My Mother Died
my world is weird.
dear diary, strap in. this is a long one.
mom died.
today… it’s three weeks since she went away.
just three weeks.
when my mom died, i didn’t just lose my mother. i lost the last person who belonged to my childhood. i lost the last person i could fight with and still be tied. i lost the person i could blame, love, resent, and serve. i lost the person whose life became the center of my extreme exhaustion, and… in the cruelest twist… the center of my intense longing.
i’m not just grieving my mother, but also my last active parent. i’m grieving the mother i had and the mother i wished i had, the mother who was supposed to survive my father so we could go on to review and repair our relationship, and evolve into something else… together. i know i said… so very often… that i was ready to be done caregiving, that i couldn’t go on any longer, but i wasn’t ready for her to die.
i mean… my father’s the one who’s been on hospice for the past year. he was supposed to go first. i was ready for him to go first. what a twisted world in which we live. just crazy.
i don’t think people understand this about caregiving… that two opposite emotions or feelings can exist in the same place, or that people’s relationships with their parents (healthy or unhealthy) are more complex than what we might share in conversation.
i’ve come to find.. that people i’ve known seem to think… because i complained about caregiving, i must be relieved, that i’m rejoicing instead of reeling. people seem to think, if i said, “i can’t do this anymore,” or “i hate being a caregiver,” then my mom’s death arrived like a mercy. it seems people believe… that because my relationship with my mom was complicated, abusive and neglectful, strained, full of resentment, then my grief should be small or clean, and easy to get over. but… for sure, grief doesn’t work that way. at least, mine isn’t working that way.
i spent years as a caregiver. i spent years stretched past the limits of my mind, my body, my emotional bandwidth. i spent years stretched beyond my ability to feel like a person. i’ve been so angry for so long. i’ve been bitter. in the course of my full-time caregiving, i said and did things that were cruel. i lashed out from the place inside me that was injured long before caregiving ever started. childhood wounds shaped the wiring i was using to survive my adult duty. still, i tried my best to take care of the very parents whose failures helped break parts of me that i needed to function as an adult, and that i should have been able to rely on when i assumed responsibility for them.
there were days i hated caregiving. there were days i hated my parents for needing so much. there were days i hated myself for being unable to function gently and with kindness, with endless patience like the “saintly” caregiver that outsiders seem to enjoy imagining from a distance. there were days… that bled into weeks and months, and eventually years.
then, my mom died, and my mom’s death wasn’t a “clean ending to a hard chapter.”
my mom died after nearly three weeks in the hospital, and her death was brutal. i was beside her for all the days she suffered. i was there when she took her last breath. it was me who saw her stop breathing. not even the nurse realized my mom passed, i had to convince the nurse that my mom died. it was such a bizarre experience. and, i was alone with her. i was alone. i couldn’t even call my spouse. i couldn’t call anyone. not at two o’clock in the morning.
so typical. handling the hardest moments of my life… alone.
*sighs*
my mom died. i keep thinking about the times i hurt her when i was hurt, the times i wanted my words to land like punches because i was drowning and wanted someone else under water with me. misery loving company. i’m thinking a lot about the times i was intentionally unkind because i ran out of every better version of myself.
i’m thinking about… how… toward the end, in the final year leading up to her death… my mom said, “thank you,” for every little thing i did to help her, and every little thing i gave her. she was so grateful. she was so understanding. she was the person i needed when i was younger, but i was too beat down by my father’s care needs to appreciate her effort or her attempts at relationship mending.
i think about how… toward the end, in the final year leading up to her death… my mom said often, “i love you.” i needed to hear this… specifically from her… but was so angry that she waited so late in our lives to give me this bit of affection.
i think about how i told my mom to “shut up,” that i didn’t want to hear her “ugly voice” because she’d deprived me of the words when i was younger, when i wanted, before i learned to live without.
these things. they’re eating me alive now. it’s the times i hurt my mom because i was hurt… these gnaw at my brain all hours of the day.
