Resurrected Grief
In today's Unfit to Print, I offer excerpts from a piece I wrote just after my Mom passed away. I share it as a reminder to us all to support each other as we navigate our worlds of grief.
Like many of us, one of the things I’ve struggled with pretty regularly throughout the pandemic is loss. Loss of life to COVID, loss of work, of housing, of friends—so many individual and shared losses it for real feels like a pipe backing up. So I picked up a book that was recommended to me a while ago now, called The AfterGrief: Finding Your Way Along the Long Arc of Loss. The author, Hope Edelman, made note of the ways in which COVID-19 has generally triggered all different kinds of grief for all different kinds of people, for a lot of different reasons. One of the “Grief Types” she writes about that is really resonating with me is the resurrection of old griefs. So many mornings, still, I wake up and think, “I’m gonna call my Mom today,” or “I’m gonna tell my Mom that” only to arrive an instant later at the end of the thought to remember, once again, that she’s gone. Still.
Recently, I re-found a cassette tape of me and my mother talking that I made way back in July of 2000. I was 28 years old. She was recently divorced. The world was a very different place. And I had never listened to it. Once, really soon after she died, I thought about listening to it, and I might have even slid it into a cassette player and tried—but it was too fresh. I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t bear to hear her voice. I feared that her “real” recorded voice would cancel out my memory of what her voice sounded like. Or worse, that I remembered it wrong. Then, in the middle of the pandemic (July 2020) I moved to a different apartment and I “found” the tape again. It took me another 12 months to build up the strength to get batteries and a player that could turn the cassette recording into an mp3 file. So, last week, I listened to my younger mother and my younger self, talking at the kitchen table in her house, with a batch of laundry drying in the background.
Grief has a way of shifting and changing—it never goes away, but it does move, like water. And as a person swimming in it, sometimes I get stuck in the rocks or dry beds, and sometimes, I flood over the edges of the banks. Ultimately though, it’s a choice to either fight the current, or go with it. As I listened to the tape—laughing at some things that I remembered were so distinctly, classically Mom, and getting angry at that impatient 28-year-old me who didn’t yet know how to listen—I was reminded of a piece I wrote during, and just after, she died, in May 2016. All I really remember from back then was being angry that she was gone, at what had caused her death. Of course I tried to get it published, but I had no takers—maybe it was too angry. Maybe there was no way for a reader to enter into that messy part of my grief. Either way, I offer excerpts from that piece for you in today’s Unfit to Print, just to remind us all, it’s okay, even necessary, to grieve…whenever, wherever, and however you have to.
An Illegitimate Disease
So many people still believe that addiction—specifically, alcoholism—is a lifestyle choice, and that if a person is addicted, it’s because they lack self-control. There are even doctors and nurses that believe this.
When my mother returned from the hospital after her first (of two) paracentesis procedures, no one knew about it. Not even me. She hid it with big clothes. Paracentesis removes the build-up of fluid in the belly caused by a failing liver. After the second procedure, we tried a lot of things to help her quit. Some things worked for short stints, some things didn’t work at all. Mostly we felt helpless and exasperated—and alone with it. Because my mother wasn’t a mean drunk, or an angry drunk, or even a sad drunk. She was, actually, a loud and laughy drunk, which is exactly the kind of frustrating alcoholic that befuddles most people and makes them think What’s the big deal? My Mom kept up the house. She kept cooking. She kept laughing. Until, of course, the time came when she didn’t.
My grandmother died of lung cancer in her 70th year. She’d smoked Pall Malls all her life and when she went the first time to check a small nodule on her lungs they said, Eh it’s nothing and did nothing. Nearly a decade later when the nodules were bigger and she was older—much bigger and in no condition for surgery—it only took about a year for her to succumb to the cancer. My grandmother wrote my mother a letter before losing lucidity, a final note of love, that ended with, please sue them.
I remember driving my grandmother to radiation treatment once. I wasn’t told it was radiation at the time. I wasn’t told she had cancer. And honestly, you could never tell anything by looking at my grandmother’s eternally stoic face, which was the face she was wearing when she came out into the waiting room after. I honestly thought she was just getting a checkup. We walked back to the car. I offered to take her to Friendly's for an ice cream—maple walnut on a sugar cone. It was summer. It was her favorite. She said no thanks, and I didn’t even get to think anything of it. I didn’t get to know anything that was true. But by the following Easter, she was hospitalized. And by Memorial Day 1993, she was gone.
