Grieving in life as much as in death

Remembering my mother

“I miss her, but perhaps not more in death than in life.”

~Gloria Steinem

Like my own, Gloria Steinem—a force, legendary second wave feminist—had to mourn her mother while she still breathed.

Reading these words, it reverberated deep within my soul.

My mother was my best friend, my confidant and support. She sacrificed so much for me and made me her whole world. And while that certainly came with co-dependency and emotional attachment issues that messed with my mental state and cognitive development as I grew, I cannot imagine it any other way.

I cannot imagine my life without my mother.

My dad, despite his obliviousness and the haze of alcoholism from which he existed, once said to me when I was a teenager:

“Can you imagine your life without your mother?”

It made me pause.

I don’t recall the exact context in which he made that comment, but I do know this:

Though I appreciated her, I was also a teenager and I probably was quite self-absorbed, not showing her adequate gratitude in that exact moment.

As a middle aged woman now though—no, dad, I certainly cannot imagine my life without my mother.

When I earned my doctorate and became Dr. Donelson, my dissertation acknowledgments thanked her for buying me letter magnets as a small child and by saying:

“Without you, I would not be a doctor.”

It is true.

I cannot conceive of the trajectory that my life would have taken had it not been for my mother, had she not done all she could to ensure that my life not end up hers.

She made sure that [I knew that] I was to go to college, to get a 4 year college degree, not be limited by a marriage, and to achieve my dreams by flying away from little Panama, NY.

For the scarcity of financial resources that my mother had, the lack of emotional support from a partner, along with her own mental illness (PTSD, depression, anxiety), I now stand in awe of her and all she did with oh-so-very little:

My mother moved mountains for me.

I can hear her in my head now telling me that, “No, Danielle, That’s not true—it was all you.”

But it was not.

My mother was my safe harbor, my touchstone growing up in a volatile home with a rageful, verbally abusive alcoholic father, where we were plagued by constant economic concerns, when our duct-taped cars broke down and we could not fix them, and when our southwestern NY home was without heat in the frigid winters—

As my father refused to do any work he did not want to do—when he even could work, not recovering from injury from his job as a log-cutter.

But through—she believed in me. She did all of it for me, but when it came time for me to leave—to college, into a—too young marriage—and then moving to the other side of the world, it shattered her.

I felt the burden of this in more ways than I can put into words here, and for so many years. I still do.

No child should have to feel guilty for growing up and becoming the functional adult that they were raised to be.

But my mother didn’t know any better. She didn’t know how to exist for herself. I can only imagine her trauma she lived through to believe herself not worthy.

I give her grace in this regard, because I also ended up in a toxic relationship, with a narcissist who devalued and emotionally abused me, and still I stayed for far too long. And though I have endured a great deal of trauma, I still believe it a fraction of what she experienced in her lifetime.

As a girl, I had my mother who constantly built up my self worth, telling me that I was worth it. She told me I could do anything that I wanted, that I had it all within me.

I took this light with me, when I moved to Marietta College, five and a half hours away from little rinky-dink Panama. And I took her with me when I moved to the other side of the planet to live a tropics in overpopulated Central Java.

She was my guiding light that I carried with me.

But, over the years, I witnessed my mother’s light slowly fading away.

I would see glimpses of this gradual dimming during her bouts of major depression, where I would come home to visit her and see her laying in her beloved waterbed, unable to rise, surrounded by massive amounts of clothes and bags of untouched shopping goods and piles of unfinished art projects.

It was jarring to come home to see how she had surrounded herself by massive piles of junk, mounds so large that they overtook my parents’ condemned home.

When I returned from Indonesia, my parents picked me up from the airport and after parking the car in the driveway, my father turned to me and said:

“You don’t want to go in there.”

My stomach sank. I was worried at what I would find.

And my feeling and his words proved true—

My parents’ home had grown ever more uninhabitable as the years went on. But I had never seen it so bad:

I could [only] sit in the kitchen chair. There was no place for me to sit in the living room as the couches were covered in piles and if I could make it to my mother’s waterbed downstairs, I may be able to lay down after shoving some clothes aside. But you had to follow the narrow path; there was no way to move otherwise. Even still you had to step around and on top of piles of things. And the upstairs was completely sealed off.

The hoarding had overtaken the home and their lives.

Most noticeable was that my mother’s light was dimmer. It no longer shown as the bright force she once was.

She was gone. Her deep blue eyes vacant and empty. In them you could no longer perceive her spirit, glimpse that sharp sardonic wit that everyone loved about her, the twinkle and smile she would get when she presented a little gift she had found for you, her ultimate love language.

After my father completed suicide on his couch in the living room, and the couch was removed because of its blood and brain matter remains, and burned—

My mother still did not want to leave.

