On the second last day of my mother’s life, I sat in an armchair by her bed, shifting uncomfortably on the seat, trying to take a visual inventory of the space. The flowers on the windowsill: who sent those? The yellow curtain that divided the room, on the other side of which lay a man who periodically amended our conversation with thick, wet coughs. The way her hand looked as it grasped mine, its machinery of bones and tendons moving underneath the paper wrapping of her skin. She had always been very thin.
“You even wore pink to send me off,” she says, noticing my toque.
I stare at the walls, out the window, at the ceiling. I regret wearing a sweatshirt to a hospital floor that, populated by the old and the sick and pinioned by spears of sun, is uncomfortably warm. I realize that it’s possible that maybe I’m crying. I beat the tears back. My mother is talking about how I can go through her closet, when it’s over. That nice burgundy sweater, she says, I’d look so good in that.
“Okay mom, we don’t need to talk about that right now.”
She smiles a lot, that morning. Before they give her the drugs that sweep the pain out with her consciousness. The doctor tells us how neat it is to have a patient who smiles and is in full possession of her mind. Most of his patients don’t. She wants the doctor to give her a needle that will let it end. He has to break it to her that he can’t. That’s not how it works, another team does that, it takes a week at least to get approved.
“I’m so sorry mom. I didn’t know that was what you were thinking.”
My heart breaks for her, but at least I know that she’s at peace, and she’s ready.
I wish I could remember the last thing she said to me, and only me. I was eating chips in the hospital cafeteria when they put the morphine in her IV. When I came back to her room, she was already being carried into sleep, and though she murmured a few words about something — pain in her feet, was it? — she never really woke up again. But I remember what she said before the doctor came, as she squeezed my hand and looked up at me with eyes that were bright with something beyond life.
“Through all the ups and downs, it’s been wonderful,” she said, and her smile spread until it touched every part of her eyes. “My beautiful daughter.”
I held her hand and bit my lip, so as not to let slip what I was thinking.
Why couldn’t I have been beautiful to you, when it mattered?
Instead: “I love you too, mom,” I said.
I made a resolution, many years ago, that I would not write about my mother until after she was gone. It didn’t seem honourable: an olive branch had been long since offered, and accepted. There was no point of making a private past public. Besides, she was better by then and, I kept trying to tell myself, so was I.
I write this for everyone who has had to live a complicated grief. For everyone who has mourned a relationship that was previously broken, and imperfectly mended. For everyone who, in this loss, has studied the tapestry of their life, unsure which threads are trauma and which are forgiveness. Unsure which of their tears are love, and which are souvenirs of a love long since lost.
It’s okay that we do not bear these events simply. It’s okay that, when people reach out to express their condolences, you find yourself going through the rituals of the newly bereaved, saying the right words, doing the right things, but not knowing which you are simply acting, and which you truly believe.
There’s something strange about all the old photos I have of myself with my mother. I don’t remember them. They must have happened, because I can see how I’m standing there smiling beside her at a park, or a school concert, or our kitchen. We must have done these things. But when I search for the memories, they’re absent.
In my mother’s papers, my brother finds a hand-written itinerary from a trip we’d made to see him in Pittsburgh. I receive it with a jolt. I remember the trip well: the sloping streets of the city, the books on the walls of my brother’s apartment, the Jim Henson museum. But I don’t remember my mother. In fact, until that very moment, I thought I had gone on that trip with my dad.
It did not begin like this. She cherished me once, even before she’d met me. When the Children’s Aid Society called my parents to say that, after over a year of waiting, they had a baby for them, a newborn girl, my mother broke down in tears.
“I really wanted it to be a girl,” she said, although they already had three.
Though I don’t know precisely what I did to vex her expectations, I did not turn out to be the girl my mother imagined. I was stubborn and independent, almost as soon as I could speak; when I was just three years old, my mother complained to my father that he wasn’t raising me to be “feminine” enough. (The meaning of that was as opaque to him then as it was to me when he told me the story, many years later.)
Her concerns about my disappointing lack of femininity notwithstanding, the first years of my life are a dream. I am the baby of a big family, and by such a vast margin that there is no competition with my five older siblings; they all dote on me. I am an outgoing child, happy and creative. I give lip synch concerts in front of the TV.
