a mother's day letter to my mother, long overdue

Dear Mom,

It’s Mother’s Day today. Six years ago today I held your hand and urged you to keep looking at me as you suffered a septic shock seizure. It was this day six years ago when you were transferred to the hospice unit, not expected to survive the next 12 hours. We sat beside you, talked to you, painted your toenails blistering red and held your hand for almost two weeks before you finally let go of us.

In truth, the you who raised me had gone months before, lost to a devastating infection that put you into a coma for several days, and when you came out of that, your mind had retreated to a place and time that only you inhabited. Some days you knew who I was but mostly you thought I was your mother, or your cousin or a friend, or a stranger who was lost. Every so often you thought I was twelve again but those moments were fleeting, and provided humor through the grief. There were many days you stared at the corners of your hospital room, whispering to ghosts and shadows that inhabited your memories, unable to acknowledge the people seated beside you. To this day I don’t know which was worse, the desperate stare we exchanged during that seizure, my hand gripping yours as I urged you to keep looking at me, or the months of days spent by your side wondering, wondering if you were ever coming home again.

There are so many things I would say to you today, if I could sit beside you, with a cup of tea on the back patio, as we used to do on lazy Sunday visits. It’s taken a long time to know what form those words would take, the tones that would inflect them, the volume at which they would be delivered.

Even as I washed your face and sat holding your hand, month after month in different hospital rooms, I was angry, deeply angry at you. Angry at you for undergoing a surgery that I knew deep in my heart was a bad decision, had implored you not to have, knowing with a gut level certainty you would never accept, that this surgery was wrong. Sometimes in the dark of night, as I rested fitfully in uncomfortable hospital chairs, the click and hum of an IV machine as our soundtrack, I wondered if your decision was another bid for attention, because all of your children had implored you to wait, to reconsider. In those dark and bleak hours, with only the sound of your breathing and the equipment that sustained you, there were times I resented the positions we were in, because I felt you had made this situation through your stubbornness, your need for something that never seemed to fill you, no matter how we all tried. Sometimes I still believe that, but the anger is gone, because you were who you were and certain truths are what they are, unchangeable by even the passage of time.

As those days and months of hospitals and nursing homes and near death instances passed, my anger with you, with nurses, with doctors, with life, coalesced into a seething core that left me feeling hard and cold and spurning the love I had for you, my mother. Since your passing, I have used that anger to justify my feelings of relief that you were not here to witness Dad’s cancer and death, as the emotional burden you would have been through that might have been more than I could handle. My relief that you were not here during Joey’s cancer struggle as your past behavior would have scraped at Donna and perhaps made the suffering worse. That you were no longer here to manipulate my feelings and infuse guilt for not calling you every day, for spending time with my In-Law’s, for not going on vacation with you and Dad; all of these feelings I had and struggled with the reality of them, the guilt of them, the shame of them. Your needs were hard to manage, your drama and hypochondria a drain on those that loved you. I let all that seething anger gulp down past resentments, minor irritations and frustrations until that engorged gooey black ball lodged itself deep in my conscience. It was easier to wrap these feelings in anger, directed at you, my dead mother, than truly feel the grief and loss and utter devastation those 6 months you were dying left within the landscape of my heart and soul.

Perhaps that anger fueled me and helped me to survive what came next, and the gods alone know that what came next almost broke me into little irretrievable pieces, but perhaps that indomitable core that kept you breathing and alive two weeks after those seizures is inside me as well, for the pieces have forged themselves into a new pattern, leaving me a different person, a stronger person.

They say that time heals all wounds and cliché’s are cliché’s for a reason, I suppose, but wounds of the heart take longer as they cut deeper and are connected to soul and sinew.

There were so many other things after you died that left little time, or energy, to examine that anger, those feelings of guilt and regret, and the occasional peek at the surface just showed the same swirling emotions, acknowledgement of them became the norm, they became familiar and closer examination became something to avoid. Those feelings of anger became my memories of you and while none of them were wrong, they were not, are not, the whole of you, or of us, and yet I let them superimpose over the unbroken pieces of us.

