More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
will always be someone they think to call, someone they want to talk to, because my mother is far beyond my sight, beyond the reach of my voice, and not a day goes by when I don’t think of something I wish I could tell her.
I could think was that if she had died, imagining her in heaven would be no comfort at all.
But her illness, the first serious one of her life, was a turning point for our family, an upheaval from which there would be no lasting recovery.
What had seemed like stability proved to be a flimsy, shallow facsimile of it, a version
known to so many American families, dependent on absolutely everything going right. When something went wrong, as it often did, I watched my parents push down their worry and fear and work harder.
But in this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you’d hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them.
Sometimes I wonder if being their child, a product of their choices and their faith if not their genes, is what made me believe that another life might be within my reach.
The possibility of creating a different kind of family, one I would not have to question my place in, had long been appealing to me as an adoptee, and I knew that I might never have the experience of seeing a face like mine unless I had a child of my own.
We knew so little of ourselves or the world when we got married, but we were right to believe that we could change and grow together and make each other happy.
I struggled to accept how little I could do for him and my mother, my attention and energies divided between the family I was raising and the one that raised me.
No one in my family had ever gone to graduate school, and I did not fully anticipate what several years of not maximizing our income, facing every shock and setback without a practical safety net, would mean.
Our “broke” bore no resemblance to my parents’ “broke,” because ours was finite and because we always had other options: we could have quit our graduate programs, avoided having children, tried to pursue more lucrative careers.
We’re often told that we will rise, reap the rewards, if only we work hard, have faith, wait our turn. What I wish I’d understood sooner is that my family didn’t have time to wait.
there’s a reason that he worries far less than I do, opens bills without dread, generally believes that things will work out in the end: he is from a family for whom things do work out.
He runs to our room, and I say the words, the words I still can’t believe, for the first time.
I never imagined that he would simply die, quietly, peacefully, in his sleep.
I have just enough of what some would call perspective to be glad that none of these things happened, that the moment of death was the peaceful one he’d prayed for. But I cannot be grateful for how he died. He could have lived a hundred years, and my mother and I wouldn’t have been ready to let him go.
I think of how many times I have heard terminal illness and death referred to as “equalizers,” as if they can flatten our differences and disparities simply because they come for all of us sooner or later. Sickness and grief throw wealthy and poor families alike into upheaval, but they do not transcend the gulfs between us, as some claim—if anything, they often magnify them. Who has the ability to make choices that others lack?
This is a country that takes little responsibility for the health and well-being of its citizens while urging us to blame each other—and ourselves—for our precarity under an exploitative system in which all but a small number of
us stand to suffer or lose much. A country that first abandons and then condemns people without money who have the temerity to get sick, accusing them of causing their own deaths. It is still hard for me not to think of my father’s death as a kind of negligent homicide, facilitated and sped by the state’s failure to fulfill its most basic responsibilities to him and others like him. With our broken safety net, our strained systems of care and support, the deep and corrosive inequalities we have yet to address, it’s no wonder that so many of us find ourselves alone, struggling to get the help
...more
these were not inevitable outcomes, nor matters of pure chance and inheritance, an avalanche of genetic misfortune. He needed access to quality health care in order to manage and treat his illnesses. He needed it throughout his life, not only in his final years,
But the regret and anger I bear is a constant ache, fierce and gnawing and deep, so entwined with my grief that I cannot begin to parse where one feeling ends and another begins.
I still found some reassurance in the rhythm of the liturgy, the prayers I’d known since childhood, the echo of moments when I’d felt a whisper of something like grace.
I texted my friends: There is no room at all for my feelings with the kids here. They were all sympathetic, but they reminded me that it was important for my children to be there. Even if they weren’t super close to your dad, it’s their first experience with death. They need to be able to witness it and say goodbye. I knew this was true. Still, I kept wishing that I could be cared for, instead of having to be a caregiver. I didn’t want to have to be a parent while I buried my father; I only wanted to be a grieving daughter.
I never quoted Czesław Miłosz to them—When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished—though I was tempted to do so, once or twice, as a joke.
had not considered how my experiences as an adoptee would tint the edges of my grief when I began to lose them.