Reluctantly, my mother sued. Like how you might make the sign of the cross and bow whenever you pass by a church—superstition—because it was just a straight bad idea to disregard the last wishes of the dead. Reluctantly, the defendant passed a hundred grand across the mediation table along with an NDA that assured the story stayed locked down in a vault. People always think you sue cause you’re greedy. But people like us, that is, broke and broken people, never sue for money. We sue in self-defense. And we always lose, even when we win.
My mother’s drinking, which had been somewhat regulated, leveled up after that. When they take your mother—your best friend—and then they take your story with an NDA, I mean. What’s left?
No one knows why the alcoholic drinks. Even alcoholics who “recover.” When asked why we drink, we usually respond Because I’m an alcoholic. My mother died of alcoholism on May 2, 2016. My sobriety date is May 4, 2001. My mother did not believe she was an alcoholic. At my worst, I did not drink every day. I am what is often called someone Who Stopped In Time. Whenever I hear that phrase, I picture everyone frozen in a game of red-light green-light.
I call myself an alcoholic. For me, it’s an admission that I have a specific limitation: I can’t drink. It’s a limitation that I honestly have to remind myself of every day. Because it is very hard to live with this (or any) limitation in a society that doesn’t really believe in them. That phrase, “If you just ____ hard enough,” says it all. But that phrase is a lie. The truth is there will always be one or two things a person can’t do, and/or that a person in the society is not supported in doing. Like, run a marathon, eat shellfish, lift a sofa, write a book, play basketball, become President. The list is endless and unique, per person. We learn something about what we are made for (and what our society is made for) when we learn what we’re not made for (and who our society is not made for). When society refuses to recognize that its structures limit the growth and development of whole groups of people, the society comes to believe that the inability of those people to achieve success within it is their own personal failing. When alcohol consumption isn’t considered a real limitation, then not being able to stop doing it is considered a personal failing.
At the wake, some people came down the line and asked what it was that had done it. How’d she die. We were too afraid of answering that question to realize what a thing—what a thing—to be asking someone in the family line at their mother’s wake.
But if you’ve ever wondered how you get the death certificate, it’s through the funeral home. They emailed me a copy, which I printed out. Cause of Death: alcoholism. I showed my father.
How do they know that’s what she died of? He said. He was angry. Death certificates are official and permanent. They can be accessed at any time. Used as proof—of what I don’t know. I wasn’t sure how to answer the question. Cause of Death was not an opinion, was it? It was a description of fact. She certainly didn’t die of anything else.
Call them and find out why they wrote that.
I called.
And Ask what doctor.
I Asked.
How could she know? She wasn’t even her doctor!
I shrugged. He looked into the middle distance.
Don’t tell anyone what she died of.
As we stood in the receiving line at the wake, and people asked, I thought I heard the cock crow every time I said, she was ill for a long time.
The worst part about losing my mother to alcoholism is, I want to know why. Even as we say Why is not a spiritual question, I still want—I need—to know why. I got out—so many people get out from under the damning thumb of addiction. Why not my mother?
I’ve had to try to figure this out on my own because my mother can’t talk to me anymore. She couldn’t even really talk to me then. Unlike her mother, she hadn’t taken the time to write me a letter when she could. In her final years, she couldn’t even hold a pen, never mind think clearly. It’s what I remember most from the long years when her health was failing. In the year before she died, my mother had drifted far inside her own eyes. Sometimes you would ask her a question and she’d look at you as if she’d heard an echo over a canyon and was waiting for the whole sentence to arrive.
I didn’t know my mother very well. I used to feel like this was my fault. That I didn’t try hard enough, listen well enough. But I was where I was supposed to be, and what we both lost was a relationship that had time—time to grow up. When my mother’s health started to fail, I felt like I had just become an adult who craved an adult relationship with her, and it was already too late. But in the year before she got too foggy to talk at all, she surprised me.
I’m glad you have your girlfriend, she said, So that you won’t be lonesome.
It was a blessing—a blessing from her that I wanted and didn’t know how much I needed. A blessing that I took—and take still—every day. But her words also revealed so much more about her than I had ever understood. About unhappiness, regret, and the hole left in you when someone you love dies.
—MF
Love the picture of you and your mom
This is such a tender and beautiful essay. ❤️