Hello, My Shadow Self

I suppose everyone hits a certain point in their life at which they look back on the photos of themselves as a twenty-something and see a stranger. Or at least someone they are curious about, someone they want to remember being. There is this photo of me and my brother the year we lost her--me newly 24, my brother still 20--at the beach on Cumberland Island. We are both bent over the ruined remains of a sand castle, now a lumpy pile of mud in the tide, focused with the intensity of young children creating something in their minds. The long sprawl of beige sand meets the angled white line of the tide, the ocean-sky pale blue spreads out behind us in a way that is both lonely and comforting to the observer. It's just us out here in this desert wilderness by the sea, feet squashed down into the sad, knees bent, heads tilted down. You can see that Joey's hair is recently buzzed and grown out all over so that he is on the verge of resembling a dandelion gone to seed. Mine is long and pulled up in a pony tail.

I want to remember what is was like to have long hair and not be afraid all the time of pulling it out, to be effortlessly slender like that and not worry the way I worry now. Is that what being young is about? Being carefree? Do we actually accrue more things to worry about as we get older (mortgages, child rearing), or do we just become more well-versed in worrying the more sadness life shows us?

Maybe the better-sweeter-younger of nostalgia is a lie; maybe things weren't easier back then. Maybe I was just as anxious as I am now. But even though I was scared to lose my mother, I didn't know what that would feel like; we had nothing to compare it to. That's a nostalgia I would gladly return to, a knowledge I would gladly do without.

In the distance under a straw hat, I'm sure she crinkled up her gaze on us, content to watch us playing in the sun. Too thin, but smiling big. Still behind the tipping point at which the animal on your heels overtakes you. We left that idyllic beach vacation and went out into the world like birds tagged for recapture, not guessing that she'd be nothing but ash just four months later. There was the lilt of springtime unfurling in the air. We were all eyes and hearts dancing full of big-city dreams and meanderings and falling in and out of love and all the while her last summer was a coal truck rattling down a mountain behind a blind curve toward an impact that nothing could stop.

How could I have fallen in love?

I look at that picture and try to summon from it who I was then. Sketch in a background of all I couldn't see, or didn't want to. A dark incantation of longing: Tell me, image of my younger self, why is wanting my mother back as much as I want her back not good enough to bring her back, and why can I not accept this? In The Vampire Diaries, they keep showing this flashback segment where the psycho-vampire-witch-doppelganger hot dude says "hello, my shadow self." That's what I feel like, like there's a shadow self living inside me, or maybe two, that together we form some semblance of a whole; a trinity of self-like beings. There's the girl in the photo, sarcastic but not yet jaded. Another girl who goes to work in the morning, comes home at night, just got married, is living anyperson's life. Then there's the tiny splinter of a girl who believes that longing is powerful enough to precipitate a shift in the universe, sending out filaments of despair to snake their way up into the stars and bring back what is lost. If I can just go back to the places we went together, I think, I'll find her somewhere, buried in the sand, or haunting a red room in the French Quarter. Cumberland Island, Maine, New Orleans, Charleston, Cold Spring Harbor. The docks and beaches and broken city streets of her. If I can rediscover who I was back then, if I can just return to myself, I'll somehow be able to return her to me.

Now I realize that the third self is really me; if the other two exist, do they matter if this faintest wisp of shadow-hope is etched into the iron core of who I am? Maybe I'm also coming to realize that I'll never be a real person until I stop hanging on to all these shadows and start to believe that redemption is found in the future, not in the past.

Countdown to a Motherless Wedding

(I wrote this before the wedding but have just updated it--wedding=no blogging time!)

