Our bodies remember things much differently than our brains. Our bodies use our senses to recreate moments. In times of duress, our senses are in overdrive and pick up every detail and hold it until a trigger commands it’s release. Late summer and early fall brings my mom’s illness to the forefront. It’s like I am seeing things sharply but also zoomed way out of focus. There are times that I honestly feel like I am a stranger looking in on this life because it seems too bizarre to have it be my own. I was talking with a newish friend the other day and recounted the last 3.5 years. My mom’s passing, my dad’s death, finding out I have a half-sister, COVID, homeschooling on the road in an RV during COVID, my Grandma’s sudden passing, oh and Pearl now has a bunny named Juniper, that lives in our garage.
November will mark 4 years. My mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in late July and died 4 months later. Just like that. No notice, no eminent risk, no warning. Just a pain that started in her stomach, an unlikely diagnosis, a monstrous surgery, a “recovery” that never led to any sort of actual recovery, prolonged agony, death. The end. The life of my mom, and my kid’s grandma; just gone.
As I take in the way the bright sun spends most of the day burning off the dampness, it sends me back. Back to watching the bitter, evil suffering on my mom’s face. Back to the feelings of hopefulness, only to be replaced by shock and anger. Back to me endlessly reassuring my mom that this was just going to be a blip in her life. Obviously she would have the surgery that would undoubtedly save her life. She would probably have some chemo, which would suck, but then everything was going to be fine. A blip, I repeated. In my head I pictured the timeline of her life, she had had plenty of shitty lows, this one would be lower than those, sure, but then she would be rewarded with happiness and longevity. I suppose, she has peace now but it’s still too fresh for me to accept so instead I watch the leaves turn autumnal colors, the darkness take over the daytime hours, the spiders balloon, the crops dry, and the dew sit on the grass. Fall affects me, I cried on the way to work last week for no reason. Fall is that no-reason, reason. I was really sure that my mom would outsmart death. I really believed in the whole blip thing. I just kept saying it, for my sake and hers, probably more mine. Death is hardest on those that are left behind. I didn’t want to be without her. We had a Cayman vacation booked. A Disney trip booked. She couldn’t wait to see the kids play sports at Wallace. Girls shopping trips would be plentiful. Multiple daily phone calls back and forth and back and forth because we both suck at being able to find and answer our phones on the first try. All the firsts for Pearl, Bode and Gus; graduations, proms, weddings.
Instead, she sat miserably in pain at Gus’s 3rd birthday party on October 6th, 2019 and that would be the last time she saw her grandchildren.
Still though, I have strength. Being a mom myself has helped me through. Kids love fall. Pumpkin farms, the leaves crunching in that satisfying way under foot, soccer, and halloween take over their little hearts. So I continue on, mostly happily, for their sake. On October 29th, 2019 I drove from St. Joes hospital where my mom was dying, to Wallace Grade School for a Halloween parade, then back to joliet to meet the van that carried my mom to the joliet hospice house, where she would die 5 days later. Those days flew by in a blur of fall colors along the highway. I’d see combines and fall decor but wouldn’t really “see” them. It was like I was looking through everything and everyone. Even though the kids and their busy worlds of school halloween parties, book fairs, and parent-teacher conferences aided in dragging me along, it also angered me. It all seemed so pointless. I also hated that mothers were still expected to be everything to everyone but that’s exactly the point. We as mothers love our kids so much that it’s painful. My kids needed me and I needed them. The back and forth dichotomy of over-sugared children clad in Halloween costumes and watching the slow process of the most important woman in my life being taken away, simultaneously, still seems so odd.
Faith also helps. I wasn’t one of those who turned my anger on God. I was angry, but not at Him. I think it would be hard to be a non-believer because at least I have the sense that my mom is finally free from pain. The anger that raced in her heart for most of her married life, now softened. I also like to picture my mom and grandma together half-heartedly quarreling about who’s right on a certain topic. My dad and grandma playing pinochle. I honestly don’t know what my mom does to pass the time in heaven. Maybe she is finally playing tennis or pickleball, she’s certainly not sitting down. She was never much for sitting.
She was a mover and shaker. My mom was the original bad ass. I’m talking the type of woman who would out work all of the men in her AT&T garage and look like a million fucking dollars doing it. She drove a bucket truck for the phone company and was a member of IBEW for 37 years. She’s just always been cool. A pomerette in high school, rocking the white boots and short shorts by day and waitressing at night. She was the eldest, clearly the boss of all bosses and you’d better not question her authority. She was literally everything all the time. She was a feminist who had conservative morals that shaped my early views of what it meant to be a woman and a woman of God at that. She listened to the Indigo Girls and Pearl Jam but also had Rhythm Nation on cassette, all of which I would steal from the center council of her car. She would take me to Sam Goody and buy me the explicit versions of the CD’s I wanted. She kept things real with me, she never pressed or pried, she gave me opportunities to make mistakes, and didn’t judge me when I did. My mom would wear Redwing work boots and high heels, and generally did so in the same day. She was humble but also bold, but not in an attention seeking way, though of course she did have your attention because she was so damn beautiful. She would iron her Levi work jeans and watch weird dramas on PBS. She took pictures of lilies, sunsets, and her dogs. She went Facebook live non-stop during harvest season as she would drive a combine through the field. My mom was strong both mentally and physically. She valued her health and I can still picture her on that old, primitive Precore rowing machine that I helped move every time we relocated. She was all emotions and wore her heart on her sleeve, her anger always brimming. Doing things for others helped to offset that anger within. She had such a generous heart and spoiled her inner circle. She lived off of instinct and intuition and would rarely clue you in to the how or why of what was going on, you just knew to go along with it. She was empowered, and knew exactly what she was capable of. She had an eye and a knack and could walk into an antique shop, pick up the most random item and place it on a shelf at home and it would like it was meant to live there. She loved to move things around, whether it be perennial plants or a sofa, nothing stayed in the same spot for long. She knew where every Dunkin’ Donut was in northern Illinois, along with the quickest route to get there. When a google map tried to tell you differently, you ignored that google map if you knew what was good for you. My Grandma also had a good sense of direction and the same predilection for being right about the directions, or anything, really. I can recount three specific occasions in which my Mom and Grandma had stand-offs regarding directions, one of which was in Central Park, NY. I am still not quite sure why two women who had never spent much time in NYC thought they knew directions there, but they believed they did. And so we ate our lunch at The Tavern on the Green in silence. The women in my family are strong-willed, tough to live with but as I’ve learned over the last couple years, damn near impossible to live without. I’ve settled into my grief and while I have this sense of sadness around me, especially this time of year, I revel in the fact that I had them at all. Grief is an expression of love and I am so lucky they were mine to love.
3 months before my moms death.
mpoweredstate 