A few weeks ago I was going through my closet and found a box tucked up on the top shelf; a box I don’t recall placing there or what it contained. I took it down, put it aside for a while and finished my task. When I finally opened it, there you were, in a length of lavender fleece, a package of satin edging, and a spool of purple thread. You bought these to make a new blankie for Giggles because her favorite blankie was falling apart along the sides and you couldn’t mend it any longer. You never got the chance to make it. I put that box back on the shelf, could not bring myself to get rid of it, fully aware that I will never make that blanket. You know I won’t, because I never got into sewing like you did, but those pieces represent a you that I have shut aside far too long.

You would do these things, these wonderful things for your grandchildren, because you loved them, and wanted to make them happy and by making them happy, they would express their love for you, which you needed to see, to have validated regularly, to remind you that you were loved. Being raised by a woman who exhibited, time and again, a lack of love for others left you insecure and a seeker of love. We all seek that same reassurance that our love is recognized, valued and reciprocated, but sometimes the degree of which you needed that validation bordered on desperate, with a need that left me feeling insufficient. I tried, most times, to remember what I knew of your past, to remind myself that there are scars from past neglect, past emotional abuse, that never healed within you and I gave you love, time and attention, as if, some days our roles were reversed. Managing that emotional burden as a teenager was not an easy road, but you taught me, through your damaged heart, to be patient with other’s emotions, to try and be gentle with feelings and words, to accept that there are pieces of people I cannot change, nor fight against, nor heal with love alone. But when the time came and I needed to lean upon these things I learned from you, with you, I was unable to call upon those truths. How many ways I questioned my failure here, my inability to be patient, and understanding and accepting of you, when I needed to be.

Our relationship was not perfect, nothing ever is, but we are Mother & Daughter, we have loved shared, we have memories, good and bad, that keep us bound, and we have love. Always love, with humor, with tears, with heart, we have love. It is a complicated love, for we are complicated people, but death and time cannot break through the tethers of that bond.

It has taken me some time to remember, fully, that love, the pureness of those pockets of childlike innocence that lived inside you. Your silliness, your delight in feeding people, the way your tongue would poke out of the corner of your mouth when you were deeply involved in some sewing project. Most importantly, I deliberately let myself forget how much you needed love.

I let myself tuck away the pleasure you took in the simple gift of flowers from my garden, how walking around the block with the kids made you glow with pride when your neighbors complimented you on your lovely grandchildren. I put away the memories of our house constantly filled with my teenage friends, your enthusiasm in feeding them, in accepting a rag tag group of geeky teens blasting music from my room well into the evening. I remember an endless tolerance for a young child’s fascination with paint by number kits in the kitchen on rainy days, your obvious reluctance to having mice as pets in the house, but helping to set up the cage in the living room anyway as I cooed over small white rodents. I forgot that you showed me marriage takes work and 52 years of partnership was not without its ups and downs.

When my daughter awoke from a nightmare and cuddled up next to me as I rubbed her back soothingly, I recall the nights I crawled into bed next to you, scared awake by dreams, and how with every circle of your hand you settled me back into love and security.

I slipped an old CD into my stereo the other day and as Eddie Arnold crooned “Make the World Go Away”, I could see you, standing at the kitchen counter, concocting some new recipe, swaying back and forth as you sang along, off key as usual, but completely unabashedly singing out loud in your own karaoke world.

As I imagine the tattoo I am too much of a wuss to actually get, I remember the giddy excitement you had when you came back from Bermuda with your first tattoo. You were 70. You got another one a year later.

These are healing memories and they are washing away the oily stain of anger and loss. The tide of images refreshes my sense of you, of us, and what we meant to one another, without the haze I let fog the lens for far too long. I'm not proud that it took this long to let the bad feelings go, I'm not even completely sure I know why their hooks dug so deep, or maybe I do and let those reasons anchor the mad, the hurt. The reasons are irrelevant now, I suppose, the past is the past and hanging onto it doesn't change it, but it can prevent the present and the future from becoming something better, something more uplifting. So now I will embrace the memories of the mother that laughed, teased my friends, listened to my wildest dreams and rubbed my back when nightmares haunted my sleep. She's the mother that helps me be a better mom to my daughter.

Deep inside of me, there is a young girl, missing her mother, accepting her overwhelming loss. She is standing taller now and when she looks in the mirror, your eyes look back at her.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I Love You.