Okay, the title is a little morose. I don't really feel that way, like my wedding is defined by her. Except that I do and to say otherwise is lying. I lie because it's supposed to be about us, me and my fiancé, and I want to believe that it is, but very often it is actually about the giant black hole that was blown through my life nine years ago. Sometimes it's on the hazy outskirts, and I don't notice it so much. But in the two months I have left as a single girl, I feel suddenly like she's everywhere but here. In my dad's misplaced afterthought--ohhhhhhh, we should have had the rehearsal dinner here--after a family friend offered to throw it. In trying to explain to him that I would end up being the one to plan it, arrange it, stress about it. A mother wouldn't have asked these questions a few weeks before the wedding. In the beautiful and thoughtful engagement gift my fiancé's parents got us (the palpable absence of a card or gift from my dad, though he did offer to pay for the wedding), in my brother reminding my dad that I am getting married in the first place. Or the opposite; he's skipping the fiancé bit entirely and asking how my husband is, as if the whole ritual is a sneeze, best blessed and then forgotten.

I want to know how she felt about what it takes to stay married, to bring a child into the world and not hate yourself for adding to the joy but also to the climate change, the overpopulation, the great plastic garbage dumps, the social unfairness, and the fastness of everything. Is it right? How do you know when to let that self go, the self saying what about my life. I suppose though, she wasn't thinking as much as I am about losing her grip on her twenties and early thirties since she didn't spend most of hers mourning her dead mother. Or worrying about being bitter and jaded because of it. Or getting angry at people because they don't follow the protocols and small niceties of living in a civil society; letting people off the train first, walking with an umbrella in a way that avoids poking eyes out, saying please and thank you, waiting your turn. I was always older than I was, and now especially I feel like I've lived lifetimes without being able to look back on something and be proud of it.

I'm the age she was when she had me. My friends all have babies. Are they happy? I have an overwhelming desire to go out into the world and experience things. Go to Mykonos, interview old people about their lives, start a city garden, go back to Australia. Be young and free and in love with my husband without the complicated mess of adding to our family. Having children is the greatest thing many people experience, but there's so much to experience before that becomes my/our only experience. I'm not in the mood to spend all my free time raising an egocentric, needy, weak, yet fast little animal that prevents me from sleeping and causes me to gain weight. Will I ever be? All I can think is that I have not been salsa dancing in over a year, how I am not in a choir but wish I was, how I wear tennis shoes with arch-support insoles on the walk to work because apparently my feet are 60-years old, and I worry that everyone thinks I'm a middle-aged throwback to Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. Her absence (mother, not Melanie) imbues these dark April days with, well, her absence, and I wish the mundane and clichéd wish of motherless daughters everywhere; that I had her here to hear my questions, to advise, to comfort, and to accept. 

The Old Me

I've been thinking about the boys I used to love. Is this what getting married does? Stirs up all the sediment that has slid down the walls to fill the chambers of my heart?

Sedimentary, my dear Watson. All these ghosts. Nostalgia Dos. One for you, my true blue; two for the girl I would have been, had you been, and for the boy I was on my way to visit when the call came and they said you had only days.

Would it have been different? Lately, I wonder about those; the relationships that didn't go sour but instead slipped into yesteryear's circumstance. I miss you, old me. Meeting would-have-been him, breathless on an early spring night when he took my hand and pulled me around the corner, kissed me by a tiny row of fence posts; the back of something. And there, in the absence of dedicated space, I witnessed the last pure beginning of my life, the last time I wouldn't know that things just stop, no explanation owing. The sweetness of new love, seen through the wrong end of the telescope as first love, the sting of you going like sea water filling me up and making me drunker than the sun.

I wish I could go back to her, the if-you'd-lived me. If life were a Greek myth, I would travel to the underworld and make my offering of blood just to hear you speak. I'd peel back this decade of unfounded and needless regret like a banged up toenail, and there I'd be underneath, clean and new. Wearing lilac dresses and sitting on stone steps with a glass of wine in one hand, or at Mildred and Schubert, walking with you on the phone. Here I am again, a girl teetering on the edge of things. Telling you my stories, the air filling up with the buzz of exchanged words and turned earth. My face lit up by the promise of being young. Hey mom, I'd say, rounding a corner, I've got to go. Will you be around when I get home?

To Dad in the hope that he stays with us

I saw a photo yesterday of you riding an ATV. This was before ATVs were the devil, before anyone but Rachel Carson cared about the environment, when it was okay to drink and drive, smoke indoors, and not use sunscreen. My parents and their friends, young, bandanaed, thin and tan, in perilously high-waisted jeans, would go racing over the dunes with a bottle of beer in one hand and a precarious grip on the wheel.

