When I was little, I had a recurring dream that I had lost
my mother. In the dreams, I would wake up from a nap or return from school to
find that she was gone. Not dead, necessarily, but missing. Her toothbrush,
makeup, and perfume missing from her bathroom, her clothing gone from the closets,
even her favorite giant coffee mugs replaced by dainty tea cups. “Where’s Mom?”
I would ask, and my father would say, “Oh, she left. You missed it. And now she’s
never coming back.” In my childhood dreams, she never left on purpose. It was
never a decision. She just had to leave suddenly and she couldn’t stand to say
goodbye to me so she left while I was distracted. She left without saying
anything. I think it was my brain attempting to process my unmentionable, almost
unthinkable fear that my mother would die. It was a fear I told myself was
ridiculous and impossible. Mothers of young children didn’t die! Mothers of
young children weren’t allowed to die.
They had too much to do, they had too many people depending on and loving them—too
many people loving them too fiercely for any higher power to take them away. There
was no power higher than my need and love for my mother. You only died, I
thought, when no one cared about you anymore because you got too old. You only
died when you were a senile great-great-grandmother no one saw anymore. As long as I paid attention to my mom, she
wouldn’t die. And I couldn’t have stopped paying attention to her even if I
wanted to—she was my entire world.
The one thing that flew in the face of my logic, that opened
the door for my recurring nightmares, was the fact that my own mom’s mother
died when my mom was a little girl and her father died when she was a teenager.
She hardly ever talked about it, and she had a ton of siblings and a stepmother
who made the hole left by her parents almost unnoticeable to her children. But
I knew it had happened. She had gone to elementary school one day and when she got
home her mother had died of a heart attack at thirty-five years old. She hadn’t
meant to die. She hadn’t said goodbye. She just had to leave suddenly and she
disappeared. This bit of family history panicked me if I thought about it too
much, so I tried to make sense of it. Maybe, I thought, my grandmother hadn’t really
been a nice person. In the three photos I’d seen of her, hanging in a big frame
over the sofa in our living room, she looked
nice. She was young and pretty and smiling—she looked like my mom. But no, that
couldn’t be. Maybe because my mother had so many brothers, she didn’t need her
mom like I needed my mom so the higher power was able to swoop in and take her
away. Maybe, even though my mom still mentioned her love for her mother and her
desire to have her mom alive and in her life, she hadn’t really loved her. She thought she loved her, but she didn’t
love her mom as much as I loved my mom. And if she didn’t really love her mom,
then it was okay that she wasn’t around, because she must not have been that
great. I mean, what kind of mother just dies? That’s not allowed. That’s
selfish.
My parents have a nice house. It’s my favorite place in the
world—the one place I could walk through my eyes closed and never bump into a
thing. I know all its smells and its quirks, and one thing I know about above
everything else is that it’s an impossible place to tell a secret. No matter
where you are, no matter how quiet you think you’re being, your attempt to keep
something confidential guarantees that someone will, without even trying, hear
exactly the thing you never wanted them to hear. That’s important for me to
mention so no one thinks I was eavesdropping on my mother when I was right years old and overheard a hushed phone conversation that robbed me of my naivete
regarding the unfairness of death. I was taking a shower in my bathroom when I heard
my mom on the phone with a friend. She was in her bedroom with the door shut
and I had the water running, but even so, I heard, clear as a bell, “… and Lindsey is the same age I was when my mom died, I keep thinking, I can’t die
now, I can’t leave them now. I know it’s silly, but I still worry about it. It
makes me sad to think about all the things my mom missed.”
Wait. My mom had the same fears I had? My mom was also
afraid that something would happen to her and she would suddenly leave and my
siblings and I would never get to say goodbye to her? I was only eight! My mom had just had a baby! Sure, my dad was great, but he could never take care of four kids on his own. Didn’t my mom understand what I had figured out—that if
you really love someone, they can never leave you? I wanted to explain it to
her, but I was getting older and deep inside I knew my belief that love
prevents death was superstitious and would actually hurt more than help her. Of
course my mom loved her mother. She didn’t talk about her that much because she
didn’t have that many memories of her, and she didn’t talk about her grief over
losing both her parents because she didn’t want to burden or worry us. She
wanted to create the happy, intact family that she had missed out on, and I had
taken the credit for it, believing that I had been psychically responsible for
keeping her alive and well. All of a sudden that idea seemed not just childish,
but stupid and hurtful. Important, beloved people died all the time for no
reason at all, and you didn’t stop loving someone just because they got older.
Love wasn’t a finite resource that eventually depleted, allowing your former loved
ones to fade away into the ether, leaving nary an emotional mess behind. After
all, my paternal grandparents were elderly and I still loved them. They were
still people with personalities whose lives were just as important and vital as
my own. They were people, just like me. My mom was a person, just like me. And
just like me, she had loved her mom more than anyone. And her mom died. Not
because she didn’t care or no one cared about her. Not because she was selfish
or stupid, but because she was unlucky. There’s no cosmic justice to take
people away when they no longer deserve to live. Some people, through no fault
of their own, just experience an almost unimaginable, unfair amount of loss.
And my mother—my silly, nurturing, God-loving, joyful mother, is just one of those
people. It sucks.
If you’re lucky enough to have your mother in your life well
into your adulthood, as I am, something strange and wonderful starts to happen.
You start to see your mother not as A Mother, but as A Person. For me, the
majority of that experience has been wonderful. I’m still close to my mom. Though
they still live in South Carolina and I now live in Connecticut, I speak to my
parents almost every day. I rely on them for emotional support in almost all
aspects of my life. Whenever I have a parenting question, my mom is the first
person I call, and even when I don’t take her advice, I value it. Sometimes
when one of my kids is having an epic meltdown and I feel like I am going to
explode, I pick up the phone to call my mom and I realize she was denied an
experience that I so fully take for granted, and my maternal grandmother was
denied the same. My grandma never got to meet her grandchildren. My mother
never ended a horrible day by dialing a phone and saying, “Mom, you would not believe
the day I had. Come get your grandchildren because I need a break.” They both
missed out on so much.
But despite all this loss, I now know there were many things
my mother and grandmother did get to share. I can see how wonderful my
grandmother was in the wonderful way her daughter has loved and raised her
kids. I know because so much of who I am as a mother came to me, subconsciously,
from my own mom, and thus through my grandmother. I know that in the few years
my grandmother was able to spend with my mom, she taught her a lot: how to
cuddle, how to be silly with your kids, how to listen to children like their feelings
and experiences matter, how to live in the moment. How to be strong in the face
of hardship or grief, but how to avoid allowing that strength to harden your
heart. How to be fiercely, brilliantly alive. How to love. How to be loved.
