My mom passed this Friday morning. I have a lot of thoughts about that.
I was already in the throes of depression from a rather turbulent week. This article unearthed some feelings about my exes in a way that I still find myself longing for them. I'm a fixer; I don't like leaving relationships dead or gone out on a sour note, so I problems with loss and distance and want to fix or repair past relationships. Little did I know that it would become a summoning circle for the grief to come.
Visions of my dad followed my mom to sleep several nights. The man inflicted almost insurmountable damage to her throughout her life, both physical and emotional. But every morning at 6:30am, her alarm woke her. There was a tinge of a hangover; she still drank, just moderately less. She got up, showered, put her make-up on and got ready for the day. Work called to her, a positive sensation she managed to keep for 5 or 6 years. It was the longest she held down a job; Pa wouldn't let her work. Pa wouldn't let her do anything to assert her self-reliance while they were married. He wanted to keep her dependent on him. At the time it was hard to interpret it as anything negative; she really did feel helpless as if she couldn't take care of herself without him. Stockholm syndrome was prevalent in holding the marriage together.
My mom worked for Meals on Wheels. It was a selfless service that put her in the position of taking care of others, feeding the elderly and disabled. It gave her the fulfillment she never got in the marriage. Her boyfriend was happy, too. He was a sweet lug of a person; mocked as a bit slow by her but the empathetic beacon of positivity that she needed to fight back the darkness. It seemed as if the absence of her abusive husband and her forelorn children was absolute. She had made peace with it. Sorta. Until the day I decided to call her.
“Mom?”
“...what are you doing? You kids don't give a shit about me.”
“I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't a little. I just wanted to parse through some baggage.”
“Well, do it on your own.” My mom hung up. The old wounds had torn open, bled everywhere. She was furious. She texted me back, telling me the fucking nerve I had to interrupt her life after being gone so long wanting to reconcile. She was finally happy and healthy and employed and living life again after everything had happened. She said she never wanted me to call her again and that he was just like his father. Of course in the moment she was upset and scared. She didn't know how to handle her son returning to her life and whatever it entailed. She was an absolute mess from the whole situation, but somebody was there to ground her through all of it.
“I think you're overreacting. Take what you can get.” her boyfriend said. She had a lot of broken pride and knew she snapped at her flesh and blood. She regretted what she had said. After a drink or two, she mustered up her old courage and decided to call me back, hoping the bridge hadn't yet been burned.
“Hi mom.” I said.
“I'm sorry for everything I said there. I didn't mean it.”
“I know.”
“Just hearing your voice again brought up a lot of old stuff.”
“I know.”
“You're not like your father.”
“I would hope not, he's an asshole.” My mom burst out laughing at the response.
“I'm gay and trans.” he said.
“That's fine.”
“Really?”
“Why would I care? Live to be who you want to be.”
“Mark wouldn't feel that way.”
“Your father's an asshole, that's why.” There was a comradery with her son now. There was a mutual understanding that Pa was an asshole, a rotten person who subjugated people and broke their spirits. Mom learned I had almost succumbed to the same fate living with him after she gave me up to him. She grew to regret this decision, but she had a lot of regrets. Things were normalizing again. Conversations came and gone, and after not receiving my calls on her Birthday or Christmas, I figured she was busy and I let things sit.
After nearly a year I called my mom on Mother's Day. She was overjoyed to hear from me. She was crying and sobbing from happiness to talk to me. We talked about the weather, our persistent health issues like my bad back, and then she told me the news: She had been having severe stomach problems and she was worried about how much longer she was gonna be around. It was mentioned almost as an off-hand comment, but it still shook me a bit. Was my mother dying and she just casually mentioned it? It couldn't have been as severe as she said it was, right? My mom is a noted hypochondriac, but she also generally had a good pulse on her own personal health.
She offered to fly me out that evening. I wasn't ready to see her, it had been 15 years since we last saw each other in person and emotionally it was a lot. I also just disregarded it as her drunken ramblings and desire to see me. She talked about hugging me and crying and us being a mess of emotions on the ground. I'd probably be crying too, even though I'm not much of a public crier. But I couldn't fly down because I didn't have my real ID or any ID to speak of; going to the DMV requires time I didn't have and money I didn't have. I considered a train, but a sudden 18-hour train just to visit would be a lot of effort, especially when I had to be working and rent was going to be tight again this month.
Then I got the call Friday morning at 7:30am. It was her boyfriend. She said that mom was in the hospital, the 5th or 6th visit in the past two months. This time she was found in a bathroom passed out by her friends, bleeding. She was rushed to the hospital. Then I got a call from the doctor. She said that my mother was going to pass in the next hour or so, and that she's unconscious receiving comfort care for the last moments of her life. I immediately called and woke up my brother, and told him of the situation. He was tired. So was I. He made it to the hospital and kept her sleeping body company. It was ironic that the son who had a relationship with couldn't make it to the hospital for her last moments, but the son she didn't have a relationship managed to.
She passed around 11am. They said an hour tops when they called at 8am, but she managed to make Death work a little bit harder in her last moments, holding on for a few hours. Just like her to be stubborn. She was always stubborn; it's the reason she could never stop drinking. Alcohol killed every single one of her siblings. All five of them were gone, leaving my mother as the last child of our grandmother. By her logic, she figured that since she was the last one, grandma would treat her better but didn't. Her sense of humor was pitch black. I'm like my mom in a lot of ways I didn't care to admit. But having a traumatizing force back in my life and attempting to reconcile it was all I could do.
And now alcohol took her. It's been a pretty clear decision to make to no longer drink because of my mother. I never did drink that much, but now I know for certain it's a poison that's fundamentally ruined most of my life growing up, and now it took my mother away from me.
There are some regrets. She never read anything I wrote, which can frankly be seen as a plus since what I wrote of her wasn't particularly flattering. But she died having not witnessed my craft that I want to contribute to the world with. I regret not taking the spur of the moment trip to visit her; I would've done so had I known time had been so short. It's hindsight and I know it's unreasonable to feel guilt because I couldn't have known, but it's still fundamentally a decision I'm going to have to learn to live with.
The last text I sent her was a picture of me because she hadn't seen me for a decade and a half. She cried and said I looked cute, a very gender-reaffirming thing to hear. She told me not to feel ashamed for seeking disability, that I'm strong for making the decision, and that I deserve help. These are all things I struggled with in my life: my transgender identity, feelings of being disabled, my self-worth. And she reminded me why she was my mother: she accepted all of me regardless of how I felt about myself.