I physically had to remove her, to lead her out of that home, to my uncle’s and then—when she remained unable to make any decision of her own—I had to pack her up along with her stuff in the car, leading her as I would a small child, away from the massive chaos that was their house and into a senior apartment in Clymer, NY.

It was then that my mother’s light grew ever so slight, that I could not see it anymore.

Over the course of several years later, while completing my doctoral work, making continuous trips back to New York from Ohio, I tried so desperately to reignite her light.

Like a kerosene lamp, I kept applying the lighter, but it seemed her fuel was gone.

The light that was my mother’s spirit and the guiding light that she had been for me, had completely gone out, diminished.

Yet still, her shell, her lantern, remained.

And I carried that lantern with me wherever I went:

I kept trying new forms of light: candles in the way of appointments with psychologists, lighters by way of setting her up at physical therapy rehab centers, along with forced baths—thinking that if I could just bathe her and lotion her, get out of bed and moisturized and in clean clothes, she would feel better, then she would find what little bit of kerosene remained within her, to re-ignite her own flame.

That’s the more apt metaphor.

My mother was still alive. But she was an old rusty lantern with little kerosene left within her. But she could not access it and I could not do it for her. Though I tried, desperately, and for years to do so.

The most heartbreaking part was that, a few years after my father’s death, my mother started, finally, slightly, to ignite her own flame. She bolstered whatever she had left within her to do so.

She engaged some in life: she bought her granddaughter gifts for her birthday and she daydreamed with me of trips she would like for us to make, returning to Prince Edward Island, the home of my beloved Anne of Green Gables, that we visited when I was 14, but, by then—

It was too late. She had the kerosene gathered now but her lamp was too rusty. Her body was about to give out, after years of smoking and neglect to her heart health and mental health—it was simply too late.

To mourn someone who is still here and yet gone is a kind of hell, a pain so deep that it cannot be articulated. At least, I cannot. And word do not often fail me.

This is why people feel so deeply for the loved ones of those with Alzheimers and Dementia—it’s a special kind of grief, almost torturous, because they are right there, you can see their shell, maybe even glimpse their light ever so slight, about to extinguish, and you are carrying their lantern and, yet, you can’t make it work, it just won’t come together.

To mourn someone who is still alive, but who is still right there, is an excruciating type of grief.

Because it doesn’t seem to end or you don’t know when it will. It just goes on and on, and you never know when it will cease.

—

I miss my mother and my heart hurts often for her. I long for her.

Many motherless daughters exist and take up space in the world differently when their mothers have passed on from this Earth. It indicates the start to an entirely different stage, a new walk of life for many girls and women.

I will never not miss my mother. I will miss her until the day I die and our spirits are reunited. She was my best friend, my cheerleader, my saving grace, my biggest confidant. My mother’s spirit was unlike no other and it’s not only because she was my mother.

It’s because she was one hell of a warrior to make it through the life she did, still with a kind heart and love for others. Even if she became unrecognizable at the end.

I have all the respect and love in the world for her.

But I also know what it is like to miss her in life.

I comprehend Steinem’s words in a way that only those who loved their mother when they were a shell can. Those shells taking the form of Alzheimers, Dementia, Brain death, Major Depression and Trauma or the likes, can know.

Does it make it easier then? To let her go?

Again, it is not so simple. I am thankful she is no longer suffering, as that is what much of her life was. I am grateful that she is at peace. There are worse things then death.

And I know she still exists: I have felt her spirit in its whole form, been enveloped in her true light since she has walked on and I know—

I know—

that she still exists and is wholesome and healed now.

Though I still pine to hear her voice calling me “Smelly Belly” just one more time.

But I also have to face the reality and remember the truth: I ached for her when she was alive too, for many many years when I did not recognize her, this body of the elderly woman who sat in front of me, this semblance of my mother.

Mourning for someone who is still there but not is a…unique situation. Where the lines of life and death become blurred and not as distinct.

These ones who live among their beloved in their shell form, as they appear only as rusty lanterns for so many years… when you can only see them only if you peer deep down inside the lamp to the slight blue flame, and only then you remember that they are in fact somehow, almost imperceptibly, still there.

I reflect on this now when I consider my aunt and cousin, about to lose their mother and grandmother, respectively, from the disease of Alzheimers.

When someone who is a shell is finally, entirely, gone, it is complicated:

It provides a closure and a peace that had not been there before, in “life,” at least as it had become known to them and to we who loved them.

So, now, free and released from her burden of a life of suffering and illness and pain, I am grateful she is finally at rest. Healed. Whole. Her spark and spirit reignited. Her light is there. Her rusty lantern replaced.

But I also mourn the years that she was here but not [able to be] present with us:

I know the experience to grieve the living as though they are dead.