Call Me When You Get There

Grief never ends … But it changes. It’s a passage, not a place to stay. Grief is not a sign of weakness, nor a lack of faith. It is the price of love. - Unknown

During childhood, and especially adolescence, there’s the familiar narrative of feeling oneself to be invincible, of doing stupid shit with no thought for the consequences.

I never felt this way. From as early as I can remember, I was afraid of-well, pretty much everything. I had crippling social anxiety which caused me to be selectively mute in school (though it wasn’t called this at the time). I was afraid of toilets and string and accidents, of public places, and of anyone who wasn’t family. I clung to the notion of safety and the comfort of home.

When it came to movies, I remember being frightened by one in particular, a 1996 release called Fly Away Home. In Fly Away Home, a young girl- probably around my own age at the time of watching- gets the news that her mother has died in a car accident. She then has to move in with her father who she is estranged from and deal with her world being turned upside down. The girl and her father end up forging a bond by raising Canada Geese together, training them to go south in the winter. The story was overall lauded as a heartwarming family film. There was nothing graphic in its content- the death of the mother was completely off-screen, at least according to my memory. And yet, it freaked me out completely.

My mother had a laugh that held nothing back, a good, honest cackle. She loved to cook, and even when she didn’t, she did it for us almost every night. The first thing I thought of as a child when I thought of home, and of safety, was her, moving around a warm kitchen rolling biscotti or sipping coffee with her olive cheeks flushed after her daily morning run. The idea that I was a mere mortal, impermanent, was easy for me to believe. But the idea of someone as solid and real and safe as my mom suddenly being gone- that felt just wrong, like if it could happen, nothing was sacred and anything could. It was one of the first, greatest fears I can remember.

This fear, along with a lot of my other childhood fears, faded with time, making room for new, different anxieties. I was afraid to start driving and was quite literally terrified when we were shown a video in the auditorium of my school of the gnarled wreckage of cars, a teenager’s untimely death. It was supposed to scare us straight, but instead it made me put off getting a license for a year.

When I got out of college in December of 2010, the main fear ruling my mind was the prospect of getting a job. I had what I felt like was an abnormal amount of anxiety around the job search and interview process, and a certain amount of shame to accompany that (mental health at the time was not a large topic, and I never considered my anxiety was not my fault- that it was something I could get help and medication for). This was probably the litany running through my head as I sat down to dinner the night my parents broke the news to me and my younger siblings.

My mother had ovarian cancer.

This earth-shattering news statement was then followed up by a number of disclaimers. Our family doctor was very optimistic; they’d caught it very early and removed 99.9% percent of it. Chemotherapy should completely vanquish anything remaining. To add to this reassurance, my mom was an incredibly fit, healthy person. She ran miles each morning and lifted weights, made and ate home-cooked meals every night, and she was still very young at the age of 51. So even though my first response to hearing the word cancer was to think of hidden, malignant danger, and of death, everyone around us seemed very hopeful about the whole thing. My mom’s chemo went pretty smoothly and after a number of months, she was declared to be in remission, cancer-free. She attended my college graduation, held in the spring of 2011, wearing what she jokingly referred to as her ‘pirate head scarf’, the wrap she wore when she lost her hair, but aside from this she was the picture of health again. She’d even been able to continue working out. For a brief moment, we were out of the woods.

Then came the news that the cancer was starting to come back, only months later. My mom went on to do a different form of therapy, a clinical trial. This did not work as well with her body, and she ended up feeling sick as a result of the treatment more often than not. She was having a lot of digestive and intestinal issues, which led up to her opting to get a colostomy bag. My Dad brought her in for this surgery, spent a night at the hospital, and came back the next day. Our mom was not with him when he sat us down in the living room. I had no idea what to expect, but I wasn’t particularly alarmed; our Dad gave us regular updates on anything happening with my mom, all of which I typically already knew, being the only kid who lived at home at the time.

So I was semi-zoning out when he began to tell my siblings things I was already abreast on. It took me a full minute to adjust when the first strange words, like wisps of smoke before a fire, started coming from his mouth. Couldn’t do the surgery… did a scan… cancer all over.

Two weeks to a month to live.

I remember my body going numb. It felt like I was suspended in the room, pinned to the spot; there seemed to be an unreal quality to everything around me. My dad, usually the picture of stoicism, had started to cry; I wanted to go to him but I felt like I couldn’t move.

My brothers stayed home from college; my sister took time out of high school, and I took time off from my job. Mom was moved home and set up in the living room. She had a hospital bed and an oxygen machine, a morphine drip, and a hospice nurse who would come to check in on her regularly. Things happened so fast it felt like a slow-motion free-fall. My Dad called my grandparents, who took a flight to us. We moved couches and chairs into the living room around Mom’s bed and moved the old wood piano out to make room.