I saw a picture of you riding an ATV, wearing the white shirt, white shorts, and deck shoes that have been your summer costume forever, and I thought to myself, I have your legs. I had thought, or rather hoped, that I had my mother's legs, but this profile doesn't lie. Looking at this stack of photos, it makes me long for the time before digital photos, when it was a surprise to find out what was on the roll, when there were more duds, but things were less posed somehow, and there was no option to delete.

I've spent a long time missing your counterpart, but I've often thought about how I'd miss you when you went. These pictures tell us stories you never did. Oh, we've all heard about the turkey you shot on Cumberland Island with a rifle at point blank range, but what about the small struggles that make the man? We were so busy holding on to the memory of her that we forgot to make enough of you to hold on to, to store up those memories on lined shelves and guard them for the future.

Am I too wrapped up in nostalgia? Your doctor took us down the hall to a consultation room in the hospital yesterday. He was wearing a yellow button down and a pink spotted bow tie, and had the look of an old country doctor sprucing it up for the small town-big city. He propped his arms behind his head like he was about to dive into an old yarn, and told us how you showed up to appointments a couple drinks in. He was trying to pass on parameters for how not to be an alcoholic. As if a lifetime of you isn't inoculation enough.

My brother mentioned later that night that at a job interview in Cincinnati, he found himself suddenly swept away in a sea of bow ties, a disconcerting notion that resonated and sent him running. The heartland, symbols of a simpler time and all that. There's something off-putting about the mass putting on of nostalgia. But how to avoid the riptide tenacity of the past when every time we try to shake free, we are pulled back into remembering? I want to move forward, but I don't want to lose her, or you.

Why Are People So Scared of Death?

I'm not trying to be superior; I have no wish to die prematurely. When I had my first colonoscopy two summers ago, I mentally shat my pants for a week waiting for the results to come back. I'm not unscared when confronted with confronting the Great Beyond. But I don't get why talking about death freaks people out so much. There must be other cultures that handle it a bit better than we do and I really ought to research them, what makes them different from us. When you know someone who dies, and in my case a young parent (back me up on this fellow half-orphans), death ceases to become an awkward topic of conversation and becomes as normal as checking movie times. And at least for me, it lost that sense of taboo that it had before I lost my mom and became something that I longed to talk about because I was never allowed to. My one friend who lost her father and my cousin who also did are the only people (other than my bro) with whom I've felt like I was able to talk normally about it. To everyone else it seems macabre, and you have to edit everything you say about the subject, or you worry no one will want to hang out with you again. You also lose the sense of what is macabre and what isn't, as though the thermometer that normally tells you which lines not to cross got busted at 110 and no longer works. I get so overexcited when I find someone else with a dead parent that I have to restrain myself and try to act normally and not assume that their experience was the same as mine, or that they are as strange as I am. :)

Sometimes when you mention a parent having died to someone,  you can see the other person's brain going round like a computer trying to load a webpage--they're desperately trying to find an appropriate yet noncommittal thing to say that will assure you of their social competency while simultaneously avoiding a prolonged conversation about death. After this happens a few times, you start to feel bad for imposing situational awkwardness on other people, so you end up trying to rephrase things so as to make them as innocuous as possible.

The whole kibosh on the death talk makes it extremely awkward when you have to answer a question that, in my case, involves the words "mom" or "parents." These are the things you never have to think about when you have a normal life. Example: That's a beautiful necklace, where did you get it? It's not appropriate to say the actual answer: I found it in my dead mom's jewelry box and liked it, so I took it because she's not likely to wear in anytime soon seeing as how she be Miami-DADE County. Get it? Like dead with a Kentucky accent? I don't care if you don't think this joke is funny, because for some reason I really do, and I'm allowed to say it because I lived in Miami. But anyway, what are you supposed to say? Still likely to provoke odd/pitying looks and uncomfortable silences is "It was my mother's." People pause and wonder if they're supposed to ask what happened to her, or if they should assume she just gave it to you as a gift and is still in the picture.

