Now what?

My father died when I was eight years old. Fifty-four years later my mother’s heart stopped. That was Friday night at about 6:30. She lived with my sister down in Birmingham, Alabama but has been in a nursing home for the past 6 months in what was a nearly vegetative state I think. Try as I may all those memories that I feel obligated to have at a time like this just won’t come…the cookie baking, the Halloween costume making , the warm motherly moments like when I had the flu or a cold etc. My mom wasn’t a bad person or an inadequate mother or anything like that. I know there must have been times like that. It's just that in my memories of my childhood we were never a particularly close or demonstrative family. That now comes back to haunt me and a better writer than I could probably turn this into something vaguely Shakespearean….”The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

None of those moments present themselves right now and I think I feel almost as badly about that as I do about her passing. It seems one is obligated to have those warm and fuzzy thoughts about one’s family at a time like this, should feel a more piquant sense of loss. I suppose that’s just one more little hash mark on the guilt side of the ledger for me.

Finally, I am now the eldest in our immediate family and I can’t help wondering if that means that I am next. Will my children and grandchildren have the same feelings of insufficiently defined loss that I have? Will they have to struggle for the good memories? If I can offer anything of any earthly use to anyone else at this time it’s the same question…will yours? 

Comments

[Jane]

So sorry to hear about the loss of your mother. Just now opened your latest posting. You are probably out of town now, attending to necessary things in Alabama, but I wanted you to know that I am thinking of you. I lost my mother more than ten years ago -- it was a feeling almost impossible to describe. For 45 years I had had a mother and suddenly it was like someone had snapped the tablecloth out from under the dishes -- the dishes remained in place, but the underlying piece was gone -- and ever so quickly! Hope you're okay.

[Sheila Hyatt]

I wanted to say I was sorry to hear of your mother's death, but that isn't true. Death is expected, even hoped for, at that age. Maybe when people say that are sorry they actually mean that they are sorry that you are having to go through this.

What I do want to say is that I really appreciated your observations. I often read comments, "He/she was devastated, lost, destroyed, etc. after the death of his/her mother/father." I often think that such a person must have a much larger bank account of found memories from which to make withdrawals. I did have the cookie baking, costume making, wet cloth to the forehead mother, but there weren't any hugs and no actual words of love. Plus, it all went away when I hit the preadolescent years, and I spent the rest of my life feeling that I never was good enough.

I like to feel that I've done and am still doing the right things. I went through all the care giving motions with my dad before his death, had my mother live with us for a year, and now see her at least twice a week in a nursing home.

I hope it is different with my children, but who knows? I've tried to be more demonstrative. We communicate. I try to make them feel valued, but in the end, they may feel indifference for totally different reasons.

I was going to send this by email, but seem to have lost your address. At any rate, I am appreciative of your honesty. It helps.