I wrote this on the airplane flight from Pittsburgh to LA the day after my mother’s funeral/memorial service, 04 Sep 2022.
This past weekend has been one of both sorrow and joy. I flew to Pittsburgh to attend my mother’s funeral/memorial service.
How do you grieve? How do you make sense of things that make no sense? Suddenly memories of my mother which before were in sharp relief, take on a dream-like quality - were they real, did they even happen? Or did I simply dream it, make it up?
Supposedly there are stages. But these do not seem to apply; or rather, they are not linear, there’s no sequence, no first denial, then bargaining, then anger, then sadness…it’s just a random morass of feelings, but absent denial or bargaining, and a strange collaboration of numbness and confusion.
Before I left, I went for a dip in the ocean. As I walked into the water, waves washed clumps of tangled seaweed ensnaring my ankles. Amongst the mass were bits of plastic toys, and strips of trash. A little yellow and blue truck here, a pair of pink goggles. Lost and forgotten and out of place.
I thought about offering something of a eulogy for my mother but when I attempted to put something together, nothing would really come with any sense of coherency. And, I wanted to be authentic, but I also felt somehow that airing the “dirty laundry” as it were or “speaking ill of the dead” even if what I was saying was true, just wasn’t going to give justice to our short history together.
And so, there I sat, next to my father, hand on his back, consoling him as he would experience a fresh burst of tears.
I always believed that I was someone capable of amazing amounts of love, but here was a man who gave and gave and when it wasn’t enough, still gave more love to this broken woman who hurt him over and over as her mental illness took over so thoroughly that the woman he speaks of, the woman my siblings speak of, the mother that I did not know, and never will, is as a much a mystery as ever.
When I was 21, I had a dream that has stayed with me. I was running through the woods, looking for my mother. There was my mother, but in the dream, she was not my real mother, but the mother of the four youngest of my siblings. There was another mother, but she was the mother of the first three siblings. Where was my mother? Why did my siblings share a mother, but I did not?
On my 20th birthday, which happened to fall that year on the college graduation of my elder brother, my mother attempted to play a joke on me; saying that now I was old enough to know the truth - I was adopted. Just kidding! I don’t know which was crueler, that it was a joke, or that it wasn’t actually true. I mean, how else do you explain how I don’t look much like either of my parents?
Listening to my siblings talk about my mother, there is the underlying code of silence that still seems to reign, though there is less denial of my mother’s mental health issues that made it so difficult for us. But at the same time, it’s painted as the last dozen years. I want to scream - no! It was always there. I saw it. I experienced it. You did too, I was there.
Denial is protective. So I am left less angry and more empathetic; perhaps it’s far too painful for them to speak of it. I know this pain. My body, my mind, my heart will not let me deny it, it never has. There was no punishment harsh enough to force me to turn my eyes away, no rejection strong enough to shut me up from speaking of it. But oh, how I wanted to bypass it. Perhaps spiritual beliefs I’d been taught about forgiveness or psychological explanations of how she was doing the best she could, would help. It wasn’t until I was 35 and sitting in Adult Children Anonymous, grappling with my own reality that I was able to say, strongly, clearly, unequivocally, “I hate my mother.” Period. Perhaps that was my denial - denying myself what was real.
One of my siblings has very few memories from growing up. Amnesia in this way is also protective. I can’t help but wonder why I wasn’t granted this gift. Why couldn’t I be allowed some reprieve from the fucked up ways my mother would treat me?
II
So here I am with my siblings. Something is different yet the same. The ways we joke with each other. Our love for games. Is it relief? The guilt that we are gathering without our mother, intentionally, now lifted? Was there a recognition that we’d outgrown our need for mothering from our mother decades before, even as small children? Or is it the unfelt, unexpressed feelings, held so tightly under the surface tension, now ready to break, slowly, flowing and ebbing as each sibling’s voice cracks, breath catching, chin quivering, eyes squeezing, tears sliding down cheeks, now safe to do so, for when are we not allowed to cry more than when a parent dies?
I decided to sing the hymns chosen for my mother’s service - they were said to be her favorite. It was less of a real decision than a reflex; 20 years of Christian indoctrination and the muscle memory still here to take over when one can’t think of what else to do. The time to take a stand and make some statement about my lack of Christian faith had long since passed.
I also chose to sit in the very front, right next to my father. This meant that directly in front of me on the church altar was a photo of my mother, taken when she’d graduated from nursing school in her 20’s. She was conventionally beautiful, and wore her hair short then as she had all my life. Being her fourth child, she did not look like that when I came around, and I saw different siblings in her face; but not mine. I wondered what she was thinking when that photo was taken. I wondered if she felt she had achieved her dream, or if she would have done something more if she’d felt it was available. She had a serene look on her face. As I sang, I glanced away from the words, and at the photo, and there it was, the throat-choking, air-gasping, eye-stinging tears. I looked away, attempting to regain composure, to sing the verse to a song that expressed words that no longer reflected my religion, but retained some of the depth of my spiritual connection to Source.
III
I thought about offering to play a song I’d composed a year ago for the service. But when I thought about it more, memories flooded back, a time when my offer to play piano in church when my mother was unable to fulfill her commitment went ignored - I, after all, wasn’t the piano prodigy - a time when I was visiting from college and sat down at a piano and played a jazz riff only to be shut down immediately by my mother. It was decades before I performed what I called a piano exorcism, slamming my hands hard down on the piano - MY piano, in MY house, and shortly thereafter started composing piano music. I figured that if she was alive and I were to play what I’d composed, she’d utter “oh, that’s nice” and then turn to my sister, the piano prodigy, and ask her to play.
IV
Often I secretly think that my mother had a secret expressive side and that had things been different, she might have danced. So when I dance at ecstatic dance, I will sometimes dedicate part of my dance to her. I say, “for some reason, you can’t let yourself truly go, so I will do it for you.”
Sometimes I wonder if, before incarnating in this body, I made an agreement to channel all that could not or would not be expressed in my family to be felt and expressed through me. I felt like a lightning rod, pulling the anger, the grief, the fear, into my body, my body with its porous boundaries, its empathic sensitivities, and being wrung out like a sponge, exploding out all at once. How else does one explain the more controlled, moderated emotions of my siblings? I tried so hard to master this self-control, but the tectonic pressure was too great, and the circuit breakers could not hold. Pele was going to have her way with me, one way or another.
And then, now, the dams are breaking for them. Somewhere, somehow, an impermeable bubble formed around the lightning rod, and though the mirror neurons take over and though I cry when they cry, I am suddenly free of taking it all on. I can allow their process to be their own, and be self-assured of mine, though none of it makes any sense.
I wonder if, finally, now, I am being understood after all these years. I wonder if, maybe I never understood all these years as I felt so certain that I did. Is it even possible?