This is going to sound really silly, but something I really hate to talk about because it inevitably leads to an awkward conversation/ because it feels like lying: My parents house. I have a house that I can visit, it is my parent's house. Yet I feel weird saying my parent's house, like I'm somehow secretly trying to lie about my mom being dead. So I say, "my dad's house." But when I say "my dad's house," it makes me feel either like a child of divorce or like my mom is a dead beat that ran out on us. And then sometimes people ask, oh, where is your mother, and I don't want to make them feel awkward by telling them the truth. Sometimes people ask me where my parents live in the course of getting to know me, and this is worse because then I also invariably have to say: "my dad lives in…" or just name the place without saying "my parents live…" because then seemingly run-of-the-mill small talk becomes uncomfortable. Does everyone else overthink the way I do?

Getting Your First Colonoscopy at 31! Yay!

It's not that bad! Really it's not! Okay, the part where you have to drink the stuff that makes all crap leave your body is REVOLTING. Like cough syrup's evil twin. Worse is the day and a half you have to spend not eating, or eating green and orange jello (no blue or red) and tea, and water, and chicken broth and crouching on the floor with your stomach cramping from hunger and your head spinning (the vomit feeling you get fifteen minutes after drinking the mixture is awful too). By the time you get to the hospital the next morning, you are falling-down hungry and so excited to be over and done with it so you can eat food that you're practically screaming STICK ANYTHING YOU WANT UP MY ASS! I DON'T CARE! JUST HURRY UP!

I remember calling my boyfriend a tall drink of water in front of the registration desk person because I could barely think straight. Then you get little warmed socks and a gown and an I.V. dock and sit and wait to lose your butt virginity (unless you've lost it already, of course) among the mostly older women, a forty-something woman next to me who also had colonoscopies in her thirties, all of us a strange little club of naked magazine-reading cyborgs with plastic docks taped in our hands (naked underneath hospital gowns, not reading nudie magazines, though that would be terrifically amusing).

Then they take you in, and this I remember so vividly: the ceiling was this beautiful bejeweled display of back-lit photos; they had replaced some of the tiles with images of fish and coral and such, and it was very pleasant looking up at them. Then the doctor came in--it seems so wrong to meet a doctor for the first time in a hospital gown does it not?--a very nice Indian man, and explained about being in a "twlight" state. I don't know if my body listened because I think I conked like a conch shell, and from that time on it was a whooshy dreamy floaty experience of which I remember once blinking at a yellow computer screen and hearing someone say, look there's your polyp. Then I blacked out again very peacefully until I was given cracker and juice options (saltines, cranberry) and pinched my cheeks to look rosier for my waiting knight who was going to take me home and FEED me. A few weeks later they came back and said the polyp they found was benign and that I wouldn't need another colonoscopy for five years (yay!) Small blessings abound :)

Other People's Writings/Blogs I Like

WORK IN PROGRESS!

Happy Dead Mom Day blog

Just found this and think it's hilarious! So few people understand dead mom humor, and dead mom-less people don't understand that sometimes humor is the only way you get through it:

http://happydeadmomday.blogspot.com

Random letter to a dead mom: I don't even know who is responsible for this below link, entitled "I miss my mother. I miss you" , but I think it's beautiful. He or she drew (I assume) this simple picture on MS Paint to accompany the letter and it find it simple yet moving. So are the words. How many of us have written letters to our dead mothers? I mean, half the stuff I write here ends up being framed from that perspective whether I mean for that to happen or not. Check out the site for the letter and picture:

http://www.happyscrappy.com/dirtylaundry/2/mother.html

Grief is a Rollercoaster, Just Gotta Ride It

Cheers to those of you who know that I'm making a play on words with the dorky song that I secretly love: "Life is a Rollercoaster" by Ronan Keating. I don't know, I heard it when I was living in Australia, possibly it wasn't big here?


