Sometimes I wish it was enough to just say that I was feeling sad, but there’s always been a taboo against that. I’m not the only person who’s felt obligated to say that they were fine when they were anything but, to stitch a smile on my face and pretend to be happy.
Eight years later and I still can’t predict when I’ll get triggered by my mom’s death. Lately, it’s been from my annual rewatch of Midnight Mass, “Lamentations” in particular since it was the last episode I watched. There’s a scene where our two leads Erin and Riley have a discussion on what happens when they die, from their perspectives. One leans more on the reality of it, the death of the body before getting into a spiritual belief of being “scattered across the goddamn cosmos” while the other leans more towards a Catholic belief of the afterlife (which given the nature of the show makes sense), about reuniting with long dead relatives and experiencing a deep, all-encompassing love, because “that’s what we mean when we say Heaven. No mansions, no rivers of diamonds, or fluffy clouds or angel wings. You are loved.”
It’s my favourite of Mike Flanagan’s works, my favourite show for a number of reasons that would make a post all its own. But those monologues get me, especially last week, and I don’t know why. I always miss my mom, I always will, but sometimes it hurts more, sometimes those parts of me feel more tender and sore. Vulnerable. Weak.
People don’t like to talk about death. It makes us sad; it makes us existential. We’re all going to die though. I don’t mean that to sound depressing, though it unavoidably will because that’s how we’re taught to handle death. And it is sad, it’s sad when someone dies, when that person you love isn’t here anymore. Just gone, forever, and if we’re lucky our dreams of an afterlife together are true. But when I say that we’re all going to die it’s just a fact, it’s just the truth. We start and we end, and nothing’s going to change that.
But this is a fact we don’t like to think about, but one that people who have grieved, who mourn, who have seen death closely can’t stop thinking about. I remember seeing my mom’s body in her hospital bed, because that’s what it was then, a body. This body that had hugged me and baked cookies, that had made crafts with me and rubbed my head at night when sleep wouldn’t come was just a body. The woman who animated it was gone, is gone. Dead. Hopefully in Heaven if my upbringing has any truth to it.
And I wish I could talk about that more, except that after eight years people expect me to be over it. Or not over it, but not as sad. Normal. I’m lucky that most of the people in my life acknowledge that my mom’s death has changed me, that it’s trauma will always affect me, that I’m different from who I used to be. But there’s still an unspoken expectation, that if I bring her up it will only be in darkly comedic moments, to acknowledge the bad but make a joke out of it. That I can share a short memory but not dwell, and only then when it’s relevant, and even then, sometimes not. Pointing out the store my mom used to work with met with short nods and no follow ups or ignored altogether for a funnier joke.
I’m used to not being heard, and I’m used to quick apologies that get forgotten and pushed away for sunnier discussions. I wrote a whole goddamn play about grief, about being sad and heard and it did nothing. Nobody listened, or if they did have forgotten by now. Our memories are so short. I just want people to listen, to be brave enough to open themselves and share my hurt for a moment, to acknowledge all the times I can’t be happy.
Some day we stop, we die. It’s inevitable, and it’s okay. I don’t know what happens when we die. I don’t know if we return to the stars or sit on clouds, if we come back and forget who we were before, or if we just end, wholly and completely. Black. But I like to think that if there is an afterlife, if there is any type of after that we listen, that what hurts us now won’t hurt us then but will be acknowledged. That it will be held and cradled and acknowledged and that we will feel love, that it will surround me like a comforter and that I’ll be tucked in with it, secure and safe.
That someday I will see my mom and she will smile, and all this love that has nowhere to go will find it’s anchor again.
Watch my short play Beep here: