I attempt to recall her hands. They were younger than mine are now. I envision her extended fingers and yellow, irregular, and unvarnished fingernails. Or had her nails fallen out? I am eight, on the brink of turning nine; she will be deceased in two weeks. Today is Mother’s Day, and I am permitted to stay home alone with her while everyone else attends church. I am designated to be her assistant, so I bring up a basket from downstairs. I place it on her bed. She is seated.
I understand this is supposed to be our day, our time; it is the initial and final occasion I will be alone with her in this residence. But I do not desire to be here. Within weeks, she has transitioned from my mother into a specter, a skeleton; no hair, scarves obscuring her head. I know I am expected to want to be with her on this day, but how can I want that? To be with a dying woman, my vanishing mother, whom I resent. It is too overwhelming. “What are you doing?”, I want to cry out. “What do you anticipate me to do now, here without you?”
With those hands, she raises two socks from the basket, as if scooping water. Here is how you fold laundry, she remarks. My dad’s black work socks, gold stitching at the toe, hang loosely in her palms.
I yearn to learn how to fold the two socks into a ball that stays put, a sort of magic trick, which, to me, is the sole captivating aspect of this chore. She comprehends. She holds the two socks together; I observe her hands, limp, devoid of muscle. She cannot manage it, she relinquishes, reclines against her pillow, closes her eyes – the relief of surrendering to insurmountable pain.
There is a scene in Maestro, the film about Leonard Bernstein, in which his wife, portrayed by Carey Mulligan, discovers she has breast cancer. She is dying. This twist in the film caught me off guard. My reaction was swift and complete, as if on cue. I was in tears, undone. It was a subplot: Bernstein was the genius; the sorrow of his wife’s demise was there to illuminate more about him, his ultimate devotion to her, the wife he failed in so many ways. However, for me, the subplot was the narrative and had me confronting the truest aspect of myself – that my mother’s demise from breast cancer when I was a child was the thing that shattered me. But I no longer believe that, for how can something shatter before it is whole? That is the essence of childhood loss: it is nothing like losing your mother when you are an adult, when you possess a self. I had no self, nothing to shatter, and so the shattering became the self. I constructed a personality around never having to experience that sensation again. It was a relief to know that it did originate somewhere, my catastrophe.
In the years that ensued after my mother’s passing, while my peers crafted gifts for Mother’s Day, a teacher, a nun, Sister Somebody, would come around to inquire: “Do you have a special aunt?” I have many affectionate aunts, but it is a ludicrous question, because there is no direct comparison, an equivalent to a mother. The implication was a reminder of my exceptionally bad luck, my heedlessness, so early in my life. Not long ago, I heard the poet Victoria Chang express of her mother’s death: “I don’t need to get over it. It’s always with me, not a shadow, but the thing itself.”
Maestro is merely one piece in my assortment of books, plays, and poems that constitutes a practice of encountering my grief mirrored back to me in art. There are other films: Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander; James L Brooks’ Terms of Endearment. I am also a collector of data. I stumbled upon a statistic noting that parental loss before the age of 17 was the most devastating and the most predictive of adult depression, suicidal ideation, and suicide. The study’s author, the sociologist Lynn Davidman, proposed this was particularly true for a mother-daughter relationship.
I strive to find solace in such statistics. Is accumulating data a means to shield myself in reverse? Or is it a means to ready myself for the argument against me, to defend my sorrow and my years of not getting over it and not moving on, as if facts will safeguard me or compensate for what has vanished or what is irrevocable? Imagining the counterfactual of early parental loss is a futile exercise. You become who you are around your loss, and the loss becomes a gift; you grow to cherish who you are and the life you get to have; and you know it is inseparable from the loss, the perpetual wound.
Long before my son was born, I dreamed of him. I knew with some certainty that the solace of this dream was the understanding that something of what I had lost would be restored to me. Of course, being a child is not identical to having a child, and being a mother is not having a mother; I comprehend the harm caused by those who conflate the two, making their kids their confidante, friend, or even parent. No, what was restored when my son was born was an notion of the purest love, the capacity to love a child devotedly and unconditionally, which I could do because my mother had done it for me. That was within me – she was within me. I did not know her for very long, and it would be a shock to encounter her now; she would be so dissimilar from the person she has become for me in her absence. But this restoration was tangible, the closest I would come to having her back.
What I could not foresee was the fresh comprehension of my loss that would accompany that joy. “The pain in life defines the joy,” wrote Tennessee Williams, so the reverse must be true. For in each phase of my son’s life – and most acutely when he reached the ages I was during my mom’s ailment and her demise – there have been regular reminders of a child’s developmental needs, of all the ways a child requires a mother. I comprehend through this the devastation of a little body having the primary caregiver taken away, eliminating the truest safe space for a child – what my mom was for me and what I am now for my son. I have also learned that no one could love this child as I do. Even in my most catastrophic imaginings (I have never been sick), I envision myself as a witness to my son’s vulnerability. My great tragedy has become my great fear.
Perhaps every parent who has undergone early parental loss dwells with that fear constantly at the edge of consciousness, the hypervigilance of trauma. I am aware this is no good for a child; the legacy of my mother’s death could be a heightened anxiety passed on. So, for the 16 years of my son’s life, I have kept myself apart from that space of disintegration. Within the profound joy of raising my child, I have learned what my mother must have felt when she realized she was going to die before her children could live without her.
Without acknowledging it to myself, everything I undertook in those years of mothering was an endeavor to distance myself from that shatteredness.
I have learned what my mother must have felt when she realised she would die before her children could live without her