When I am five years old, my parents divorce. I learn this when I wander into the bathroom, where I find my mom sitting on the toilet sobbing, and somehow, in a single moment, I knew.
“Are you getting divorced?” I ask.
I don’t know how I know this word. My mother says nothing, she only cries.
Everyone is worried about me, but the divorce doesn’t bother me too much. Now dad lives a few blocks away, and I have the best room in his apartment and he fills it with all sorts of fun things, and there aren’t as many rules anymore. My mother goes back to university to study early childhood education, so that she can get a job as a teacher. I’m left on my own a lot more, which is alright by me.
But already, my happy life is changing. On one of the first weeks of my parents’s new joint-custody schedule, I go to my dad’s apartment for lunch; he’s not there. Terrified, I sit on his doorstep, sobbing, until suddenly he is with me, embracing me, wiping my tears and telling me it’s the wrong day: on Wednesdays, I’m supposed to spend lunch breaks at my mother’s. I walk to her house, red-eyed and sniffling. When I get there she slams a sandwich on the table and grabs my arm and starts screaming.
How can you be so stupid. How can you not remember something so easy.
I am six years old. Too young to understand that she is more scared than me.
Soon, my much-older siblings have all grown up, and moved out, and then there was nobody to protect me from her anger. It settled over our house like a smog, thick and black and omnipresent. You could breathe it, almost, sucking it in with breakfast. I wake up listening for dishes crashing in the sink. I dawdle on my walks home from school, terrified of whether I’ll be greeted by silence, or rage.
It’s hard to say which is worse.
Everything I do is wrong, to my mother. Everything I am is wrong. My nose is too big, she tells me, I should stop flaring my nostrils so it doesn’t get bigger. I should get the birthmark on my thigh removed, it’s ugly. I should get the moles on my face removed (I eventually do), they’re ugly. I should be someone else, if I ever want men to like me. I should become something else. I should be completely different than I am.
The child I am is shrinking. I stop doing lip synch concerts in the living room. I start retreating into my own mind, a place from which I will not begin to emerge for a very, very long time. I am always afraid, on edge, full of fear that everyone thinks as little of me as she does. I can’t do anything right to her, and then I can’t do it to myself, either.
I talk too much, she tells me. I talk too much about boring things. I’m wasting time with my hobbies, like art and music and writing. I’ll never amount to anything. I cost her too much. I eat too much, too. If I want money for food, maybe I should talk to Him, she’s already spending enough money on me. Him, that’s what she calls my dad. Never his name, or even a “your father.” He is only ever and simply “Him,” with a hiss.
My father begins to slip me cash, so that I have enough to buy a little something for myself. She wants me to hate him like she does, but he never says anything bad about her. That was part of their divorce agreement, he told me once. Still, when I tell him the things she says to me, his jaw clenches until I’m scared he will burst, and he grips the steering wheel so hard his knuckles go white.
At one point, I beg him to get full custody of me. He tries not to cry when, days later, he comes back and explains, in ways a nine-year-old will understand, that the lawyers say he wouldn’t really have a case. But he will always be there for me, he says. He will always be there if I need him to come get me. He will always…
“You were very brave,” my therapist says, over a Zoom call in my dim-lit apartment.
What?
“You were very brave, to seek out someone who felt safe.”
I never thought about it like that. I guess I really never thought about it like that.
“Notice what feelings are coming up for you now.”
Sadness. Incredible sadness. Howling, aching sadness, to think that the greatest love I’ve had in my life was, in part, just the way my six-year-old self was learning how to survive. Sadness, to think of how deeply the child that I was searched for love, and found only anger.
What if every harsh voice in my mind, all these years, was hers?
What did she do to me? What, really, did she do to me?
On the day my mother died, someone on Twitter invited me to share more about who my mother was, when I was ready. It’s been over two months; I am ready now, I think.
My mother played the cello. She worked as an editor after college.
I learned those things from her obituary.
She was an attentive mother. She always had fun activities ready.
I learned that from my older siblings, for whom she was a much different mother than she was to me.
The things I know about my mother are, mostly, not the type of things that make it into obituaries. I know that she always dressed immaculately, with that particularly constructed femininity sold by white women in 1960s advertising. After she died, I went through the clothes in her closet, marvelling at how they were all in pristine condition. She took very good care of her things.
