September 7, 2006 12:08 AM Charlotte, North Carolina
I look around and she surrounds me. She permeates every detail of this house. She is in the details of this self-imposed prison of nineteen years and I find myself adrift on a sea of memories.
The little kitten looks up unblinking from the pillow she is embroidered on. The closet in the guest bedroom overflows with half-finished sewing projects that will never be completed. My mother immersed herself in an unending supply of complicated projects to pass the time – the years – to stave off insanity – her mind embittered by the ugliness of betrayal in her marriage. I am the guest in this room.
I have returned to my mother’s side to be with her at the end of her life. She lies in her temporary medical bed dropped off by the hospice people in her living room struggling to remain here – to make up for lost time and laugh and smile with me and tell me everything before it is truly time to go. We have nearly 20 years of life to condense into the short time she has left.
She struggles to stay.
I cannot say exactly what happened that kept us apart for 19 years. There was no one defining moment. I feel as though I am as much to blame as she is. She was so broken by my father’s infidelities and I was unable to help her process. I was graduating from college and she didn’t want my father there and I didn’t want to take a stand against anybody. I was so happy to be graduating – I just wanted it to be about me.
She didn’t attend and there was tension. After that I can only say there was a phone call between us and then there was a lost mother, a lost daughter and then the silence began.
I spent the years waiting for an opening yet it never came until now – when I know she is too weak to hang up the phone or slam a door in my face (would she have slammed the door in my face if I had shown up on her doorstep?)
It is so tragic that I have come just for the end. My heart is heavy.
Just the three people that she brought into this world surround my mother.
I see signs of Christmas everywhere – yet I know she spent her Christmas’ alone. She didn’t quite get the decorations put away this year - she must have been sick for a long time and didn’t bother to try to get well. It is so odd to see the decorations now, all the nutcrackers and angels so lonely and out of sync with the world. Certainly it could be a metaphor for my mother’s own life. Sometimes it is a leap of faith to keep believing in the good that the world has to offer.
She removed me from her will. I don’t know when – but she did it. She wanted no part of me and wanted to make sure I would get no part of her.
Now that I am here, she is insistent about making sure I will take things. She is worried that nobody wants anything, as though she didn’t matter. She wants to be validated.
She bought a ring with my birthstones in it a few years back and asked me to bring it from her jewelry box. She told me today the story of my birth. I had never heard it before. A mother doesn’t forget even if she chooses to be alienated. I accepted the ring this afternoon because she told me she was thinking of me when she bought it.
I will think of her when I wear it.
I feel time pressing in on me, on us. Our mid-morning chats will end soon and I will be truly alone after that. I will know that there isn’t any chance for us to be reunited like what I waited for during the past nineteen years. It will just be the end.
I told her I loved her and she said it back.
I can’t breathe.
My tears threaten to drown me.
September 7, 2006 11:07 AM EST
There will be no conversations with my mother this morning. The pill for nausea has the side effect of sleep. She sleeps. I look for the quiet rise and fall of the blanket covering her so I know she hasn’t left yet.
I had looked forward to our conversation this morning; she has released information never told before. Her sickness has opened doors. I am not sure if it is the approach of death or maybe just the morphine but I have been afforded the chance to know this private, dignified woman – my mother. I wanted to tell her today that her life mattered. That she gave a lot to us kids – good and bad, but I can forgive the bad. I wanted to offer her forgiveness.
Wake up so I can tell you.
I reflect on all that she has told me, a lifetime of impressions and memories giving me insight into her and the way my brother and sister and I were raised. Suddenly things make sense. The quiet of the morning allows me space for my emotions. I am glad I didn’t bother to put on make-up today – it would have been washed away already.
But I have more questions.
Please don’t go yet.
September 7, 2006 12:45 PM
The clock chimes the passing of time. I am grateful for its persistent marking of the hour; otherwise I think I would be lost in the swirl. My memories float around me as I walk noiselessly through the rooms. . I find my first oil painting, a stained glass owl (from the 70’s), linen handkerchiefs and the fateful college graduation announcement.
The house is a time capsule of my life too.
September 9, 2006 12:07 AM
Yesterday was a bad day. I guess it was the turning point. She was lucid for less than an hour. No time to talk, just maintenance - hospice care at home.
Resolve has come and now there is anticipation of the finish of all the suffering.
Her passing is a difficult one.
I haven’t slept for days. Her ragged breathing fills the house with its sound - night and day. The air inside the house is dense with confusion and sadness. My brother, sister and I are empty.
We are exhausted.
