Vestiges, Echoes, and a Surge of Melancholia

I gave my mom the pink scarf in that picture. She wore it all the time. And always said, “You picked this out for me.”

The year Mommy died, Mother’s Day was May 12, and she died the next Sunday, May 19. So this year, when Mother’s Day was again May 12, much to my surprise, I was stricken all over again with deep grieving, an unutterable sense of loss as if it had just happened, as if I had just held her hand as she breathed her last.

And it’s gone on all week. 12. Sunday. 13. Monday. 14. Tuesday. 15. Wednesday. 16. Thursday, today.

Now listen, I’m not a fan of doleful, plaintive affect. I’m moving, and in this process, this move, I have thus far shed at least 50% of everything: clothes, furniture, books, dishes, knick-knacks. I’m freeing myself. Cleaning out and off and up my space. And in the same vein, I am cleaning out the parts of my soul and personality that weigh me down, cost me energy I could spend in joy and contentment. I am trying to let go of cynicism and of being quick to take offence and useless anger.

I have long said — though not always lived — that if I think someone in my life has hurt me on purpose, then I ought to not have that person in my life. By the same token, having had someone in my life who is no longer a corporeal presence, someone who I loved and who loved me, I know they would not want me to be weeping, miserable with missing them.

So, yes, I’m surprised how hard this week is for me.

What I miss, the absence where there is ache, is the shared frame of reference that was ours, only ours, the private language that exists in every relationship, the vision of me that she had, that she held in her heart. When she needed me, when she called on me, when she laughed with me, when she trusted me, when she asked that I be with her at the end, that Charlie was the best Charlie I will ever be.

And I’m 63. And I’m one of the two youngest of 6 siblings, one of whom has already died. The odds are that I’m going to lose more private languages and shared heartsongs before I die.

That year she died. on Mother’s Day, I had gone to pick her up at Record Street Senior Home, where, because of her oxygen levels and heart health, she had been moved permanently to a “sick” room on the first floor, which had sort of broken her heart, and she clearly wasn’t feeling well. I tried to convince her that we didn’t have to go to the planned family gathering, but she insisted. However, we only made it up the hallway to the front door before she collapsed from her walker to a bench, and sobbing said, “I just can’t do it anymore.”

And she meant it. By Thursday of that week — today of that week — she was no longer conscious. My little sister and I sat on her bed with her, singing songs — and now I am sobbing as I type this and furious with myself that I am crying again, another day this week — and please don’t say it’s okay to grieve — I know this, I do, but what do we do — what do I do, when the lost heartsongs keep adding up?

I know what I’ll do. Honestly, I’m fine. Almost all the time.

My mom said to me, once, toward the end when there was nothing about which we didn’t talk, when we weren’t just mother and son, but, truly, best friends, she said to me, “We both spent a lot of years being made unhappy by people who knew we didn’t think enough of ourselves to walk away from them. I hope you’ll never do that again and I’m sorry I taught you to be that way. I wish you could see yourself the way the people who love you see you.”

She thought any sad thing or bad thing that happened to her children was her fault, and any happy thing or good thing was an accident with which she had nothing to do.

I don’t think I have ever been so sure I was worthwhile as I was when she said that to me. I don’t think I have ever been as strong as I was when I held her hand as she died.

After she died, I was in the room, alone, with her body, for a few hours until the funeral parlor staff arrived. She wasn’t there. Her absence was a presence. I didn’t really cry until her funeral, which was an awful Roman Catholic lugubrosity of epic proportions, but I was able to cry because I was seated next to one of the dearest people in my life, ever, who I’d asked to sit with me, who gave me permission with her touch and her presence and her love to lose control. I bent into keening.

And this week, it’s again, the loneliness of those hours I waited for them to take her body that I’m feeling — there is this duality of her in my life and not in my life, at once, and right now, it aches.

And I’m keening a bit. And that’s fine. And I have that pink scarf. And the red garnet necklace she had seen in a jewelry store and loved, which I sneaked back and bought for her. And I have the heart songs sung in the language only we two knew.

And I miss her. And I’m fine. But I wanted to write this because … because I want her to know I’m trying to see myself and be the self she saw through her eyes.