Ten Years Later

Thoughts on my mom's death a decade later

1.

I don’t know how to start this and I don’t really know what to say, I only know that I want to say something. I’ve had parts of this post sitting in a draft for months now preparing for today. I had planned to get my thoughts out early, to say what I wanted to say but I should have known I’d drag it along because whenever I write about my mom I am ripping at a scab, I am digging into a wound. I know that it will hurt, and it does hurt. It always hurts, and it always will.

My sister sent me a screenshot of a tweet by FaizahFunmilola that said, “Someone once compared grief to carrying a needle in your pocket. Most of the time, you go about your day without noticing it. But then, out of nowhere, you get pricked, and all the pain comes rushing back.” That is what today feels like.

Ten years ago today, my mom died of inflammatory breast cancer. I think most people know this by now, if not I try to send them hints. I follow new friends or co-workers on social media and hope that they are curious enough to stalk my social media accounts or lurk through my Substack and find out that she’s died. When talking about my family or the holidays I’ll mention that it was spent with my dad and sister, let the person I’m talking to fill in the blanks about where my mom is, but I think too much about blanks. I don’t want anyone thinking my mom left us by her own decision. She wouldn’t have left. She didn’t want to leave. She stayed as long as she could. She wanted to stay. But I can’t avoid another person’s thought, I can’t predict what a person will think if I don’t give voice to it.

I am so afraid of giving people the wrong impression of my mom in my silence, of discrediting her memory. But how can anyone ever hope to know the wonderfulness that was her without actually knowing her? My words are insufficient in honouring my mom.

2.

Not long ago I was talking about Christmas to a colleague. I was talking about how it’s hard and was explaining how my dad worries about gift giving because my mom was always the one in charge of presents. She knew who was getting what and where to get it. But I had to offer an explanation, so I casually threw in, “My mom’s dead” and continued with what I was saying. My colleague thought this was funny. They mentioned how quick I threw it in, but the truth is that sometimes it needs to be said. Sometimes it’s needed for context. My mom is dead, and yes that’s sad, but it needs to be mentioned. It doesn’t have to be dwelled upon, not when it’s something that affects me intimately.

Sometimes when I mention that my mom is dead I find people who also have a dead parent. Sometimes I can tell before I say it. Let’s call it intuition, or maybe I’ve just come to recognize the careful ways grievers interact with the world. I’ve had conversations where we both alluded to something that had happened to us that was hard before one of us finally announced that we had a dead parent. One time it was a conversation about tattoos. Another time it was about being triggered by the opening scene of Guardians of the Galaxy.¹

In the decade since she’s died some of my friend’s parents have gotten sick. Some of them have died. I don’t know how to describe the panic when they told me their parent’s diagnoses, the sour taste in my mouth, how my insides shake, only my insides. I don’t know how that’s possible, I don’t know if after all these years of living in a constant anxious state I’ve just learned how to hide the physical aspects of it and keep it locked inside. My insides shake. I feel unstable, uncentred, off-kilter all the while thinking Please God no don’t let them die. Please don’t let them die. I don’t want my friends to feel the way I do. Because even still, after all these years, in my most desperate moments I pray. I pray that things will be different. I pray that the people I love will not have to feel the way that I feel.

But they do. They will. The only way to avoid grief is to not love, and how awful would that be?

To quote Vision, “What is grief if not love persevering?”

3.

It took me about four years to start talking openly about my mom’s death. I had written a poem about it that was meant to be published in an anthology that never actually came to be and it was my sister who pushed me to turn my poem into a play. I was against it at first. My walls flew up. I told her that I didn’t think it would be good, that I didn’t think I could do it, and she very simply told me, “I think you can. I think it’s time.” And she was right.² Writing that play made me realize there was a lot of my grief that I was holding onto, that there things I was afraid to let go of. I held onto my grief, onto all my love for my mom because I was afraid of what would happen if I lost my grip on it. I was afraid of who I would be if I actually started to understand it. I was shocked by the catharsis it brought.

One of my favourite shows is Steven Universe and in one episode, “Mindful Education,” there is an interaction between Steven and his friend Connie where Connie confronts Steven about repressing his emotions.