Sometimes I wish I could go back to 2004 and wear a T-shirt all the time that said "I am allowed to be sad. I am supposed to be sad." That would have been liberating. But instead I partied my way through my mid-twenties like everyone else except I was only having fun on the outside, and I wish I could have communicated that somehow, or understood it better, or known... I don't know, something. I wish I'd asked for help. I wish people had offered it. I wish people had asked more than one time: how are you doing? Okay, obviously it was more than that, but honestly not much more, which is a sad commentary mostly on our society I think, where people have gotten the notion that asking you if you are okay will remind you that you have suffered a horrible loss, which will consequently make you sad. As if you're not walking around all the time being sad anyway and wishing that people would ask so you don't have to be the girl who brings up her dead mother all the time.

Support networks are really important. But you often have to be the one to reach out because people in general (and younger people in particular) are scared of grief. This baffles me, but they all act like it's a communicable disease, like if you ask someone how they are dealing with the loss of their mother then you might die to. Maybe they just subconsciously worry about confronting the fact that their own mothers will eventually die.

We do have a lot of odd ideas about grief in this country, so it's no wonder people don't know how to act. Like the idea that grief is some sort of road trip that ends 1-2 years after you begin. First of all, if you think about how horrible it is to lose someone close to you, how different people are, and how different their relationships with their close friends and family are, then it should be obvious that grief is going to be different for everyone. Yet a bunch of idiots scientists got together a while back and said, yep, it goes like this. Five stages and you're done. I was reading Hope Edelman's book (Motherless Daughters)--I will probably end up citing her a lot given that she sort of is the literature on the topic--and she talks a lot about cycles of grief and how that stages of grief thing (you know, denial, acceptance, anger, whatever) wasn't even about death, it was how people handle bad news or something to that effect. Which death obviously is, but I think it was bad news about themselves, like finding out you yourself are going to die soon, not that someone else just died.

REGARDLESS, the point I'm trying to make is this:

---> You can't run away from grief, you just have to do it and move through it.
The first year is really going to suck. I read somewhere that the first period of intense grieving feels as though you're walking through molasses, which is so true. You feel detached from reality and everything comes to you as though in slow motion.


---> It will get better...
and then it will get worse
and then it will get better

GRIEF IS A DAMN ROLLERCOASTER

Of course it's going to keep happening, it's your MOM for Christ's sake. And even if your mom wasn't all she was cracked up to be according to what society says moms should be, or what you wish she could have been, it's still a huge deal. That never goes away. People don't get this until they're older, so if you're like me, and you were pretty young when you lost your mother, then it is difficult to cope with other people's ignorance because you often feel like you aren't ALLOWED to be sad.


YOU ARE ALLOWED TO BE SAD. But it will actually get better. Just keep living.

Grief and Motherless Daughter Sources

I don't claim that this is anywhere near an exhaustive list, especially since I just started it, but here are some sites that might be useful.

Read Hope Edelman's book, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss, which is one of the first things that made me feel like I was not alone. I have not even read that much of it, but the parts I did read really resonated with me and were useful:
http://www.hopeedelman.com/books-motherlessdaughters-edelman.htm

Also in the back of this book are people to contact for support groups in your area. I imagine the website has something similar.

Random article: "Help for Motherless Daughters: Experts say motherless daughters can cope by making a lifelong connection with their departed mom."This is an interesting article about motherless daughters with a focus on Ms. Edelman's book that talks about how the whole grieve for one year concept is crap, and how grief is ever-changing and can be part of establishing a new relationship with your dead mother:

http://women.webmd.com/features/help-for-motherless-daughters

The other thing that made me feel less alone was going to a Motherless Daughters Meet Up Group. I would try Meet Up, they have groups in major cities, or you could start one. For me, it felt amazing to sit around and say things out loud to these women, like my friends just do not get it at all, and they were saying the same things that I was and it made me feel almost as if all my hairs were standing on end. Here is a list from Meet Up of all the groups in the U.S.:

http://motherlessdaug.meetup.com/all/


Facebook group:

https://www.facebook.com/Motherless-Daughters-153858391294874/timeline/


Random article on being a motherless daughter on Mother's day:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeryl-brunner/mothers-day-grief_b_1466872.html

Why Didn't You Leave a Letter?

