. The loneliness of separation, of death. How nice it must be for people who have never experienced that feeling. How lovely it must be to experience the world as an adult, without that shadow of darkness. Nothing changes you like the death of a parent. There is a clear dividing line, an unmistakable contrast: Before Death and After Death.

To experience the death of a parent is to experience emotional chronic illness. There is no cure. There is only pain management. My prescriptions of choice were alcohol and avoidance. I drank a lot. The recycle bin full of champagne bottles told the tale. “Haha, champagne is my beer,” was how I laughed it off. To be sure, there were other factors involved. My brand new marriage was rocky, work had it’s own challenges, and both of those things were stressors on top of the grief I was experiencing but not feeling.

Memories come unbidden. The wiggle worm when I was little. The van on the way to Virginia beach. Making Christmas or Thanksgiving dinners together. That time I hurt her feelings because I was an asshole. That time I illegally drove her home because she was too drunk to drive. Those memories come when they want, triggered by the smallest things, and with them, pain. The pain causes me to withdraw. It’s obvious when this happens. I wear my heart on my sleeve and it’s pretty clear when I hide it and myself away. “What’s wrong, what are you thinking about,” is the inevitable inquiry. “My mom died and that’s fucking with me,” is not an answer anyone is ready to hear, unless they’ve also lost a parent. The people who have also lost a parent? Those people know. They get it. They understand. We are kindred for the wrong reasons. We are members of a secret club that none of us wanted entry to.

For almost everyone else, things get awkward. The death of a parent is not something people like to talk or hear about. Mortality, in general, especially the mortality of loved ones, is not something people wanted to be reminded of. “I’m sorry, what can I do to make you feel better?” is the default response, because we’ve not been taught how to sit with someone else’s pain. Unless an unusual level of emotional intimacy has been reached, to truthfully say “you can’t make me feel better about this,” is to put the person on their heels, to end the conversation. They feel rejected, I feel uncomfortable, everyone goes home a winner. So that doesn’t happen. Instead, I avoid the subject entirely.

“What’s wrong, what are you thinking about?”

That all my mom wanted was to see me have kids and that never happened.
Oh, nothing, my mind is just wandering.
That I have no true place to call home anymore, because being a military kid, home was where mom was.
Oh, just that we really needed this rain. I really love the rain, don’t you?
That had we taken my mom home like she asked us to, she probably would still be alive today.
Oh, just this new thing I learned about.
How to reconcile the sadness I feel about the loss of my mom with the difficult feelings I have surrounding her parenting.
Nothing.

Thinking back to the person I was before my mom died, I was so jovial in comparison to myself today. So light. So amazingly, emotionally carefree. I was walking, talking, Hakuna Matata. I didn’t know what it meant to feel grief, true sadness. Now I know. These days, even when I am feeling happy, there is rarely a lightness to it. It is happiness with an asterisk. It’s hard to be carefree when you aren’t care free. I try to fake the lightness sometimes, to see if I can force it to come back permanently. It hasn’t worked yet. I’ll keep trying. I remember what it felt like to be that free and I’d like to have that feeling back again.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. It’s another one of Those days. Valentine’s Day was a special day to my mom. It was her day, in a sense. She made it a point to always do something for everybody she cared about. Nothing major, just a little something to let you know you were special and important to her. Whenever I was single on Valentine’s Day, no matter where I was, mom would send me a thing. A card, flowers, something, because she wanted me to know that no matter what, I was loved. I cried tonight while thinking about that.

Were my mom still alive, I’d probably drive up to spend the day with her. We’d talk about dating, love, and relationships. I’d pretend not to care about being single instead of having the family we both wanted for me. She’d give me platitudes about how I’m beautiful (in your eyes, mom, but I know I’m a 7 on a good day), how it only takes one (one in a million, mom, and I can’t date them all in the roughly 15,000 days I have left on this earth), and anyone would be lucky to have me. I’d roll my eyes, change the subject, and help her cook dinner, but I would be comforted that even when I didn’t believe in me, in those moments of hopelessness and pain, she’d still believe in me and hope enough for both of us. A mother’s love and support is like no other. It is all unyielding, uncompromising, and unconditional. The violent removal of that love leaves a wound that never fully heals, with more than a bit of scar tissue.

It’s now been 2 days since I wrote the bulk of this. 11 days since her birthday. 1 day since Valentine’s Day. I’m still in a bit of a funk, but it’s fading. I dreamed about her the night after my last writing. We goofed off, making funny faces and doing stupid dances, as we always used to. It made me laugh in the dream. I woke up crying. That’s how it goes. The dreams happen. A more spiritual person would say she’s trying to let me know she’s still with me. I know my brain is still doing anything it can to fight the pain of her loss, 4 and half years later. Dreams are the realm of the brain, where anything can be reality. My brain still wants my mom alive, so it creates the reality in which she is.

A month? Two months? Some time later. I abandoned this draft, because I didn’t know how to wrap it up, perhaps because some part of me knew it wasn’t complete. I started writing it because my therapist called me out on the fact that in my 6 months of seeing her, I barely talked about my mom’s death. I’ve talked about anything and everything else (work, exes, relationships, work, family history, work), but steered clear completely of the death of my mom and the resultant emotions. I wanted to force myself to acknowledge and be accountable for the grief and anguish. I suppose I thought naming the feelings would stop me from running from them, to be honest about them. I wasn’t completely honest though.

I wrote about the good things in the relationship I had with my mom and ever so lightly touched on the hard things. I left out the lingering anger and resentment for not being properly equipped to exist in this world, for having to be responsible for myself and my brother at 10 years old, for being treated as and expected to act as a miniature adult, when being a child and experiencing the world as a child was the most important thing I should have been doing. I didn’t mention these things because it felt wrong. De mortuis nil nisi bonum and all.

Still another aspect of losing a parent that nobody warns you about. Where do you put the negative feelings, the anger you’re left to deal with while the subject of that anger has left this reality? Do you bottle the feelings up and allow them to rot inside of you, slowly escaping their vessel over time, forming a lake of poison in small increments? Do you rage at the person who can’t rage back? Do you sit in your therapists office and sob uncontrollably, struggling to regain your composure, your breath, as you voice the feelings you don’t dare share with your family lest their suspicions that you didn’t love your parent find false validation in your agony?

The loss of my mom was devastating. I’d been razed internally, so much that I didn’t even have the means to properly assess the damage. 4.5 years later, the rebuilding is happening. After working with my therapist and allowing myself to actually think about my mom, feel all the feelings (insert Allie Brosh drawing here), and deal with the feelings, the scaffolding is up. I occasionally find myself wishing I were in this place a year ago, but I quickly back off of those thoughts. I can’t rush the grieving process, doing so would cause still more damage. It takes how long it takes. You get through the worst of it, then it gets a little better, and a little better, then a little worse, then a little better. Then you keep going.

This post was published months after it was written, because sometimes emotions surrounding death are a bit too overwhelming when trying to deal with Everything Else. ❤️, Erica