CONNIE: But it’s okay to think about it!
STEVEN: It feels so bad.
CONNIE: That’s okay, too! There was nothing else you could’ve done!
STEVEN: I don’t want to feel this way.
CONNIE: You have to. You have to be honest about how bad it feels so you can move on. That’s how it was for me.
STEVEN: [Sniffles] Okay.

I wish I had saved it, but I read a post from someone on Instagram recently who said that they believed that grief was their core emotion. It’s not like this was a choice. It wasn’t my choice. Like Steven, I don’t want to feel this way. I’ve told this to people as the years between my mom’s death and now lengthens, but one thing that is never talked about with grief is how time doesn’t heal all wounds, that with grief you just get used to feeling bad all the time. Sometimes it cloaks me, sometimes it trails me like a shadow or follows me like a stray cat. Sometimes I feel like Atlas with the weight of it on my shoulders. Sometimes grief is a dragonfly landing on my nose.

I don’t want to feel this way, but I do.

4.

The first year of grief is the hardest, that is what any self-help book or counsellor will tell you and they aren’t wrong. The first year of grief is a year of firsts, a year of holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, and celebrations with the person you love missing. It is the constant reminder that they are gone, of trying to fit them into the scene knowing they’ll never be sitting at that table, never be unwrapping that present, never be blowing out that birthday candle again.

My mom is dead. My mom is gone. I would never see her again, and the world around me moved on from it. I went to school, I went to work, I went shopping, I found facts, stories, and trinkets that I wanted to tell her, wanted to give her knowing that I couldn’t anymore. My mom is no longer here to talk to. I can never buy my mom another gift.

In those first few weeks and months I felt like I was scattered, like I couldn’t find my footing. I would move around the house and find scraps of paper she had written on, the blanket she curled up with on the couch, her glasses on the table and was continuously rocked by the fact that she was never coming back. I kept wondering about when I would feel like myself again. I felt like a stranger.

I ended up hating anyone I saw who was older than her. I’d think about how unfair it was that they got to live when my mom had to die. I’d see a middle-aged person with their elderly parent and have that anger burning in my chest. I didn’t think it was fair that I should feel so awful while they still got to have a mom. It’s taken me many years to get over this.

Now I usually find people who end up being her age, or the age she would be now, and I analyze them. I look at the way they dress, the way that they stand. I look at their greying hair and the canes they sometimes hold, the walkers others have and wonder what parts of these people would have carried over to my mom. Surely she wouldn’t have a cane? Surely she wouldn’t look this old?

What would she look like now?

5.

People get tired of grief. It inconveniences them. It makes them uncomfortable. People generally don’t want to talk about death, they don’t want to be reminded that one day they will die. It’s sad, and people don’t want to feel sad. I get it, I do, but sometimes we are sad. We can’t avoid sadness, and we can’t avoid death. But when I do bring it up I mentally prepare myself for the soft faces, the condolences, the sorry for your losses, the she’s in a better place.

I hate euphemisms, I hate the way that we try to soften grief.

Last year I had a play performed and in the Q and A afterwards I ended up mentioning that my mom was dead. When I said that the audience awed and my throat closed up. My insides shook. When I spoke to a friend at the end of the night they told me that the mood shifted in the theatre after I mentioned that my mom was dead. I felt it to. It’s not like I did this on purpose, I didn’t want to dampen the mood. I don’t want to be an elephant in the room that shits on the conversation.

My friends know that my mom is dead, and they are good about it. They’ve offered to spend time with me today, some of them have acknowledged the hard moments that haven’t come yet. I am grateful for my friends. I am terrified of burdening them with my grief.

But I’ve developed a dark sense of humour around it.³ My sister has turned “yo momma” jokes around to the teller saying that she can’t relate because our mom is dead. When learning another friend had a dead mom I told another friend, “Much like myself, X’s mom is also dead.”

Still though I wonder if I’m annoying them. I wonder about the people who follow me online who see me post annually about my mom’s death and I wonder if they roll their eyes. I wonder how many people I annoy. I wonder how many people are tired of me talking about her. I wonder how many people think, “My God, it’s been ten years, when will she get over this?”