Dear dead mom person, this is neither here nor there, but why did you never get around to teaching me how to cook? I'm not trying to be sexist; I also wish you'd taught my brother. Does anyone else wonder about things your mother never taught you, the knowledge she never imparted, the letter she never wrote you to say goodbye. I mean, if she'd taught me how to cook, it would have been way before she died; I was twenty-four and living on my own in a different city. Maybe if I wasn't teaching myself how to bake a chicken breast at thirty-two, I'd feel less like an orphan train wreck, but it's mostly the wondering that gets to me.

The brilliant mixed blessing of the Big C is that often (unless it's pancreatic), you have time to sort out your shit. My mom had three and a half years. It's not like she was in a car accident and died with no warning. Was she so invested in believing she would survive that she never thought to leave behind anything tangible for us to cling to after her death? Or was she just that certain that we'd be fine without her? Surely it would have occurred to her after the letters at our twenty-first birthdays, our college graduation. She was a person who put things into beautifully-crafted words and then floated them out to you like a lily pad crossing a pond. I'm a capable person, but it would have been something to have a few more words of advice, of comfort, assurances to hold on to. A lifeline, something.

Oh, how I long to have found an envelope going through her things all those years ago, to be sorting scarves and sweaters and jewelry I'd never wear and come upon it suddenly. I dream of that still happening, a note fallen down the side of her chest of drawers with a perfect edge of settled dust, the tentative, laughing glance my brother and I would share (all these years! how did we never...). Or maybe locked away in a safety deposit box, the key to which we'd find in a box of old journals. Journals she hid, or burned, or buried. God knows I understand why she wouldn't want us finding those and reliving her darker moments. But a letter...a fantasy as perfect and iridescent as a soap bubble. My heart stands still seeing my imagined name on the envelope and the typed pages that would somehow find a way to encapsulate perfectly these twenty or so years that I would have had her. The words encircling me with her warmth and verve and kindness and wisdom.

But of course a letter like that is a fantasy at any level. Received, it would have been worn threadbare and then placed with all the other keepsakes I have of her, falling short, as they all do, of being her.

Keeping the Faith

This one afternoon, probably a year or so after my mom died, I was so wretchedly sad--I don't think anything bad happened that day, I just really missed her. All I wanted was to go home and have a good cry. I got off the bus from work, and as I walked into the elevator, I was thinking to myself if you can just make it to your apartment, then you will survive. I wasn't even sure I could make it all the way up to the eighth floor without bursting into tears.

In the elevator, I must have been staring at the floor, because at one point during the forty second ride, I looked up at the wall of the elevator and saw this tiny little light bulb and a plaque that said
"Help Is on the Way." I looked at this little sign and it was like it had been put there for me, on this very bad day (has anyone else read that kid's book The Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day where the kid keeps saying he's going to move to Australia?); Anyway, when I saw the sign, my breath caught and I got this very powerful sense that someone was watching out for me. Even if it was a sign of my own brain's crazy making, I needed a sign, to believe that there would be a better day SOMEWHERE OUT THERE. And strangely, it made me feel a lot better.

So what I'm trying to say is that no matter how sad you are, it will get better. It will get better a tiny bit at a time until all those tinys add up to a lot better, and then you'll start to notice that you can breathe again. Someday you will be happy again, you just have to believe that it will happen, and grieve, and realize the magnitude of your loss while still keeping faith in the magic of time passing, because that is a cliche for a reason. Time may not heal all wounds, but it makes them hurt less and less until you can bear it. It makes you forget more and more your old life, which is horrible and sad in its own way, but is what you need to eventually move on.

Why This Blog/A Bit About Me

My mother died from colon cancer in 2004, when I was twenty-four. She was my best friend, though the more time passes, the more I wonder what kind of friend I was to her. All things considered, it could have been worse. Through the chemo, radiation, and seeing her so frail, she still managed to carpe diem the hell out of life before she died. And when she did get really sick, it was only for a few months. I'm sure those were not easy months for her, and it was fairly awful to witness in small doses (since we were selfish and young, and 400 miles away, and she was a wonderful mother, it was in small doses that we witnessed her being really sick up until the last couple of weeks), but it's easier for us (me and my younger brother and father), knowing that the bulk of the time that she was sick, she was able to do the things she loved, the things she didn't have time to do when she was too busy living her life to live in her life.

