Appearances were everything to my mother. What was on the outside mattered. Her earrings always matched her shoes. She was always put together. Her nails were always painted. I think it’s why, from a very young age, I questioned all of that. Underneath all of those things, I knew there was still room for being messy. I knew that the public tone and the smile were often hiding something others couldn’t see. Something even I couldn’t see. Because of my mother, I knew that judging people from their outward appearances wasn’t fair, that those things hardly ever told the full story of a person’s life. My mother was full of layers. She was complicated, and she was beautiful, and she was angry. I would use all of those same words to describe our relationship.
My mom died a week ago today, and she took a lot of those things to her grave with her: the things we couldn’t see. Her neurological decline over the years from a disease that took her physical and cognitive capabilities took some of those things away from her. And in the end, there are some things I will just never know about who she really was.
When I was about 20 years old, my parents divorced. My mother had been in a long-term extramarital affair with the minister of our church. It was quite the scandal, as you might imagine, and it hurt a lot of people. I am not going to tell that story. It’s not mine to tell. What I will say about it is that, at 20, I was on my own. I had mostly been on my own since my sister left our home for college many years before that. My parents had their own stuff. It was the late 80s. People parented differently. We know better, we do better…all of those things. But, I felt abandoned, during a time in my life where I probably need the most support. And because it was very easy to do, given the circumstances, I placed the majority of the blame for that abandonment on my mother.
I’m 50 years old now, and I have my own adult children. I am in the midst of navigating those same years in their lives, and I’m doing it much differently. I’ve done it differently all along the way, knowing that I didn’t want my kids to have a similar experience. But the older I get, and the more I understand the nuance of life, I also understand that my mom simply wasn’t equipped to navigate what she was doing back then. I don’t think she ever thought beyond her own needs, about the consequences of her actions, or how some of the decisions she made would affect her kids for the rest of their adult lives. I have to think that surely she didn’t quite have the capacity to consider those things.
When my sister suggested moving our mother from her nursing home in Ohio to Kansas City, I was not on board. It had been fairly easy for me to ignore and to compartmentalize my feelings toward her when she wasn’t right here, living only one zip code away. But my sister, whose heart has always been more gracious, and whose mind seems less sullied with anger, was right. Our mom deserved to spend the end of her life here, with the two of us nearby. And so she did. And it was during the last two and a half years of her life that I began to understand my mother in new and different ways. Once I was able to see that who she once was had completely faded away, I was able to welcome her as someone different, and our relationship as something new. My mother as I knew her was only there in bits and pieces: a sigh, or a roll of her eyes. The way she would answer, “Absolutely!” or “Wonnnnnnderful” to questions, in the way that only she could, a way that became scripted as her memory faded - as if she knew that responding this way would let us know she was still in there somewhere. The way she called us “babe” when she left rambling messages about how she couldn’t find an address, or was having trouble reaching an old friend on the phone. Tiny reminders of who she was long ago.
As it became clear that my mom’s life was nearing the end, my sister and I spent much more time with her, and in the last three days of her life, we were there by her side nearly around the clock: my sister, her husband, and me. As we watched the last hours of her life slip away, we told stories to her, we laughed and joked, and we listened to the music that she loved. On her last day, when her breathing was particularly labored, my sister read poetry to her from the book of Psalms. It was only then that her breath became less distressed, and the room became quiet. My mom remained deeply committed to her faith, and those words were obviously a comfort to her. That room became a sacred space during those last hours. No one should be alone in the last bits of their lives. It sounds weird, but it felt like an honor to be the ones with her during that time. There’s part of me that still wonders if I just had some deep need to prove to her that showing up for someone is half of the battle. Maybe it was some of that. And some of it was reverence for the person who gave me life. No matter our relationship in the end, she was the one who brought me into this place, and I would be there to see her out of it.
It’s been a week since she left us, and in that time, I’ve tried to listen to my body in a way that I don’t, typically. I’ve been sleeping a lot. Reading. Taking long walks. While I’ve grieved my mother in bits and pieces over the last 30 years, I am now finding ways to grieve her physical loss. The knowledge that I can’t go visit her, even if those very visits often seemed like a chore. That I don’t have to coordinate a visiting schedule with my sister anymore. That I don’t have to come up with things to tell her, or bits of my life to share with her - things that were harder in the end, given her cognitive decline. There are things that my sister and I will never know about our mother - things she took with her to the great beyond. What happened to her to cause her anger? Why did she make the choices she made over her life? Did she regret any of those things over time? I suppose that is the great mystery of life, and of death. There are things that I will take with me when I go. Versions of myself that only I will ever know. This experience has made me think about what I share with the people closest to me, and what I keep hidden. It has helped me see my mom as human. A wonderfully flawed human. Just like the rest of us.
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