I know that my mother loved Reuben sandwiches and sweet-and-sour pork. She read a lot of books, mostly pulp romances I’d steal, as a child, and read secretively under the covers with a mix of curiosity and disgust. She lived 53 years in Winnipeg and never really learned her way around the city; even when she was well into her 70s, I had to explain to her how to get up Pembina to my apartment in Osborne Village.
And my mother was prepared, though it was never clear for what. As long as I knew her, she stockpiled supplies. Dry goods, mostly. Stacks of toilet paper, pasta, peanut butter. More than we could ever use, when it was just the two of us. I wondered if this behaviour was some sort of inheritance from her own parents, who had survived the Great Depression. A memory of scarcity, inscribed upon the genetic line.
My mother cooked, though that stopped shortly after the divorce, when my siblings moved out. After that, she made me grilled cheeses, but only ever with Kraft Singles. She sliced up cucumbers and served them in bowls of salt and vinegar. To open jars, she bashed the lids on the edge of the sink until they dented, which is a particularly violent way of getting them open but it really gets the job done.
When we begin to clean out my mother’s apartment, my sister keeps asking if there is anything I want to take, just for me. Something nostalgic, to remember. No, I say. No, there’s nothing here that feels like my mother, to me.
When I was in my early 20s, I came down with a brutal stomach bug. Food poisoning of some kind. Norwalk, maybe. For two days I lived on my bathroom floor, unable to keep even water in my stomach. My father was out of town, so for the first time since moving out on my own, I dragged myself to the phone and called my mother for help.
Half an hour later, she arrived at my apartment, and presented me with a bag full of Tylenol and Pedialyte popsicles.
“I got you these,” she said. “They should help.”
Then she reached into a second bag and pulled out what can only be described as an industrial-sized jar of Cheez Whiz, so big it required two hands to lift. She held it out to me like a trophy.
“And I got you this, because it was on sale,” she chirped, brightly.
The electrolyte popsicles worked; I was soon on the mend. The Cheez Whiz stayed in my cupboard for several years, gathering dust, but it did make me laugh every time I saw it. It was on sale, of course. Clearly, to a mom, that makes perfect sense.
By then, my relationship with my mother had been papered over, if not truly repaired. Mostly, it seemed, we’d just both decided not to mention the past, the pain, the nearly three-year break after I moved out during which we had not spoken at all.
Her life had grown richer, in that time. She had remarried and they travelled a lot, which she liked. She seemed happy. We went out for lunch once in awhile. Not too much. Maybe once every few months, just to catch up. We made small talk about our lives, about work, about my siblings. I never told her what I felt about most things. I knew, by then, that she’d never be able to know me.
But in the years since I’d fled home at age 18, I had come to know her, if only through a proxy. I’d become immersed in classic feminist texts — Betty Friedan, in particular — and while the window they opened onto my life was distorted and not always facing the right direction, they gave a clear and unfettered view of my mother’s.
This is what I learned: she’d done everything right, by the standards of middle-class white women of her time. She’d gone to college, met a good husband, quit her job, stayed home, given up any dreams for herself and raised children. In return, she was supposed to be protected, to be taken care of all her life; but that bargain was broken, and she’d never been taught how to live as a woman in this world, alone.
Later, when Mad Men debuted on TV, I saw my mother in Betty Draper: the same pristine exterior, the same tightly controlled manners that could never hold back all the anger. The likeness was so uncanny that I found the show uncomfortable to watch; January Jones’s performance became, for me, something like a trigger. I’d lived what Betty Draper’s daughter was living. I didn’t need to see it on screen.
Still, discovering these things makes me want to mend what was broken. I start going back to family Christmases, and Thanksgiving dinners. We become more comfortable with each other. When she ends her second marriage and moves into an apartment on her own, I visit more often. We spend summer afternoons by the pool at her building, and they are peaceful. Sometimes, we chat on the phone for an hour or two about our family, or just about life. She listens attentively and chuckles at all my stories.
Our relationship settles into a pattern. In my heart, I know it’s a lie: I’m just going through the motions. I’m playing the role of a daughter, and not always well. But I try. I try to call on her birthday, and Mother’s Day. I try to remember to take her out for lunch once in awhile. I learn to end our calls with “love you too, Mom,” and it gets easier to say after awhile.