In many ways, I am grateful that cancer gave her a wake up call, that her dying allowed me to be the person I am today, that at least I had her till twenty-four. But of course that doesn't change the fact that she is gone and we are still here without her, and that even through the happy moments, the moments of grace and joy and high spirits, there will always be a terrible darkness waiting, the shard of longing and missing her and wishing against logic and sanity that she would change her mind about dying and come back to us.

Yeah so, why? I like writing to her, about her. It brings her back. It makes me sad but it makes me real, to myself that is, not to the e-world. It makes her real to me. Maybe it even brings back the tiny details, like the fact that the hair clips I was wearing yesterday were hers, and I'd totally forgotten it.

When I was twenty-four, newly motherless and spending the bulk of my free time crying on the floor by the foot of my bed, I felt for a year or two that I would have been much happier if I could have died too and gone with her wherever she was going. Back then, it would have been nice to find more personal material on the internet besides Meet Up motherless daughters groups that were in the suburbs (I didn't have a car), or one in which I was much younger than everyone, or internet forums that didn't want to let me in because I was too old (what?) for the early twenty-something group by the time I got around to it a few years later.
I did go to a meeting or two and it was very eye opening and comforting, I wish there were some closer to where I live.

Women folk reading this:
Read Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman (okay, I still haven't finished, but every time I read even a page, it makes me feel like I understand so much more even though it doesn't necessarily make me feel better). It's got different sections that are useful to different stages of your life so you can get a lot out of it whether you read the whole thing all at once or just bits at a time. Contact the people in the back of the book or google motherless daughters (groups). Start a group in your town. Reach out to other people. In the end, no matter how awkward that might make you feel, or rejected/hurt when people don't understand, it's good to have a support network, and who knows, maybe you will find someone who does understand.

What's In a Name? Musings on Losing a Mother

When I saw the blue-black ghost bird of your death rise up, its shallow wings translucent in the morning light, I was relieved that you were done being in two places at once. Had I been brave enough to ask him my question, I imagine he would have leveled his pinpoint-pupiled gaze on me, and conveyed with a silence wide enough to cover both our knowing: this ride’s not for you, earth-girl. But by then, the world had begun to chirp around us, and you lay there like a wax model, your hair long and black and shinier than it should have been.

Back when I could call your name, it was such an unseen luxury. It was the way we use water in a rich country, the long showers, wash-rinse-repeat. Of all the riches in my life, this one meant the least. It didn’t matter how careless I was, because there was always another chance to use it; it was just another word, probably the first word. But now, a word like a fallen robin’s egg. Robin-less, but still a flawless shade of longing, a life-breaking blue.

Being you-less is a blue that holds too much promise, the hope without hope, the whispered return to us. We are marked. There you are, at our sides, making us flinch at casual remarks while trying to keep our faces still. The weight of your absence lifts a little each year but also grows heavier, the unsaid words and the bargaining words piling up like husks of uprooted weeds left for bagging. 

A name is a prayer that you make because you believe it will be answered, a reaching out, the way you always tried to hold our hands when a flight took off. We pretended it was babyish and tried to shrug you off. Now, I imagine your hands as they would have been, soft with almond-shaped nails, stirring up the air with those flamboyant gestures of yours. A crack partway down your middle finger from who knows what old injury.

I wasn’t there the day you greeted your mortality. It was something you’d seen glimpses of in the rear-view mirror for three years, a shadow in your peripheral vision. New spots on the x-ray, accusing you of not trying hard enough, too capable in the face of death, too polite. Would it have helped to rail at the fates, plead your case? You never abandoned God, even after being treated like the only person in a group of close friends not invited to a wedding.

My brother was there that day, always half out the door in those days, tumbling down stairs two at a time with one arm in a coat sleeve. You crept out meekly, edging up to him, waiting for him to ask you if you were okay. You paused, hesitated, turned back. He glanced back and saw two lines spill down your face at exactly the same time, like railroad tracks, he said later. Poetry to re-craft the casual misery of that moment. I think that day was when we stepped out of the shells of our former selves, except that we didn’t understand, not really, what it would be like to have the twin cores pulled out of our bodies with all the ruthlessness of ordinary life.