i’m coming to understand that complicated grief isn’t just sadness. it’s love wrapped in barbed wire. it’s homesickness for someone on whom i spent so much energy and time feeling angry. it’s longing for a person from whom i wanted distance. it’s wanting one more hug from the same person whose needs consumed years of my life. it’s wishing i could take back my meanest, nastiest words, my sharpest insults, even though i know… i wasn’t cruel in a vacuum. i was exhausted, trapped, unsupported. i was carrying trauma into a job no one should have to do, especially not alone.
after my mother died, i expected something. not a parade of casseroles and eloquence, but… something. i think, maybe, i was looking for recognition that a human being left the world, some acknowledgement that my mother wasn’t a casual event, some awareness that even a difficult mother is a mother, and maybe respect for the magnitude of the rupture i felt. instead, too many people i knew sent messages that were glib and emoji-laced. people who should have known better. even people connected to funeral planning and church and ritual sent comments that felt strangely unserious. my parents’ parish funeral planner sent a text that read, “Farewell, (my mother’s name)” with a string of emojis. little cartoon symbols. it struck me as odd. words that seemed to float above the reality of my mother’s death, instead of kneeling beside it… from a funeral planner.
it wasn’t that i needed everyone to perform grief for me, but it mattered at the very least that people who claimed to be associated with the industry of death, service to our disposal, should be more sensitive, more aware of respectful reverence. if people i knew socially couldn’t be sensitive, at least funerary people could and should have been sensitive. there was so much casualness associated with my mother’s death that it made me feel like my mother’s life was being mishandled, and like my loss was being minimized. i’m also annoyed with people who sent emoji messages or quick “sorry for your loss” messages, people i’ve known for decades, people i’ve shown up for in big ways. i tried to rationalize that maybe… people who knew me assumed that because my caregiving pain was intense, my mother’s death didn’t matter. like my anger and resentment disqualified her death from need for respect and disqualified me from mourning.
i can’t count the number of times i’ve wanted to scream in faces, “HARD RELATIONSHIPS DON’T MAKE GRIEF DISAPPEAR. SOMETIMES IT MAKES GRIEF MORE FEROCIOUS.”
but, so many times in the last three weeks… i smiled instead. i thanked people for their casual texts while cursing them in my head.
then… there were the people who didn’t even pretend to stop centering themselves.
i digress… we have a neighbor who spent years and years using nearly every interaction to complain about her job, her employees, her pay, her life, and she continued to do exactly that even through my bedside vigil for my mother. every time this neighbor saw me return home from the hospital to shower and change clothes, this neighbor held me with her bullsh*t rambles. this neighbor knew i was at the hospital with my mother, knew my mother was dying. this neighbor knew those were not minor weeks in my life. yet, her attention stayed steadily focused on her own needs, her own problems, her own stories, her imagined emergencies.
she’s lived behind us for about five years. for almost all of those five years, this neighbor’s problems became my problems. rather, i allowed myself to take on her problems. when she first moved in, she didn’t own a lawn mower. we had an extra, so i gave her the extra. our spare lawn mower was unused in our garage, there was no need for any exchange of money. i gave it to her. then, she needed a ladder. we had two. then, a mobility scooter. my father stopped using his. then, garden supplies. i gave away my planters this past spring, and she was among the beneficiaries. on and on. she came to understand that if she had need or want, and we had extra or unused items, we would give freely. i allowed her problems to become my problems. even while i was caregiving for both of my parents and had no capacity for myself or my wife, for our home or our pets, when this neighbor had need, i rose to the occasion. she moaned about her dogs needing vet care, so we paid their bills. one month, she complained about not being able to afford her life-saving prescriptions, so we paid for them. another month, she complained that an urgent care visit was allegedly out of reach due to cost, so we paid. there was always a crisis. always a need. always a reason she was at the center. then, neither as i sat vigil with my mother, nor in the three weeks since my mother died, has this neighbor bothered to make space for me or my life. instead, this neighbor came to our yard over this past weekend, looked around our property, and began to want things. pavers. concrete stones that i bought so our HVAC guy can raise our air conditioning unit off the ground. they belong to me. they’re part of an unfinished project that sat on hold while i was caregiving. this neighbor didn’t ask where i got the pavers so she could buy her own. she simply saw things on my property and decided they should be hers. she saw property she wanted and treated our yard like a store catalog. i will refrain from “colonizer” comments… but i could apply such here.
