Monday, July 14, 2014

41 Days

I'd always intended to write about my mother.

The idea of a mom-inspired story is something I considered as early as elementary school and the notion clung to me, sticking like chewing gum to my hair. I imagined it as a thing in my brain that wouldn't wear away, something I'd have to strip out or cut myself from completely. It's the reason I applied to college in 2005 at the age of twenty-eight when my retail management career took a turn. I thought if I went to school, worked toward an English degree, followed a program with a creative writing emphasis, well, I thought all of that would give me a place to start. I really had no other goal in sight. I never thought I could become a proper writer. I dreamed about it, sure. I told everyone I knew that my academic and professional intents were grander. I even hoped my degree would lead to greener pastures. However, I never actually believed I possessed the talent or skill. I only ever hoped to learn enough to write a story about my mom and, maybe some day, share it.

Nujorn Downs May 10, 1948- June 3, 2014

In those years it took to finish my degree I toyed with a lot of other story ideas and grew slightly more confident in my ability. I also began a memoir, drafted the start of several fictionalized true-to-life mother-daughter stories, and wrote a couple of personal essays--my mother the bones of all of them.  It wasn't until I graduated in 2009 and spent a year finding myself that I realized I wasn't getting anywhere with the mom story. I tucked it away. Wrote other things. Played at being a fiction writer. Waited for something to happen. Still, five years later, the only publication under my belt is an essay about her that was published in the university's journal.

My mother passed away on June 3, 2014. Forty-one days ago. I didn't imagine I'd write about her post-mortum. At thirty-seven years old that thought never occurred to me. Not once.

I had thought about the many trials and struggles I might have to overcome writing about things she or my family members may not want me to write. Especially since mine is the kind of family that often leaves things unsaid and my mom was the kind of woman who taught the hard lessons, often the hard way. I thought about giving Mom joint authorship, including verbatim passages of a story she'd written about herself for me. I pictured a stark dedication page with only the words For Mom printed in italics. I even thought about what conversations might surface with her friends should the thing ever get published and people who knew her read it. What would she say or think knowing a story I wrote about her was out in the world? How would she feel holding something like that in her hands? Maybe I just wanted the story to end with her. But that was something I imagined happening years from now--my mother sitting white-haired with thoughtful crinkled-eyes and a tight uncertain smile. In my mind, I saw my pages in her gentle work-roughed hands. Careful, concerned, and maybe even a little bit proud. That's where the story belonged. After all, it would be ours. Hers. Finishing the story any other way wasn't an option.

To say I'm lost without her, fuck, that sounds so cliche, doesn't it? But I am. I'm lost. Wrecked. Uncertain. At times, immobile. Unfinished. I've spent the last month trying to find meaning in putting one foot in front of the other, getting out of bed, like everyone asks of me. But most mornings I wake and I can't breathe. The first and only thing I can do is cry. Or in the case of spending two weeks traveling with my fifteen-year-old niece, in those instances, I expend a lot of energy putting up fronts and forcing myself to not cry. Sounds desperate, right? Dramatic even. It is. I'm not unaware. The truth, unbalanced as it might be, is my mother was the skeleton that I fleshed my entire identity onto. Everything I am, everything I will be, and everything I try not to be. All of it is her. Now I'm left, without her, trying to figure out how to exist in a world in which she's no longer a part. And that's bullshit.

But I know it's my own fault. I want it to be her fault. At best, it's our fault.

I'm still unable to write the thing I meant to and, yet, I need desperately to strip her out of me piece by piece. To get her as far away from me as I can without letting go all together. Letting others hold onto her for me so I can pull my shit together and figure out what living without her means, because in this moment, I can't see how to be anything without her. I need to write her, write me, write us, if only to find a way to see and feel something about my mother other than loss and grief.

Grief. It is a funny thing, isn't it? I'm told again and again that there's no right or wrong way to process it, but I wonder. Mostly, people advise me to distract myself, move forward, remembering the happy times, and focus on the people I love and who love me that are left. It's solid advice. I do have a husband, a father, and a brother all left mourning the loss of my mother as well. They need me. I have nephews, nieces, friends, and other family that want me in their lives for future-centric milestones. I have pets that require feeding. Plants that require nurturing. Projects that need attention. I know that some days that is exactly what I should do. Try my best to move forward at all cost.