Still, sometimes I think: maybe not everyone gets to have a mother, not really. I’m not sure what we are. Not mother and daughter, exactly. Maybe we are just a story we are telling ourselves about what could have been.
When the pandemic hits, I do not see her for nearly 20 months. It’s not safe for her, I tell myself. I’m not careful enough about COVID-19, and she’s about as vulnerable as a person can be, and I do not want to be the one who kills her. Still, I know there’s a part of me that is relieved to disconnect: I’m dealing with my own stuff. I don’t have enough energy to play the part of the good daughter, not right then.
She says she’s happy, every time I call, so I don’t worry about it too much.
Five days before she dies, the hospital allows me to visit her for the first time. I get there right in the middle of dinner. She keeps talking about how good the food is at the hospital, this time a Salisbury steak and plain mashed potatoes, but I notice that she hasn’t eaten any of it. She pushes it around her plate: the nurses won’t hassle her that way, she says.
She picks up a tiny single-use packet of salt-free Mrs. Dash from the tray.
“Have you tried this?” she says.
Uh, no mom, I haven’t. I mean, I guess I know about it from commercials, but no, I’ve never tried Mrs. Dash.
“Take it,” she insists, her frail fingers holding it out as if it were made of gold leaf. “You can put it on vegetables. It’s supposed to be good.”
Okay mom, I say patiently. I squirrel it away in my purse, and try not to laugh when I realize: it’s the Cheez Whiz thing again. And I know there, at the end and for the very first time, that she loves me very, very much.
“A feeling came up for you there. What was it?”
I was thinking that I’m going to miss my mom.
“Is that the first time you’ve said that out loud?”
It’s the first time I’ve even thought it.
In the days after my mother dies, my sister and I clean out her apartment. I count my inheritance in practical things. Three boxes of spaghetti. Two small bags of Basmati rice. Enough dishwasher detergent pods to last at least six months, and enough toilet paper for twice that long. A step-stool. A blender. A vacuum, which is nice, because I’ve been reluctant to spend money on one given that I only own a single rug.
“Do you want this little bunny?” my sister says, holding up a tiny stuffed animal my mother kept on her dresser.
No, no, there’s nothing in this apartment that feels like my mother, to me.
After she dies, I do not cry. I’m not sure if I’m repressing something that needs to be felt, but there’s no helping it, I just have to let it be. The days go by in quiet. I need time. Four weeks after she dies, I fly away on a work trip to Poland and Ukraine; I’m gone a month. It feels right, to leave the debris of what had been my family behind.
I start to remember things about my mother that I had forgotten, her presence finding its way back to the vignettes from which it had been erased. I remember sitting on the couch in amiable silence, watching Seinfeld and Star Trek and bonding over a shared admiration of Jean-Luc Picard. I remember being equally bemused and proud when, as a teenager, she took me and a friend to the waterslides and presented a pass for a free entry that she’d gotten in a welcome-to-Winnipeg basket in 1969. It didn’t have an expiry date, so they had to accept it.
I remember her reading to me every night before bed. I remember the time we went to see a new Disney movie, but accidentally came home with a new Pomeranian instead. I remember being mesmerized as she fried the onions for her famous Thanksgiving stuffing, slipping me tastes of the mixture as she went. I remember the emails she sent, every week in her later life, talking about the plants on her balcony or the nice weather we were having. I usually forgot to reply, but she kept writing.
And then, there is this: I still make grilled cheeses, but only with Kraft Singles. I still drown cucumbers in salt and vinegar. I still bang jars against the edge of the sink to wrench them open, a technique which horrified past live-in partners but for which I will never consider an alternative, because it gets the job done.
These are the ways I know how to get through the world. They are hers.
Eleven days after my mom dies, I am fumbling in my purse, looking for a pen I know is in there, lost amongst forgotten lipsticks and half-empty packs of gum. My fingers come across a smooth scrap of paper. I fish it out, assuming it’s the usual purse debris, but when I bring it out to the light, all I can do is laugh.
There, in my hand: a tiny single-serving packet of salt-free Mrs. Dash.
That night, I tack it up on my fridge, to remember. She tried, and so did I, and it was never quite enough, and it wasn’t always right. But I did have a mother, and then she died, and though our pain transformed us into inadequate actors in our roles to each other, there was love.
And I will miss her, very, very much.
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