while i am standing in fresh grief… she… saw… pavers.
i’m such a fool for helping her. i’m such a fool for thinking that’s what people do, that community and friendship mean making your table longer, that they mean leaving the ladder in place, that they mean shining light in dark corners so no one stumbles. this is old world thinking, not modern capitalism thinking. i’m such a fool.
i was so insulted. the neighbor didn’t acknowledge my mother’s death, but was able to notice my belongings. she couldn’t say anything meaningful about my mother, but could ask for my materials. she accepted my attention, my money, my emotional labor, and continued to take inventory of what else might be available. whether every story she ever told me about her need was true is completely beside the point. the relationship has harmed me, leaving me feeling used, drained, unseen. and, her last insult, she approached not in the way one should approach a grieving person but as a resource. and, this… this was enough to know it’s long overdue that i should end the connection.
so, with this person as the biggest offender, i started blocking people and deleting contacts. i deleted message threads. removed names form my phone like i was trying to stop wildfires from spreading. this neighbor wasn’t the only one, she was just the most bold, the most egregious. part of my decision to block and delete people could have been boundary-setting… and part could have been grief rage. part of it was absolutely my nervous system saying, “i can’t take any more betrayals, no matter how ‘small’.” i kept three people. three. none of them live in our area. all of them live quite a distance away from here. three.
and, then… of course… more loneliness came. bigger loneliness than i knew while caregiving.
one part of me thought… “well, dummy… you can’t block and delete people and then be surprised that you feel alone.”
another part of me thought… “you were already alone. the phone is just telling the truth now.”
this might be… maybe? the hardest part of grief without family. the silence doesn’t begin after the deletion. the deletion only makes the silence visible. i didn’t create my loneliness by deleting people. i exposed the loneliness that was already there.
*sighs*
i have a father who’s still alive, but he’s in late-state parkinson’s with lewy body dementia. he’s bedridden. he’s clueless. he requires 24/7 care. he can’t be called on as a parent. he can’t reminisce with me about my mother in any meaningful way. he can’t help me make sense of who we are as a family. my dad’s physically here, but psychologically unreachable in ways that i need him to be.
so, i’m grieving my mother while living inside the ongoing loss of my father. one parent’s dead… and the other parent’s “not there.” no real family.
no real family.
that sentence is so hard to write… for so many reasons. one… is that people seem to misunderstand it. people hear “no family,” and look for technicalities. “well… you do have a living father.” or, they point out “you’re married.” they ask about distant relatives, or they remind me that i’ve done genealogy searches for distant family tree branches. but, when i say, “i don’t have any family. no real family,” i’m not talking about legal categories or biology. i’m talking about the very real human experience of having a foundation. i’m talking about having people who know where i came from, who remember me when i was a baby, when i was one or five or twelve. i’m talking about people who remember holiday gatherings and summer get-togethers. i’m talking about people who were there without needing transactions, people who were mine in the primary sense.
so, without family for so long, throughout caregiving, friendship and community were never, have never been casual to me.
friendship has always been a shelter, a witness, proof that the world had space where people in need aren’t always in danger. but, adulthood and caregiving have taught me that many people don’t experience friendship or community this way. for people with families, friendship is secondary. community is a fantasy. important, sure… maybe. enjoyable, sure.. maybe. but, not foundational. friendships and community aren’t survival. friendships and community aren’t the places where everyone goes when the entire structure of life caves. there’s an attachment asymmetry for those with families and those who claim friends or community as “family.” i’ve learned that kinship hunger can’t be fed with friendship or community.
people with parents, siblings, cousins, adult children, in-laws, long-standing family systems, holiday tables, emergency contacts, they have support that shows up because belonging has already been established. even imperfect families provide a kind of relational floor. someone might complain about their relatives and still have people to call when their car breaks down, or when they need a ride for surgery, or when a parent dies, or when paperwork has to be handled, or when a bodied has to be buried.
when you don’t have this? friends… become more than friends. friends become survival. and, this is how i’ve gotten stuck in exchanges where i end up being used or… lost and lonely.