After my father dies, I become, for a time, someone I do not recognize. Entire weeks are all but lost to me, scooped out of my once-airtight memory.
Punishing myself, keeping myself in as much pain as possible, seems like something a good daughter should do if it is too late for her to do anything else.
Well, I think, a bit defensively, because I am. Am I not still doing what needs to be done: getting up every morning and going to work, taking care of my family, saying yes to anything anyone asks me to do? I haven’t dropped a single ball at work.
I am an expert at grieving under capitalism. Watch and learn.
Nor does the thought frighten me, as it always did before. What if you didn’t have to feel this way anymore? my mind proposes, in moments that are deceptively calm, moments when I am not sobbing in the shower or screaming in my car because I cannot scream at home. What if the pain could just end?
Neither of us expected fairness in life, especially after Dad’s death. But this—this was merciless.
I didn’t ask him if our kids had heard me crying. I didn’t ask if they were worried. The only child I could think about was me.
Hers was the loss I never saw coming.
My father never feels closer or farther away than when I return to this place to find him gone. Now I’m walking a dog he never met, wondering if he knows what my mother is facing; what we are going through without him. I turn around, the mountains a reassuring wall at my back, and let Buster lead us home for lunch.
It was always special to have a little time alone with him on the weekend, because he had so few of them off.
For a moment, I considered asking her for the reassurance I still craved, a kind of secondhand absolution:
I liked it when she joked about him, spoke of him in the present tense. Our lives may be linear, finite, but our love for each other is not so easily confined.
For the rest of the day and most of the night, I cannot stop crying. I cry while I eat or drink. I cry in the shower, and when I lie down to try to sleep. Even when I am worn out, too hoarse for my sobs to make much of a sound, the tears keep coming, silently drifting down my cheeks.
I finally realize that I have developed a deep and reflexive anxiety about phone calls, because every call for weeks has been about my mother’s coming death. My husband starts carrying my phone for me, letting me know when it’s something I need to respond to.
For me, grief is like waking up every day in a different house. I feel as though I ought to know my way around by now—I have been grieving for my father for more than two years—but find that I am continually losing my bearings, struggling to learn the layout anew. I will walk through a door in my mind that I didn’t even notice the day before, trip over a memory I’ve relived a thousand times, and it’s as if I were seeing the space around me, breathing in this hushed loneliness, for the first time.
have to explain so much before they can understand, and even then there’s no way for them to join me in the past. It’s the same when I bring up my father or my grandmother. The three people who saw me through my childhood, who remember best what I was like as a baby and a little girl, are gone, and now I carry these stories and memories alone. Three deaths, one composite lump of grief.
Grief is a chasm, one I can lose myself in without trying. And yet it’s not quite the unyielding abyss I feared it would be. I thought they would feel farther away—that they would both be lost to me, and that it was what I deserved. But now, sometimes, I feel they are so close, as if they were only in the next room, as if one of them might hear me if I called. It’s not a presence, exactly. But not an absence, either.
Of all the places they lived together, I think it was their favorite. It was a home they owned outright after so many uncertain years; a home that gave them community. A home they could feel proud of.
When I woke, it occurred to me that perhaps my mind is trying to mother me, now that my mother is gone.
the hope that it stops, but have learned that if I acknowledge it instead, give it some of my attention, it may quiet, its warning
It has taken time to understand the ways in which grief can interact with and feed my anxiety; sometimes, I think, I lean too far into it, let my mind run away with worrying and planning, so that grief is not all that I feel.
I don’t want to say that she saved us from our grief, because neither loss nor healing works that way. But with her, we’ve been able to access a kind of effortless happiness we hadn’t known for a long time. She has given our weary, grieving family another place to put our love, a shared focus that isn’t all about what we’ve lost, and I am often reminded that this, too, is part of mourning: trying to find new joy where we can.
all the time, dreading May, when everything will sound and look and smell exactly as it did when she died.
But perhaps I shouldn’t be so shocked, because if I know anything about my mother, it’s that she gave the best of everything she had to others—to me, especially—and that she was always, always thinking of me. I can’t help but believe that she may yet find other ways to surprise me.
