[Content warning: SA will be mentioned]
More than three weeks ago, I received a terse email from my brother-in-law to me and my cousins saying that one of my mother’s hospice nurses had said she could die any day. The physical pain of the rupture between me and my sister coursed from my brain to my belly and back, and I immediately rearranged my schedule to drive three hours to State College, to see her, sit with her, and say goodbye to her before traveling for three weeks to share time with my own daughter giving birth.
While I was there, I stopped by my father’s grave. That’s a story for another day …
That visit seems about a zillion years ago now … while I was away I experienced a bag of my own messy, childhood emotions imperfectly processed and metabolized … while my mother ate pureed food and smiled in all her public pictures.
This week, my brother-in-law wrote that the head of Hospice said the nurse who had predicted my mother could die soon had not been authorized to say that; aka: she seems to have stabilized again.
My mother often said her own mother was “made of piss and vinegar,” and that was what kept her alive. It’s true that my grandmother seemed “bitter and sour,” another phrase we used to talk about our Jewish elders and ancestors, almost in code. Lately, I’ve come to experience the ways my mother’s mother was connected to old Eastern European rituals and wisdom that got lost in translation between her and my mother and me. That wisdom was woven into her black dresses; it swayed with her when her hips moved back and forth, crying and mourning, as if tending the collective grief like an achy newborn child. She had taken in two grieving children – her husband’s niece and nephew – when their mother died of the flu in the 1930s. Both of them remained devoted to her their entire lives.
My grandmother had an intimate connection to death that my mother shunned at every turn as she pursued assimilation and public success as a business woman in a small town USA. I imagine my mother needs some version of her mother’s ancestral wisdom now, to be at peace before she dies. It’s as if her ties to that have been severed.
Sometimes when I sit with my mother and stroke her hand, she seems to experience that peace for a second – as she did the day I taught her how to calm her own thoughts with breathing – and then she startles awake and another drive takes over, one in which I am threatening and dangerous. I try to leave before that happens. More often, I long to extend the moment of peace with her, and I miss the cue she gives me to leave.
I kiss her quickly and nearly invisibly on the forehead and head home, leaving her alone with her thoughts – and mine – tangled and confused.
I have “made peace” with my mother many times, and at the same time wonder if it’s even possible to be at peace with her when we are both still alive.
The most important reckoning with my mother took place from late 2016 through early 2018 when I helped her finish her memoir, Eat First, Cry Later. We spent every other weekend together, between my house and hers, and we saw her book into print.
That process was extraordinarily liberating for me: I sat with my mother and listened to her as if she was not my mother, but a batty old feminist elder with a set of memories and life lessons others could learn from. When my memories were different from hers, I would say “Mom, do you think it’s possible this happened?” … and then I’d say the gentlest version of what I had experienced at the time.
When she said, “Yes that could have happened,” years of noisy fighting – not just me and her, but her whole family – washed through me and out of me. Of course the residue of all that fighting never goes completely away. Therapists make their living helping people figure that out. Religions are built on some version of that truth of the human condition: people hurt one another; sometimes we hurt the people we love the most.
The Jewish version, again and again, reminds us to shine our face on ourselves and others as the Eternal shines their face on us – this is “grace” in Judaism, a kind and loving face before, during, and after all that fighting that has come down to us through the generations and seems nearly impossible to tend.
In the process of helping my mother tell her story, I got her to remember the time eight-year-old me was raped. I remember her saying, at the time, “When you want it to stop, it will stop,” washing her hands of any responsibility for a kind of domestic terror so intimate and essential to who she wanted to be that she didn’t dare stop it. That morning in 2017 when I finally got her to see what I had experienced as a child, she wanted to race out of the room and “do something,” she said.
“Mom, please sit down, I’ve already forgiven him and you. I just wanted you to listen.” If I had that moment with my mother again, I would center her and what she was seeing fresh, and I would ask her, “What do you want to do?” But I had what I needed, that tiny moment that felt like closure, so I could move on.
That moment – the two of us sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, early morning light streaming in – opened up new conversations between us. In the penultimate draft of her memoir she included one of those conversations between us. When she ultimately cut that scene from her public story, I was sad, angry, and once again innocent enough to still be surprised.
As my mother’s memory started to decline, she remembered that scene of our reconciliation – and the stories that preceded it – with more and more jagged edges. I am the first born daughter of a woman who was told she couldn’t have children. For my mother, I am both a harbinger of hope and breath and the imperfect answer to her longing for escape from things she wanted to leave behind.
Honestly, I pray for peace in the moment my mother says goodbye to this world and shifts to the realm of the ancestors and the unknown. I’ve been made from her, losing her, and unable to grieve her for generations.
What is something that is emotionally awkward for you, where you are a bit in limbo, right now?
Let yourself write it all out, however you do that – that could take a few days, or longer. When you feel you’ve gotten all the raw stuff out on paper, here are two questions you can ask yourself in order to shift your relationship with the hard thing:
- In ten words or less, what is the part of this experience that is most awkward for you? If you are able, give that thing a name – perhaps that’s an emotion, or a place in your body where things get stuck, or a color or time of day. Let the whole thing flow down into that one thing, and sit with it for at least 24 hours.
- Then ask yourself, “What do I want to learn from this part of me, and what do I want to shift going forward?
If this prompt and exercise are helpful, you might consider sharing what you learned with others, so they can go deeper into one of their own awkward moments.