and, i realize… this imbalance is painful. to the people i’ve known… i’m a secondary relationship. to me… friends are lifelines. to the people i know… i’m one person in a broad network. to me… friends are the only names i have left. to the people i know… i’m incidental. to me… friends are integral. so, the realizations i’ve had since my mother’s death… about my place in the world and the space i thought i held with others… has been devastating. it means… i’ve been living without the relationship infrastructure that most people assume everyone has.
i think quite a lot of people don’t truly understand how much easier life is when there’s a family system underneath them. they don’t understand what it means to make every decision alone, to face every crisis without backup, to become the last functioning person standing, to care for declining parents while also carrying the history of being harmed by them. they don’t understand the terror of being the entire safety net when no one is standing behind you.
people especially don’t understand caregiving.
*sighs, again… takes a breather… and continues…*
i’ve also found, both, through caregiving and since my mother’s death, people love to suggest solutions from a distance. people have told me to apply for help where i’ve already applied for help. people have told me to set boundaries where systems punish caregivers for having boundaries. i’ve been told to “manifest” a better reality, as if illness and death, job loss and financial difficulty, dementia and disability, social abandonment are failures of imagination. i’ve had advice tossed at me… like bricks instead of water wings while i’m drowning, and then the people offering slipshod advice have acted offended when i’ve not been able to turn their bricks into a bridge… while treading and choking.
one of my mother’s friends shared my phone number, without asking me if she could or should, with her daughter. this daughter was someone who bullied me relentlessly in childhood, from first grade through to graduation. twelve years, living in the same neighborhood, riding the same school bus, sitting in the same classes, she had constant access. our mothers were friends, and our mothers wanted us to be friends, but we absolutely were not. the text i received from this high school bully… after nearly 40 years of safe separation, was so insulting, so superior, so absolutely unwelcome, i immediately blocked and deleted her and her mother. no explanation. no warning. just… gone. and, i had intended to keep in touch with my mother’s friend. but, i see, i’m a fool for holding hope for community.
*sighs*
and… another thing….
of late, more than ever before… i’ve come to hate the language of “manifesting.” i’m finding it used against suffering people, taking pain and turning it into evidence of personal failure. telling someone that if their life is unbearable, perhaps they’ve invited it, vibrated incorrectly. this is sick. very psychopathic. telling someone in dire straits that perhaps the universe is teaching them something because they didn’t want the right things hard enough is pathology. manifesting is, to me, a beautiful excuse for not helping, not paying attention. if my suffering is my manifestation, then no one has to bring a casserole. no one has to sit with me. no one has to learn how caregiving systems fail. no one has to admit that some lives are crushed by forces bigger than attitude.
hey! maybe when you hear about someone else’s pain, maybe… just maybe… that’s the universe testing your humanity! maybe being presented with need is your chance to fulfill a “soul contract” to help someone you’re supposed to support, someone with whom you have an agreement from a past life or from a pre-life! see how that works?
we create our own realities. some of us create realities that rid of us of responsibility. some of us create realities where the gifts of our spirit can be and should be used to make our life and others’ lives better. but, now i’m way off track. so, back to my diary entry.
i’ve come to learn with certainty that people don’t understand how hard it is to make friends while drowning. friendship requires energy and time, consistency, emotional availability, money, transportation, shared context, and enough stability to show up as yourself. caregiving consumes all of these. trauma consumes all of these. survival mode consumes all of these. then, when the crisis… or crises… finally become visible, people look around and ask, “where’s your support system??” as if support systems grow naturally in the dark, or “on trees,” and caregiving doesn’t isolate, as if exhaustion doesn’t make people disappear or as if disappearing was a character flaw instead of the result of being buried alive by responsibility.
anyway, what makes these past weeks more exhausting (?) frightening (?) harrowing (?) is that my mother’s death wasn’t my only crisis. a little more than a week after my mom died, my spouse, the primary breadwinner, was downsized. my spouse didn’t get to take bereavement leave before the job disappeared. she reported unethical behavior before the end of last year, and by january of this year she was being “silently managed” out of her job. and, within a week after she was “downsized,” the company posted her job as a new opening on it’s “careers” web page. not incidentally, my spouse was the most highly educated person on the team (as usual), holding the most professional certifications (as usual), with the highest number of years experience in her field (as usual), and she was the only black female (as usual), on the team. so… i’m not saying anything specific, but if you care to put together elements of the dismissal, i won’t stop you. we were helping fund my parents’ care, acting as their emergency financial cushion, and now that cushion is ripping apart.