They said two weeks at the shortest but in the end, it only took one. One single week, seven little days since I’d come back from the grocery store and the world flipped upside-down. In that time, I slept in flashes, waking up when one of my brothers would retrieve me for my shift. I’d slip out my retainer and pad down the stairs to the room where the lights were on low and the oxygen machine hummed and my mom would be in various stages of waking or sleep. At different points, my mother’s siblings would stop in, or her closest friends. We all sat on the various furniture and quietly read or skimmed the unchanging, frigid box of the internet. Our togetherness created a warmth in that one room we used least growing up; our knowledge made it a vigil. Mom made a point, in her best moments of lucidity, to talk to each of us alone.

I wish I’d bottled that moment somehow, so I couldn’t forget a single word she said to me. Whether it was the drugs or the limited time she felt pressing on her, she was a lot blunter than she’d even been in life. You’re so talented, she’d say, But I get so frustrated at the way you hold yourself back.

I don’t want to lose you, I told her once, tears leaking from my eyes as she held my hand.

No one wants to lose anyone, she told me.

At that moment I was like that kid from the movie all those years ago, coming home to a dark kitchen, to a house bereft of home, and to news I couldn’t accept. No amount of fear of this very thing in my past had deterred it from becoming reality in the future. All the worry had done was rob me of the precious minutes I hadn’t realized were close to winding down to zero. And no amount of cinema or books could prepare me for what it was really like to be there for the process: to smell the acrid scent of organ rot on her breath or to watch her chest rise and fall for the last time, not knowing it’s the last.

There are things they don’t tell you about grief, about the aftermath.

They outline the process in simple stages: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance. All of which I experienced at some point, but they don’t say anything about the other bits, the unexpected side effects that last beyond ‘acceptance’ like a resounding echo, perhaps especially after the death of a parent.

There was a lot of guilt in the beginning. Guilt for not being attentive enough, for laughing when she said messed up things on morphine and causing our father to snap at us. Guilt for not being around her enough because it was difficult for me. Guilt for the vivid dreams I’d have where she was alive again, alive but still sick, and the relief I’d feel when I woke from them.

There was guilt for the way I felt almost freed at times. From the weight of her suffering. From her opinions, from her worries about me. No one was there to watch me closely, to make sure I ate a good dinner or to say the familiar line “call me when you get there,” when I went out places with my friends, something that in my teens and early twenties I found embarrassing. But the freedom lost its novelty and opened up a door to a deep loneliness. My mom had also been my friend, the only person I took my deepest fears and wonderings to. I used to sit and laugh with her in the mornings while I ate my breakfast and she worked on baking for her home business. Her passing left a uniquely jagged hole I couldn’t fill with other relationships, the edges of which I can still find now by habit, even in the dark.

I saw every member of my family go through a redefinition of sorts. As individuals and as a whole, we were defined by her in more ways than one as the glue that held us all together. There was us before, and now there’s us without her. My relationship with my Dad shifted. He wasn’t just my father but a man with a broken heart, determined to keep us all close. In the ensuing years, I saw him meet someone and fall in love again; facets of his personality emerged that I’d never seen before, things that gave me a glimpse of how he might have been when he was my own age. He eventually remarried and my siblings and I gained two stepbrothers. We’re still close as a family; we healed and reformed, but the bones set different.

It feels weird today to know my mother will never know me as an adult, will never know how I ‘turned out’ for lack of better wording. When I hear other people talking about their relationship with their mothers, I sometimes feel a tugging, a little pang that I will never experience these things again. They don’t know how lucky they are, I sometimes think. But the truth is, I feel lucky too. While there are people who got more time with their mothers, there are people who get none. Or there are people who grow up with distant, unsupportive mothers who never feel like home. My mom put so much into loving, teaching, and protecting us that it was literally her full-time job. The time that I did get was quality, and I feel thankful that I got to know her as a person as well as a mother before she went. I had her for more time than any of my siblings, and it’s the luckiest thing being the eldest has ever given me.

In the end, I lived through something, the lines demarcated between before and after. It left me with a hole I will never fill. I’m not better for it, yet somehow I don’t think I became less. The unthinkable, number one nameless fear of childhood had happened, and here I was, still alive. In the near-decade since she’s been gone, adult life and self-discovery have taken me places I never thought I’d end up. And when I get to each of them, I think of picking up the phone, of dialing that number I still know by heart.

“Just wanted to let you know I got here okay,” I’ll say.