But days like today? Days like today I feel I have to breathe my grief. Ingest it. Live in it and roll around in it until the stink of it begins to emanate from somewhere deeper inside me. Why? Unfinished business. More than that, I'm my mother's daughter. She showed me how to wear the hard knocks and the ugly truth of personal history on one's sleeve like uniform stripes. Every scar. Every bump. Every tremor. Not everyone can live like that, but if you can I've seen that you can survive almost anything. And she survived much. It's part of what made her so incredible, so loved, so generous of heart. She was wholly unapologetic for her ugliness and her beauty, even in her moments of uncertainty concerning both. A beautiful contradiction of strength and weakness.

I wrote a eulogy of sorts for her memorial that made nod to that idea.

My mother taught me the hard lessons.
Work hard.
Learn all you can.
Give generously.
Love fiercely.
Depend on nobody.
Nobody but Mom.
These are the lessons a survivor teaches her daughter.
She showed me what the strength of a woman looks like.
She also taught me never to waste words.
Say what you mean or say nothing at all.
Yet, she used many words--telling me stories of Thailand, sharing her philosophies, telling of her joys, her disappointments, and her sorrows.
Most of my life has consisted of me, sitting at my mother's feet, listening to her words.
I believe that is why I am a writer. And why I am who I am.
Yet, I feel wasted and wordless, wishing I knew what I should say.
But mostly I feel I have no idea how to live life without her.
She was my sun and moon.
My north and south.
She was my darkness and my light.
She was my beautiful contradiction and taught me the balance of existence.
To say I will miss her, or that I loved her, seems inadequate.
So the only words I can really use to tell you what she was to me are:
She was my mother.


It's funny that now, when I read those words, I'm not as sure what they mean. Not exactly. I know when I wrote it over a month ago and read it the meaning was clear and true. Weighted and meaningful. Today, though, the words seem clouded. Fogged by weeks of erratic emotions and wandering thoughts, giving the lines a feeling of a thing sentimental and trite. I imagine in retrospect this whole endeavor will feel that way to me. Everything comes full circle. Regardless, my mother was neither sentimental nor trite. Nor do I endeavor to have such descriptors for myself, or my words, but I realize this is a process. Maybe that's why I feel compelled to move forward with this displayed therapy. However personal. However raw and unfiltered. The world can help to keep me in check, or I can at the very least give myself a perception of control and boundaries whilst I stumble my way through figuring out what I meant, what I mean, and what I mean to become. If nothing else, it's a new start in the wake of a tragic end. Is that not the very definition of a worthwhile story beginning? Somehow even that doesn't seem to matter so much.

Messy pieces are the most I can promise. I'm told by those who know this kind of grief that it is a process. A journey, which I hope will help to bring me back to whatever I'm meant to do.

8 comments:

  1. This is just beautiful, 'Chel. Real. Honest. Full of heart. Move forward if that seems important to you in a given day. But let your grief guide you and your journey will be an authentic one. Toss aside the "shoulds" and let grief be your intimate friend. Disentangle grief from any unresolved feelings of guilt or regret. Embrace your grief with the fierce love you have for your mother and grief will bring you gifts in kind. And then share this experience using your poignant words, blessing the world with your experience. xoxo

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  2. This has to be some of your very best writing, raw and bleeding emotion like an open wound, but then I may be inside it enough to see parts that others may not.

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    1. Very kind, but perhaps biased. Thank you, though. That means a lot that you think so.

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  3. I've always considered myself strong and independent. I see that in you as well. But in 2005, at the age of 42, I became a motherless child. I know your pain and the feeling of "now what do I do?" I can't say much to make it better, Michelle, except you are not alone. Some days will be harder than others, but you have so many people who will hold you up. Much love to you.

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    1. Thanks. I'm lucky to have you, your wisdom, and so many other amazing people in my life. And I know this is what will hold me up, and being able to tell all of you about her.

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  4. Love you, Michelle. I agree with Bryan. This made me cry. (Which only the best writing does).

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