My sister’s dog stayed close all day. She and my brother were out for most of the day again and he sat on my lap while I sat at the dining table writing and reading. He knows, and perhaps he sees. He was growling at the doorway to her room today. She was lying in her bed with the sun filtering through the trees and window and lighting the room with a soft golden glow. She appeared to be in negotiations – her mouth silently moving and her face expressing a plethora of emotions.
She is talking to her ancestors as they coax her over to the other side.
September 10, 2006 2:10 PM
I am perplexed by my mother’s record keeping. She kept a yearly calendar and filled each page with events and happenings. I want to read between the lines. I feel as though she was marking time. Ordering. Organizing records to survive after her life here. She didn’t want to forget – she didn’t want to get lost.
I have been looking through the house and re-visiting her treasures. There are things that I have seen my whole life so far. Some of the mysteries have been solved through our conversations, yet some will remain mysteries. I try to float on the memories to avoid the ugliness of the reality. There will be a dismantling of her home. Decisions will throw chaos into the silent order of my mother’s home – her life disrupted by the surprise (the surprise?) of cancer and her approaching death.
She had plans to continue her garden. I want to finish it for her but I know I won’t.
Nothing is permanent. Nothing can be counted on except death.
We await hers.
September 11, 2006
My mother died at 12:05 PM today.
All is lost.
September 25, 2006 10:50PM Los Angeles, CA
I wait until the house is quiet, the kids sleeping peacefully, my husband away and I open the door to my sadness. It washes over me and makes my breath come out in staccato gasps. My face is wet from the tears that flow from the deep well of sorrow.
I often wondered through the years what I would feel when my mother would die and be truly gone forever. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to feel anything.It is said that when your relationship is strained the pain or sorrow is greater.
I try to make sense of what has happened but fail to come up with answers. I think of my mother trying to do the same. I am part of her. I want to recede into a fog. I want to isolate myself with only things I love. I want to escape the reality of the daily drudgery of life and float away.
I feel lost.
I am aware of my breath. I flash on the image of her chest rising and falling underneath the blanket. The printed butterflies on her hospital gown stained with purple from the liquid Morphine.
I watched the last breath leave her.
A final push off the wall as she took flight.
I sat in her garden that afternoon and looked for her in the trees. The wind ruffled the leaves but she wasn’t there. She was gone.
She lived in a brick house with black and white trim; austere and unimaginative but the house was surrounded by her incredible, magical Japanese garden.
My sister told me she buried her dog underneath the exquisite Japanese maple tree. I imagine her digging a hole and laying the body in it. Did she cry, I wonder.
Did the dog die from lung cancer too?
I think of the lists that she wrote, they were her company; her voice resonating throughout the NFL football statistics year after year. I think it was her anchor – a way to stay here; a way to remain. Nineteen years of solitude. Nobody visited her. No one ever came by her home.
I thought she hated me, but I am a mother too and I am sure it is impossible to hate your children. I know that now.
It was herself that she hated.
I wonder if her incessant smoking was her way of committing suicide? My mind wanders through the facts and I try to order it.
I try to find a way to be at peace but I stumble upon my anguish.
I am lost.
I am treading water in the well of sorrow with my eyes closed.
I was angry she wasn’t there when I gave birth to my first son. She never called, no note. Nothing. Silence.
When I gave birth to my second son I wasn’t angry because I knew she wasn’t going to come or call or send a note. There would ust be more silence.
But I saw their birthdays marked down in the calendars. It is strangely comforting. I will take it. I will take any crumb.
She would have loved my boys.
September 27, 2006 11:56 PM
The boxes containing my mother’s belongings arrived today; I requested few things.
I wanted only items that inspired happy memories – selective memories. I think I have so many confused feelings that I edited my choices carefully.
Unwrapping the delicate porcelain teacups and setting them down in my house felt odd. I imagine she would be glad the teacups their way to my home and were not given to a local charity. She really wanted to know that her things would be looked after and wanted. It must be so strange to know you are about to die. But I think maybe for her it was a release from her suffering and she desired it.
The finality of her death again is brought forward because I can’t ask her. I have so many questions.
There is such a void.
November 1, 2006 9:14 AM
It is coming on two months since my mother died. It has become a memory instead of an incident. The pain and sorrow have been replaced by numbness.
My sister says she misses calling her for a chat. I don’t miss her because I had already lost her nineteen years prior when she decided to quit communicating with my brother and I.
Disowned.
I don’t miss her.
But my heart hurts when I remember the lonely life she lived. I don’t want to be like her.
