How Losing My Mother Brought Me Back to Myself | Part I
Once upon a time, what feels like a lifetime ago, I managed & maintained a genealogical-based blog that led to writing and publishing several of my works of fiction, including self-publishing my first novel, The Children’s Field, in September of 2019. After a few months pause to breathe & regroup my thoughts, I felt ready to turn my focus to my second novel, with plans to complete a rough draft, edit and publish it in March 2021. That all came to a screeching halt Memorial Day weekend 2020, when, between trips to the hardware store and planting a vegetable garden, my father called with the news that shattered my reality.
“Your mom’s been taken to the hospital . . .”
Unbeknownst to me, she’d been visiting my brother’s family. That Sunday morning, while sitting with her grandkids in the living room mid conversation, waiting for her tea, something . . . happened. She began taking her glasses off and putting them back on, she couldn’t speak, and eventually, she leaned her head back on the sofa, unresponsive. 911 was called. Under COVID protocol & safety guidelines, my brother was unable to accompany her in the ambulance, so he followed behind in his vehicle, watching as the ambulance stopped several times before arriving at the hospital.
While my brother waited alone in the parking lot of a hospital he couldn’t enter, I raced to my parents to pick up my father, before driving the eight hours to my brother’s, ruminating on what ifs, yet never once considering the inevitable final outcome. Although we weren’t able to visit, we were given nightly updates by the staff on duty. I’ll never forget the swell of joy I felt at hearing her night nurse proclaim what amazing progress she as showing. Although she had been induced, she was waking up! She was responding to touch! She was flexing her toes! In fact, he was certain she would be released before he returned on duty the following week. And I suppose I should credit his misjudgment and false hope because he was right about one thing: she was gone by the end of the week.
As a child, I played “Grownups” with my cousins and I can vividly recall that I always wanted to be fifteen. To seven-year-old me, fifteen was the peak age. I would have independence but no real responsibility. I would have a learner’s permit but I wasn’t driving the car alone. In the days and weeks and months that followed my mother’s passing, with all the decisions that had to be made, and my father & brother turning to me for every answer, I wanted nothing more than to be fifteen again. Losing my mother untethered me in ways I had never fathomed. I felt helpless and alone, a scared little girl, lost in the department store of life crying for my mother. Worse still, the intrusive thoughts that kept knocking: Had I caused her death to happen? Was I to blame? After all, I was the one who did the math around the time I turned thirty, wondering how old my mother had been when her own mother had passed, and how I struggled to put myself in her shoes at the realization of her young age. She’d been 34 when she lost her mother; I buried mine mere months before my 33rd birthday. What other reason could there be if not karma for picking at the scab of generations of motherless daughters?
Depressed, struggling and lost, I returned to therapy after the funeral, bemoaning to my therapist how I longed for a blueprint to life; how much simpler things would be if only someone or s o m e t h i n g could tell me the next right step forward.
“Don’t you think you’d grow bored or frustrated with that kind of life? Having every decision laid out. before you, with no input, and no ability to choose a different option, a different path?”
“No; I think it would hurt less. Every loss would be there, written on the blueprint so you’d know when it’s coming. You would have time to plan, you would be prepared for it. It wouldn’t catch you off-guard.”
She nodded. Took her time in responding. “Let’s say you have that blueprint and you knew what was coming . . . what would you have done differently to prepare for that?”
My throat tightened and I gnawed at the inside of my cheek, unable to speak the words as the tears fell. We both sat in the silence as I cried until the realization and the words could slip past my lips.
“Nothing. Nothing could have prepared me for this.”
“The worst happened, and then it passed. You lost the person you thought you couldn’t live without and then you kept living. ”
It’s been five years, and though I usually smile now when I think of her, sometimes, the loss of her still feels as raw and gruesome and painful as the day we were finally permitted to enter the hospital, sitting there, helplessly holding her hand, and watching her slip away. Because I didn’t just lose my mother or my friend that day, I lost that version of myself, too. What I came to realize was that, in so many ways, I’d been living my adult life as that fifteen-year-old girl. After high school, I moved to the city my mother suggested. I took a job at a library because she said it would be a great place to work. The first house I bought was one that she had found. My first dog while living solo was one she had rescued for me.
In the aftermath, I struggled to untangle myself from the vines my mother had planted; vines to both help me establish my own life while simultaneously living vicariously through me. I had to discover who I would be without her. Shopping no longer held the same appeal it once did, and I often left stores with sunglasses lowered, fighting against tears at each mother/daughter pair I encountered, envious of their time together. Family history & research lost the allure without someone to share information and new discoveries. Work on my second novel ceased as I lost my sounding board and draft reviewer.
Instead, new, or perhaps old, interests reemerged. I found myself back in school, and three years later, graduated with my degree in Interior Architecture & Design. I worked on home projects and built my own business. I traveled, both to favorite haunts like Washington DC and to new places: Los Angeles, Boston, and Europe, twice.
In the thick of grief, I found myself again.
I discovered a woman who is fiercely strong and independent. A woman who learned her true style by her mid-twenties, influenced from an early age to discern quality over quantity. I discovered a homebody with a wanderlust streak. I discovered a desire to minimize, to peel back all the layers and return to the things that have always mattered most to me: time, beauty, memory, ritual, and story. I discovered I wanted to live a life shaped by heritage, not as something behind me, but as something I live with. The work I do now grew from these discoveries. The homes we build, the wardrobes we curate, the traditions we honor, and the stories we tell. They’re all part of the same thread. They’re how we remember who we are and who we come from. They’re how we stay rooted, even as we evolve.
Though she’s no longer here, my mother lives on. In the traditions I continue, season after season, year after year. She is in my mannerisms, my voice and my true laugh. I see her eyes every morning as I’m getting ready for work. Her signature is forever etched on my arm, intertwined with a black rose. And as forty creeps ever closer, I’m beginning to see her laugh lines near my eyes when I smile.
And, best of all, I rediscovered my passion for family history and for writing. But that’s a story for another day . . .
Grief requires us to grow into a life we didn’t choose. The books below helped me learn how to move through that growth with a little more grace. They’re the ones I return to again and again. If you’re in your own season of grieving, I hope one of them will meet you where you are.
🫶🏻