Death Sucks - the Truth

I can not find the words that are strong enough to say that :  I was forever changed when my mother died.  It sounds so cliché. And mundane and obvious.  But it is NOT obvious.  If you have not lived through losing a parent yourself, you have NO idea what it is like.  Literally.  No. Idea.  Someone once told a friend of mine when she lost her mother, “I never knew my father, so I know what its like.”  Um, NO.  That is nothing like it.  At. All.  In fact, that has its own little ball of issues and emotions of its own, that are extremely valid and powerful, but Nothing like losing a parent. 

(Can we take a moment out to address the phrase “lost”.  As in “I lost my mother”. No, I didn’t lose her.  I know exactly where she is.  Or rather, perhaps I don’t.  But I know exactly where she isn’t.  Here.  On this Earth.  She is not LOST.  Or then there is “Passed away” – I’m not even sure what that means, “Passed Away.”  Is that like, Expired?  Yes.  My mother certainly Expired.  But more so, she Died.  She’s dead.  MY mother died.  And I suppose that makes me sound bitter or harsh about it.  People use these phrases to soften it.  It’s not soft.  It shouldn’t be softened.  It is bitter and harsh.  She’s dead. …. Which is why I am writing this actually, let me continue ….. )

They say it takes at least an entire year to go through the grieving process of losing someone.  Mostly, this is because you are forced to face a years worth of days, and mostly holidays, without the person.  And this mutates how you will see these holidays from this point forward.  But that isn’t it; at that one year mark you don’t wake up that morning and instantly feel better.  Absolved.  Healed.  It will still haunt you, and sometimes in the oddest strangest ways.  I spent the first Mother’s Day after my mother died, in bed.  By choice.  By planned choice.  My daughter was young, just a year old.  My husband took her and his own mother (and father) out for dinner.  And I stayed home.  I intended, and succeeded, in staying in bed all day long.  Crying and sleeping.  Sleeping and crying.  Scanning through some old pictures.  My mother had died in January, just 4 months before Mother’s Day.   I was a wreck.  I would have spontaneous crying spurts.  Moments where I would curl up on the kitchen floor, holding myself and wondering when it was going to get better.  I could not bear to go through the steps of Mother’s Day without my own.  And my daughter was young enough not to know any difference.  This was probably the best gift I could have given myself.  Time to grieve.  I gave myself the gift of time and space, and allowed myself to be upset.  To cry, and feel desolate, and sad.  I embraced my sadness and allowed it to flow from me freely that day.  Did it make me feel better?  No.  But I felt ok with that.  I was at peace with the fact that I would never be the same, and I had to learn about the new me that I had become.

I remember someone saying, “Your mother would want you to be happy.  She wouldn’t want you to dwell on the sadness.”  THAT was the furthest from the truth.  Let me correct that statement, of course my mother, over all, wanted me to be happy.  BUT, my mother would want me to miss her, to yearn for her, to cry, and be lost without her.  She had some insecurities about herself, and about our relationship that I only discovered once I read through her journals (see my previous blog about what not to write in a journal/diary, To Thine Ownself Be True).  It would give her just a little bit of peace and pride to know the effect that her death would have on me.

My mother and I were very close.  Sometimes too close, it is true.  I found, as time passed, that people tried to diminish that closeness, to usurp it for themselves.  To use the fact that she was not there to validate, in her name, their own feelings, wants and beliefs.  They would say things like, “Your mother would have wanted it this way.” “She would want so&so to have This-Thing-of-Hers.” Or my favorite, “Your mother believed in God” (as in the Catholic God).  Despite that I attended Pagan ceremonies with her, and exchanged books on Earth religions, I think that she would laugh at your insistence that she believed in ‘your’ God, and concede that it was okay if that idea gave them comfort.  Or wanting me to give up things that she had given Me, her only daughter, because “she would have wanted it that way.”  Seemingly, as I mentioned, forgetting that she and I were so close.  Enmeshed in some ways, but close.  I am her only child.  I am her only daughter, and therefore, only I have the right to her legacy.  Her legacy is mine. 

That being said, I am her only daughter.  Her only child.  This also means that noone shares the kind of grief that I feel at her death.  Yes, many people have lost their mothers, fathers, parents.  But no one else has lost this specific unique woman who was also my mother.  This is my loss only.  She was a sister, a daughter, an aunt, a friend, a lover to so many.  And each of them feel the loss deep into their souls in their own individual way – but none is like mine.  I am not saying that mine is more fierce or more toxic, which is highly debatable.  But this woman was no one else’s mother.  No one else shared exactly the same bond as I did with this very strong and distinctive soul.  They have their own kind of bond with her, and their own kind of grief.  And that is just as valid and poignant.  But they do not share my memories, my theories and intimacies.

No one will ever love me like my mother did.  No one else has that blind unconditional interest in my life.  No one else could I call and sum up what had happened in my day, the trivial nuances of my day, and would actually BE interested.  No one else can I call when my daughter does something super cute, and who actually care the same way, or see the connection that it might have to how I was when I her age. There is no one else that I can call the minute I see the first snowflake of the season, and share the same awe.  Or describe the thrill of seeing a peacock expand its plumes fully for the very first time, and understand, and share that moment.  No one else cares just like that.  No one will ever be that for me ever again.  And no one will be that for you, either.  When you suffer a loss of that parent, there is nothing like it.  Nothing.    

My feelings about death, in general, changed after my mother died.  I was one of those people who expressed sympathy in clichés.  “I’m so sorry.  My thoughts are with you and your family.”  Etc etc.  Once my mother died, I could only express the truth, still yes, “I am sorry.” But more so, “That sucks!”  Death sucks.  I wasn’t wasting my time or theirs sugar coating anything.  Death sucks.  I know what you are going through friend, and it sucks.  Period.  And I like my new attitude.  I think it is more comforting.  More validating.  If someone said this too me, I would know they knew what I was going through.  None of this afterlife chatter, God needed an angel talk, etc.  NO.  Maybe all that is true.  I don’t clearly know.  But what I do know is what is left behind.  The people who are left behind, and they are sad and upset, and it sucks. 

In some ways, it makes me a tad more cynical.  Less hopeful.  I also no longer believe in ghosts or spirits.  Because, I do know my mother. If anyone was ever going to come back and visit, or haunt people, it would be my mother.  And she has not.  Not once have I felt her presence.  There was no response to my callings into the night, “where are you??”  She is not here.  If she could be, she would be.  But she is not.  So maybe I did lose her after all.

originally posted 5/13/2013