I struggle to keep my head above the cold waters of solitude.
I won’t be like that.
Not me.
November 6, 2006 10:12 PM
I have become the guardian of a collection of my mother’s Bonsai plants, or are they called Bonsai trees? Or perhaps just Bonsai’s. They are perfect specimens – little masterpieces.
My mother was always an avid gardener when I was young. She always said she wanted a Japanese garden someday. When I arrived at her home in North Carolina I was stunned by the perfect and beautiful Japanese garden that encompassed her entire yard. It was her canvas.
One of the few things I did take from my mother’s home was her notebook on the care of these rare and delicate plants. It is a testament to her obsession with these trees.
It is all hand-written with a sharp pencil. There are small descriptive paragraphs and photos cut from magazines and pasted on the pages as well as price tags and labels that come from the source. There are years of notes detailing when to pinch the leaves, when to fertilize, when to water. There are charts on which tree gets full sun or partial shade, the time of year best for re-potting and when each of her little trees had its maintenance done.
My mother studied and figured out the formulas for optimum growth.
Now I look at these perfect specimens and I worry about them. Their futures are uncertain in my hands.
December 22, 2006 3:23 PM
I have a line from a song stuck in my head today. All day I am hearing the repetition of this line, ‘haunted , haunted by the past…” but that is it – no beginning and no end, just the fragment.
Now that song haunts me –I am doomed to be haunted. Haunted, haunted by the past.
How does one deal with sorrow – with death? Is being “haunted’ really about having feelings that haven’t been resolved?
Uncategorized feelings. We want to put everything into compartments so we can have order.
Order from the inevitable chaos of death.
Chaos describes my feelings. My mother died and everything is so unresolved. I want to burst into tears (I often do), I want to breathe a sigh of relief (I do that too). I want to scream in anger and fight someone with my fists. I am so mad with her.
Nobody knows how I feel. In the end, nobody cares.
We are all living separate lives and we have separate identities. We look for moments when they overlap and find similarities. We grasp these fleeting moments of shared realities and build dreams and lives upon them but they are sandcastles.
I drive too fast down the coast highway alone in the dark. The only light is the reflected light from my headlights and the soft glow from the lights on my dashboard. My hands are gripping the steering wheel - my knuckles are white. My face is wet with tears.
What does it all mean while we are here?
I look around and she surrounds me. She permeates every detail of this house. She is in the details of this self-imposed prison of nineteen years and I find myself adrift on a sea of memories.
The little kitten looks up unblinking from the pillow she is embroidered on. The closet in the guest bedroom overflows with half-finished sewing projects that will never be completed. My mother immersed herself in an unending supply of complicated projects to pass the time – the years – to stave off insanity – her mind embittered by the ugliness of betrayal in her marriage. I am the guest in this room.
I have returned to my mother’s side to be with her at the end of her life. She lies in her temporary medical bed dropped off by the hospice people in her living room struggling to remain here – to make up for lost time and laugh and smile with me and tell me everything before it is truly time to go. We have nearly 20 years of life to condense into the short time she has left.
She struggles to stay.
I cannot say exactly what happened that kept us apart for 19 years. There was no one defining moment. I feel as though I am as much to blame as she is. She was so broken by my father’s infidelities and I was unable to help her process. I was graduating from college and she didn’t want my father there and I didn’t want to take a stand against anybody. I was so happy to be graduating – I just wanted it to be about me.
She didn’t attend and there was tension. After that I can only say there was a phone call between us and then there was a lost mother, a lost daughter and then the silence began.
I spent the years waiting for an opening yet it never came until now – when I know she is too weak to hang up the phone or slam a door in my face (would she have slammed the door in my face if I had shown up on her doorstep?)
It is so tragic that I have come just for the end. My heart is heavy.
Just the three people that she brought into this world surround my mother.
I see signs of Christmas everywhere – yet I know she spent her Christmas’ alone. She didn’t quite get the decorations put away this year - she must have been sick for a long time and didn’t bother to try to get well. It is so odd to see the decorations now, all the nutcrackers and angels so lonely and out of sync with the world. Certainly it could be a metaphor for my mother’s own life. Sometimes it is a leap of faith to keep believing in the good that the world has to offer.
She removed me from her will. I don’t know when – but she did it. She wanted no part of me and wanted to make sure I would get no part of her.
Now that I am here, she is insistent about making sure I will take things. She is worried that nobody wants anything, as though she didn’t matter. She wants to be validated.