so, my grief isn’t happening in a “quiet” room.
my grief is happening with bills on the table, with care needs still ongoing, with a father who requires 24/7 care, with the memory of my mother’s last breath still inside my brain and body, with the knowledge that i can’t simply step back into full-time caregiving as if nothing happened.
i can’t.
this is one of the clearest truths i have right now.
i can’t.
i cannot return to the same level of caregiving. not after watching my mother die. not after years of my father’s “atypical parkinsonism” and lewy body dementia decline with violent episodes, not after the exhaustion and resentment, the guilt and terror. i can’t… not after being forced to become “strong” in ways that didn’t make me stronger… just more broken and more depleted.
i’m so frozen… so frozen now. my mind knows there are things to do, but knowing isn’t the same as movement. grief has weight, like cinder blocks. trauma has weight like anvils. financial fear, social abandonment, my nervous system overload… all elephants on my chest. and, i can some mornings barely breathe or move from feeling overloaded.
my grief and loneliness aren’t just “i wish my mom hadn’t died” and “i wish i had plans this weekend.”
they’re atmospheric.
it’s the air in our house and the space where family should be. it’s the phone with fewer names in it and the realization that people liked me best when i was giving, helping, listening, paying, planting trees, remembering anniversaries, sending food, writing condolence letters, checking in after everyone else had gone back to normal. the thing that grinds me now… is that i knew how to show up for people… and i showed up because i know that company vanishes when the “ceremony” or the “party” ends. and, then… my mother died and people vanished anyway. or, some stayed close enough to see what they could get from me while i was feeling weak.
i’m not sure what i’m trying to say. maybe i’m just rambling… because my mind’s been working overtime these past weeks… 40 days since my mother was admitted to the hospital… 21 days since she was pronounced… so much time… to think.
maybe i’m churning these thoughts because… i’m trying to reckon with the reality that my mother’s death revealed the poverty of my relational world? maybe because my mom’s death showed me how many relationships couldn’t hold weight? maybe because i’m more aware now than ever that people are comfortable receiving from me but awkward, careless, and absent when i have need in return? maybe… my mom’s death showed me that people are interested in my exhaustion as evidence that i wouldn’t grieve, and showed me that complicated daughters are not granted the dignity of uncomplicated mourning?
i really am lonely. lonely in a way that’s different than the way i felt when i was caregiving two at once. maybe i’m lonely now not because i failed to appreciate the people around me, but because i finally stopped pretending that every person around me was safe? i don’t know.
the people i blocked in my first blast of grief… maybe some day… if time and situation permit… maybe i’ll reconsider. maybe… i’ll see that some people were clumsy and not cruel.
*sighs*
there were a lot of people whose absence was information, and whose casualness was information, and whose requests or complaints, entitlement were information. i’m trying hard to survive this landscape after my mother. i’m trying to understand how i can feel homesick for someone who hurt me and loved me, someone i hurt and loved. i’m trying hard to comprehend a life without a family foundation and where friendship scaffolding isn’t strong. i’m trying to grieve without being devoured by guilt, and recover without feeling like i’m abandoning my mother or my father. i’m trying to stop being useful long enough to find out whether anyone likes me for me.
i know i’m not the only person who’s ever struggled with these thoughts, or who’s taken up this space. i know this is part of the human condition.
completely off-topic. relative and relevant. i can see how people become hoarders. there are things my mother gave me, in the before-times. things my mom brought to me as gifts when i invited her to spend time with me in my home before caregiving. things i planned to donate when i got around to downsizing. now, i can’t bring myself to let go of anything my mom gave me, no matter how mismatched the items are to me or my life. i understand hoarding in this way. and, i understand why it takes some people years to clean out their parents’ home after their parents die. it’s not just about getting rid of things. it’s about revisiting lives and timelines that are ended. and, i think it’s especially delicate when someone, like myself, has no family.
void… i think my grief and loneliness are accented by darkness and void. it’s a very strange place to be.