Socialite Peaches Geldorf died by suicide in 2014, ten months before my mom. Her last Instagram post before she died was a picture of herself as a toddler and her mother, Paula Yates, who died of a heroine overdose in 2000. The caption for the photo was simply, “Me and my mum.”

A couple of days ago a TikTok came on my For You Page from user @emma_stewy sharing a story about how her dad recently shared a picture in their family group chat of himself and his dead mother saying, “I want my mommy.”

Obviously this isn’t the same for everyone. Everyone has a different relationship with their parents, and it’s what can make grief so complicated at times. Still though, in this context it’s been comforting for me to see that I am not the only one, no matter how many years later, who still misses their mom. That it isn’t about getting over it, it’s about remembering.

My God, it’s been ten years, when will she get over this?

Never. The answer is never.

I want my mom.

6.

An unfortunate thing that I’ve learned about grief is that it will be used against you. I’m sure this can be said about any trauma but regardless, it isn’t fair. It will be used against you when it isn’t relevant. It will be used by people who don’t want to respect you, who will invalidate your grief and minimize your trauma for their own comfort.

I have had to confront people. I have tried to communicate and set boundaries. I have tried to be heard by people who I trusted only to have my grief be brought up when it wasn’t at all relevant, for the communication I was trying to achieve to be seen as inconsiderate. People who instead of taking the chance to listen and attempt to understand what I was trying to say said,

Look, I know you’ve been through a lot—

Because yes, I have been through a lot. Yes, I am irrevocably changed by everything that has happened to me. My grief and traumas have shaped me in many ways and I will never be who I once was but in no way does that mean I don’t deserve to be considered, to be respected, to be heard. Sometimes I’m calling you out, sometimes me calling you out isn’t me reacting in an unreasonable way because of what I’ve been through. Sometimes, you’re just a dick.

Don’t use my grief as a way to take my feelings less seriously.

Don’t invalidate my grief.

Fuck off.

7.

In those first few years I thought often about how it didn’t really matter if I died, that we all die in the end. I thought that, sure, some people might be sad that I was gone, maybe for a little while, but like my mom everyone would move on eventually. I thought about how a lot of the same pictures we put up for my mom’s visitation would be put up for me. I thought about how it didn’t really matter if I ever wrote again because I would die and if I was published my books would someday stop being published and I would be forgotten. Someday we will all be forgotten. Someday there will be no one left who remembers our names.

For a long time I was nihilistic, I didn’t see a point in doing anything because I was going to die anyways. I went through the motions of life. I ate, I studied, I worked but didn’t put much care into any of it because it didn’t matter, or I didn’t think it mattered. Why put the time or energy into anything when the result will be the same? If I am destined to die, if I will someday be forgotten, why try to leave any sort of mark?

It took me a few years to realize that that was the very reason to leave a mark. As the old Latin reminds us, remember to die. We are here only briefly, but in that time we leave marks, we leave impressions. In the snapshot of our lives someone will remember our smile, another will remember our laugh. Someone else will remember our ambition. In the short time we are here it is inevitable that we leave marks on those around us and so we should try to spend it by leaving marks of love, care, and kindness. We should focus on love, on loving and caring for others even if it means the hurt of missing them when they are gone.

Yes, I will die and yes, I will be forgotten, but until then I might as well love. I might as well leave some good marks behind and let others leave their marks on me. To be loved is to be missed, and if I am going to leave a mark I’d like it to be a good one, like a handprint in dry concrete, a motivational sharpie message on a bathroom stall, words in a book that will someday turn to dust, like we all will.

8.

I love it when I meet someone who knew her. Recently I found out a few of my colleagues used to work with her. I’m lucky to have had more of those moments, to have found ten years later that there are still people who think about her, still people who wonder about her in the world. I love finding people who remember her. I love to see the smile stretch on their faces when I mention her name. I love the moment when they ask,

How is your mom doing?