She bought a ring with my birthstones in it a few years back and asked me to bring it from her jewelry box. She told me today the story of my birth. I had never heard it before. A mother doesn’t forget even if she chooses to be alienated. I accepted the ring this afternoon because she told me she was thinking of me when she bought it.
I will think of her when I wear it.
I feel time pressing in on me, on us. Our mid-morning chats will end soon and I will be truly alone after that. I will know that there isn’t any chance for us to be reunited like what I waited for during the past nineteen years. It will just be the end.
I told her I loved her and she said it back.
I can’t breathe.
My tears threaten to drown me.
September 7, 2006 11:07 AM EST
There will be no conversations with my mother this morning. The pill for nausea has the side effect of sleep. She sleeps. I look for the quiet rise and fall of the blanket covering her so I know she hasn’t left yet.
I had looked forward to our conversation this morning; she has released information never told before. Her sickness has opened doors. I am not sure if it is the approach of death or maybe just the morphine but I have been afforded the chance to know this private, dignified woman – my mother. I wanted to tell her today that her life mattered. That she gave a lot to us kids – good and bad, but I can forgive the bad. I wanted to offer her forgiveness.
Wake up so I can tell you.
I reflect on all that she has told me, a lifetime of impressions and memories giving me insight into her and the way my brother and sister and I were raised. Suddenly things make sense. The quiet of the morning allows me space for my emotions. I am glad I didn’t bother to put on make-up today – it would have been washed away already.
But I have more questions.
Please don’t go yet.
September 7, 2006 12:45 PM
The clock chimes the passing of time. I am grateful for its persistent marking of the hour; otherwise I think I would be lost in the swirl. My memories float around me as I walk noiselessly through the rooms. . I find my first oil painting, a stained glass owl (from the 70’s), linen handkerchiefs and the fateful college graduation announcement.
The house is a time capsule of my life too.
September 9, 2006 12:07 AM
Yesterday was a bad day. I guess it was the turning point. She was lucid for less than an hour. No time to talk, just maintenance - hospice care at home.
Resolve has come and now there is anticipation of the finish of all the suffering.
Her passing is a difficult one.
I haven’t slept for days. Her ragged breathing fills the house with its sound - night and day. The air inside the house is dense with confusion and sadness. My brother, sister and I are empty.
We are exhausted.
My sister’s dog stayed close all day. She and my brother were out for most of the day again and he sat on my lap while I sat at the dining table writing and reading. He knows, and perhaps he sees. He was growling at the doorway to her room today. She was lying in her bed with the sun filtering through the trees and window and lighting the room with a soft golden glow. She appeared to be in negotiations – her mouth silently moving and her face expressing a plethora of emotions.
She is talking to her ancestors as they coax her over to the other side.
September 10, 2006 2:10 PM
I am perplexed by my mother’s record keeping. She kept a yearly calendar and filled each page with events and happenings. I want to read between the lines. I feel as though she was marking time. Ordering. Organizing records to survive after her life here. She didn’t want to forget – she didn’t want to get lost.
I have been looking through the house and re-visiting her treasures. There are things that I have seen my whole life so far. Some of the mysteries have been solved through our conversations, yet some will remain mysteries. I try to float on the memories to avoid the ugliness of the reality. There will be a dismantling of her home. Decisions will throw chaos into the silent order of my mother’s home – her life disrupted by the surprise (the surprise?) of cancer and her approaching death.
She had plans to continue her garden. I want to finish it for her but I know I won’t.
Nothing is permanent. Nothing can be counted on except death.
We await hers.
September 11, 2006
My mother died at 12:05 PM today.
All is lost.
September 25, 2006 10:50PM Los Angeles, CA
I wait until the house is quiet, the kids sleeping peacefully, my husband away and I open the door to my sadness. It washes over me and makes my breath come out in staccato gasps. My face is wet from the tears that flow from the deep well of sorrow.
I often wondered through the years what I would feel when my mother would die and be truly gone forever. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to feel anything.It is said that when your relationship is strained the pain or sorrow is greater.
I try to make sense of what has happened but fail to come up with answers. I think of my mother trying to do the same. I am part of her. I want to recede into a fog. I want to isolate myself with only things I love. I want to escape the reality of the daily drudgery of life and float away.
I feel lost.
I am aware of my breath. I flash on the image of her chest rising and falling underneath the blanket. The printed butterflies on her hospital gown stained with purple from the liquid Morphine.
I watched the last breath leave her.
A final push off the wall as she took flight.
I sat in her garden that afternoon and looked for her in the trees. The wind ruffled the leaves but she wasn’t there. She was gone.
