My Mother Died
A friend I haven’t seen in a while was at my house the other night. She asked:
“So how’s your mom doing?”
The question took me by surprise. It has been almost four months since my mother died, and I forget that most people don’t know that.
But then again, how could they? My mother isolated herself and my family for most of her life and hers coming to an end didn’t change that. We were a mere seven people at her funeral and that was almost double the number expected. She didn’t want us to put a notice in the paper because which paper and for the benefit of whom?
It makes me endlessly sad to say, but there was no one close to her other than my dad, my sister and brother-in-law and I.
So she left her life as she entered it; alone and without notice.
My mother was adopted and an only child. She was born in 1944 when Denmark was still under German occupation. She never knew who her father was. She did know the name of her biological mother but didn’t — as far as I know — take any steps to find and meet her. It could have been out of respect for my grandparents, but knowing my mother it was more likely because she felt rejected and was too proud to go back to that.
My mother was about as unsentimental as they come. She had no problem leaving the past behind and did so many times over in her life. Her purging skills made Marie Kondo look like a case for the TV Show Hoarders. My fear response of walking away with empty hands and start over somewhere else I get from her and I don’t know how that makes me feel. I think in later years she came to the realization that no matter how often she moved her darkness would always move with her, that no change of address would change her. And so she decided to stop.
She was very creative — that I also owe to her — she painted, she wrote, she had an eye for colors and patterns and art and literature and theatre and film. She was, however, a fierce critic and most of all of herself, a perfectionist who deemed herself imperfect.
It wasn’t easy being her. And by extension, it wasn’t always easy to be around her. Maybe she knew and saw isolating herself as damage control, a courtesy to the world. I will never know because the only statement she ever made to me in the way of a goodbye was a month before her death when she still had lucid moments and looked at me and said:
“I must have done something right, right?”
That was the last time she really spoke to me. After that, she was too emaciated and in too much pain to want to talk to me. More than that I don’t think she could. There was too much to say, and so she opted to say nothing at all. That was her choice. And then my mother died.
That was in January. Now it is May and Mother’s Day and I am just scratching the surface of figuring out what it means to me that mine isn’t here anymore. Looking around in my life it doesn’t seem that much different. My mother never visited me in California, my children didn’t know her, she rarely called me or texted me of her own volition and when she did it was with bad news she couldn’t not tell me. She minded her own business and expected me to do the same. My life isn’t and wasn’t dependent on her presence.
And yet I am untethered. One of the strings that hold me in place in the Universe has been cut and my mother corner is flapping in the wind. It is strange and unsettling and freeing at the same time. The mirror has been taken down and my question is if it matters what I look like? On good days it doesn’t. On bad days I can still hear her voice in my head telling me not to cry for her because she never did. So that is where I am on this day; not sure how to honor and mourn my mother.