Present tense. My mom, present tense, because for the briefest of moments my mom is alive again. My mom is thought about. In this question the asker has formed a picture of her in their mind of who she is now, of what she has been doing in the decade since they last saw her. My mom is alive, my mom is talked about, and I love this. I love this moment and I sit in it. I wish I could fool myself into thinking it’s true, pretend that I have a better answer then the one that’s waiting.

Because this is the part I hate, the part that comes next. It’s the part where I have to answer, when I have to tell the truth. This is the part where I tell the person that she’s dead.

This is the part where I kill her.

She died.

A month or so ago I was at a work event with a colleague. Our mom’s used to work together and a woman came up to her and said to say hi to her mom, that she used to work at the store and I became excited. I told the woman that if she knew my colleague’s mom then she must know mine. I told her her name and the woman’s face remained blank. She said maybe if she saw her she would know, and what was my mom doing now?

And then the shaking started, my words became sticky and it was too late to swallow them down as I told her she was dead. The mood shifted and the woman scuttled away.

And then my own anger, my own unfair thoughts, How dare you not know who she was? How dare you!

9.

In the decade that my mom’s been dead I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about death. For the most part I’ve come to find a comfort in it. Death is unavoidable, it’s something that comes for us all in the end. Maybe it’s a cloud-covered Heaven. Maybe death is short and we come back as a bird or a bee or a blade of grass. Maybe we are energy that returns to the Earth. Maybe it’s just dark. Maybe there’s nothing.

Sometimes death scares the shit out of me. Always at night, right before I’m about to fall asleep I’ll think about how someday all of this will end and I’ll start to panic. I’ll think of a clock that stops ticking, a lightbulb that bursts, of things that can’t be repaired. We stop. Dark. We end, and that’s it.

Sometimes I think about death in TV shows. I think about how the loved ones and relatives come back and I think about how happy that is. I think about how much I hope that it’s true.

Sometimes I’ll think about this and become incredibly sad. I’ll start thinking about my dad, my sister, my cats, my friends, myself and I’ll think about how much I love them. I’ll think about how much I’ll miss them. I’ll childishly think about how I wish we could live forever. There are so many people that I love. There are so many people that I will miss so much.

To quote A.J. Milne, “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

I learned about a book by Margaretta Magnusson called The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. It comes from a Swedish practice called döstädning and appears to be a new Marie Kondo-esque cleaning style where people clear out from their homes so that their living relatives don’t have to do it once they die. Sometimes I look around at my room at all my books, at the trinkets on my shelves, the clothes in my closet and dresser. I think of all the things I’ve collected. I think of my mom’s things that I still have, of all the sentimental connections I’ve attached to them. I think of the things of hers we have given away. I think of the things we still have. Sometimes I look around my room and think about how most of my things could probably be thrown away. I think about what parts of me people would want to keep and which things would be given away.

During the first year that she died, when I was scattered and trying to make sense of how everything would be different forever, I had a moment where I felt like I was moving through time. I saw myself a year after my mom’s death, three years after her death, five years, ten years after she had died. I understood that I would live, that I would grow, that I would keep moving forward and would go on without her. I had an understanding that this would happen and the world would change and so would I but that she wouldn’t be here to see it. I knew that every second, every day, every month, every year would be another without her in it.

Today I am not as rocked by this knowledge of time continuing without her but it presents itself in different ways. Ten years from now I will have lived twenty years without my mom. In twelve years it will have been twenty-two years of living without her. If I am granted that long, and longer, by that time I will have lived longer without my mom than with her, and every year after will add to that time. I will be forty-three. I will keep growing older. My face will crease with wrinkles. My hair will turn grey, and my mom won’t be here to see it.

I wonder if she would recognize me. I wonder if I will see parts of her in myself.

10.

To paraphrase John Green, “I love you, present tense.”

Always.

1. I went in expecting a funny superhero movie and BAM cancer mom dying in the hospital. Almost as bad as the fantasy cancer in Onward.

2. Sometimes, you’re sixteen minute older sister is right! You can watch the play here.

3. A super healthy coping mechanism, thank you very much! In fact, let’s play this particular lyric from Bo Burnham’s White Woman Instagram because now it’s fitting.