I wasn’t there, but my mind created a false memory of how you looked in that moment, flat-chested and square shouldered, black hair parted in the middle and hanging straight to your shoulders. It was summer, but all the same, in my memory you’re wearing a turtleneck and a faded pink sweatshirt with an outdated geometrical design.

You had a name because we existed. I’m still here, but your name left without me, like a confused bird that didn’t know its job, like one of those geese that follows a magnetized pattern of the earth but got its poles mixed up. I could still say it, but it would be like giving something up with nothing to receive it. I tried yesterday, just to see what it would feel like. The word floated up to the ceiling and hung there a moment before dissipating into the atmosphere, and I thought about how I have become. Like those pine trees that decorate the ridge where the beach greets the forest, meeting the wind head on, taking the wearing cycles of weather until they go bald on one side. Everyone who lost you is first in line to feel the wind blow through them, losing layers in the struggle to fight through you.

Once we were haughty; entitled to the child’s expectation of being loved unconditionally. Now there is no danger of letting myself be taken over by grief; loss has followed me like secondhand smoke for so long that I’ve grown petrified, surrounded by Polaroids of death and summer. The music of your life. The gratitude that you existed in the first place. And the prisms we search for so that we can believe that this dry landscape--winter wheat and salted roads and an enduring homelessness within--is just a different kind of beginning.

I'm Getting Married...Please Un-Cancer Your Ass and Get Back Here

Hey there lady friend 1946-2004, was it really, truly necessary for you to get cancer and die? Fiancé and I are getting hitched and I don't know which is weirder, planning all this without you, or the fact that it seems totally normal for you not to be here. Sometimes I wonder how my friends with two young parents feel, like they have this amazing shelter over their heads all the time, even when it's sunny. They don't even sense it. Their mothers come to visit, laugh with them in bridal photos, hold the new baby (I don't even want to think about how bad that mile marker is going to feel). My mom's in town, we went shopping...My mom's in town, we had drinks at....I've had a bad day/I'm sick/I'm confronting a huge life decision, I want my _______. I DON'T GET TO USE THAT WORD ANYMORE I want to yell at them, at everyone. They are ignorant of the beauty of their lives with regard to this one thing--like life is an Instagram image set on deep blue nostalgia with warm yellow tones. I'll always be longing for that word, the blank space inside me. A m*+#er. A you to grow up under the umbrella of. 

Who is a mother once you've lost her? Once you've sifted through the who of you and her and the selfish way you wore her like a blanket that would never fray or fade or fall off your shoulders. I mean, who was I within that embrace? I don't even know how it would be to be that again; so untouched by the world and by life. But her, she produced me. (And my brother, side note.) And yet she was more than a mother, she was this whole separate person and I won't ever know her, not all the way. I won't ever know why she stayed after she threatened to leave my dad (ultimatum: you stop drinking, or...), and he did, and she didn't, and then he started again. Is being Catholic a good enough reason to stick it out? At least she died leaving the notion of forever intact for him. (Random neighbor: Your father never got over your mother. He's still so in love with her.)

At least he didn't have to mourn her absence while she was still alive. And P.S., what kind of example does that set for me re the whole marriage concept? My poor beleaguered fiancé, I hate to imagine his sadness every time I profess that I'm scared to take the leap (something for which I've recently apologized, I think we've left that stage behind). What kind of legacy did she leave behind for me to follow?

Mother mine. Both of us fans of writing, and singing, and reading, and running, and gardening. The beach. FML some might say. FHMFL* I say, for being so much shorter than she deserved. Shorter than she probably could have made it, if she'd had the colonoscopy when she was supposed to (at 50, which would very likely have saved her life), gone to the doctor when she was tired all the time and couldn't climb the stairs without being exhausted. WTF? say I to her. You could have been here. Couldn't you? Are you still a damn fool, wherever you are? Can you please come back, just for an hour or two, just for a visit, because nobody understands that living is sometimes only part-living without you.

*Fuck her motherfucking life