She lived in a brick house with black and white trim; austere and unimaginative but the house was surrounded by her incredible, magical Japanese garden.
My sister told me she buried her dog underneath the exquisite Japanese maple tree. I imagine her digging a hole and laying the body in it. Did she cry, I wonder.
Did the dog die from lung cancer too?
I think of the lists that she wrote, they were her company; her voice resonating throughout the NFL football statistics year after year. I think it was her anchor – a way to stay here; a way to remain. Nineteen years of solitude. Nobody visited her. No one ever came by her home.
I thought she hated me, but I am a mother too and I am sure it is impossible to hate your children. I know that now.
It was herself that she hated.
I wonder if her incessant smoking was her way of committing suicide? My mind wanders through the facts and I try to order it.
I try to find a way to be at peace but I stumble upon my anguish.
I am lost.
I am treading water in the well of sorrow with my eyes closed.
I was angry she wasn’t there when I gave birth to my first son. She never called, no note. Nothing. Silence.
When I gave birth to my second son I wasn’t angry because I knew she wasn’t going to come or call or send a note. There would ust be more silence.
But I saw their birthdays marked down in the calendars. It is strangely comforting. I will take it. I will take any crumb.
She would have loved my boys.
September 27, 2006 11:56 PM
The boxes containing my mother’s belongings arrived today; I requested few things.
I wanted only items that inspired happy memories – selective memories. I think I have so many confused feelings that I edited my choices carefully.
Unwrapping the delicate porcelain teacups and setting them down in my house felt odd. I imagine she would be glad the teacups their way to my home and were not given to a local charity. She really wanted to know that her things would be looked after and wanted. It must be so strange to know you are about to die. But I think maybe for her it was a release from her suffering and she desired it.
The finality of her death again is brought forward because I can’t ask her. I have so many questions.
There is such a void.
November 1, 2006 9:14 AM
It is coming on two months since my mother died. It has become a memory instead of an incident. The pain and sorrow have been replaced by numbness.
My sister says she misses calling her for a chat. I don’t miss her because I had already lost her nineteen years prior when she decided to quit communicating with my brother and I.
Disowned.
I don’t miss her.
But my heart hurts when I remember the lonely life she lived. I don’t want to be like her.
I struggle to keep my head above the cold waters of solitude.
I won’t be like that.
Not me.
November 6, 2006 10:12 PM
I have become the guardian of a collection of my mother’s Bonsai plants, or are they called Bonsai trees? Or perhaps just Bonsai’s. They are perfect specimens – little masterpieces.
My mother was always an avid gardener when I was young. She always said she wanted a Japanese garden someday. When I arrived at her home in North Carolina I was stunned by the perfect and beautiful Japanese garden that encompassed her entire yard. It was her canvas.
One of the few things I did take from my mother’s home was her notebook on the care of these rare and delicate plants. It is a testament to her obsession with these trees.
It is all hand-written with a sharp pencil. There are small descriptive paragraphs and photos cut from magazines and pasted on the pages as well as price tags and labels that come from the source. There are years of notes detailing when to pinch the leaves, when to fertilize, when to water. There are charts on which tree gets full sun or partial shade, the time of year best for re-potting and when each of her little trees had its maintenance done.
My mother studied and figured out the formulas for optimum growth.
Now I look at these perfect specimens and I worry about them. Their futures are uncertain in my hands.
December 22, 2006 3:23 PM
I have a line from a song stuck in my head today. All day I am hearing the repetition of this line, ‘haunted , haunted by the past…” but that is it – no beginning and no end, just the fragment.
Now that song haunts me –I am doomed to be haunted. Haunted, haunted by the past.
How does one deal with sorrow – with death? Is being “haunted’ really about having feelings that haven’t been resolved?
Uncategorized feelings. We want to put everything into compartments so we can have order.
Order from the inevitable chaos of death.
Chaos describes my feelings. My mother died and everything is so unresolved. I want to burst into tears (I often do), I want to breathe a sigh of relief (I do that too). I want to scream in anger and fight someone with my fists. I am so mad with her.
Nobody knows how I feel. In the end, nobody cares.
We are all living separate lives and we have separate identities. We look for moments when they overlap and find similarities. We grasp these fleeting moments of shared realities and build dreams and lives upon them but they are sandcastles.
I drive too fast down the coast highway alone in the dark. The only light is the reflected light from my headlights and the soft glow from the lights on my dashboard. My hands are gripping the steering wheel - my knuckles are white. My face is wet with tears.
What does it all mean while we are here?
