In the words of Meursault from the first line of Albert Camus’ L’Etranger, “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” Talk about beginning in media res. But it’s a line I’ve been thinking of now for almost two weeks, because for two weeks, my mother has been…no longer part of the physical world. My mom died. Her body is hanging out in a morgue in California waiting for an autopsy (and lest my cavalier way in presenting this seem flat and tactless, this fact really really disturbs me, and it also really made her death hit home for me) before she can be cremated and her soul released.
The last couple of years have been a deluge of one thing right after another, with barely any time to catch air before being submurged again beneath another wave.
I can’t believe my mom is really gone. I hurt.
A Complicated Relationship
I won’t get into the details here, but we had a very complicated relationship. We really hadn’t talked I don’t know when the last time we actually talked was. It was a good conversation. She said she was proud of me. But then she also said she was “Sorry for whatever I did.” That whole non-apology thing. She knew what she did, she just didn’t want to take responsibility for it and say the words. I did not call her when I knew she was declining. She was being toxic and abusive toward her care team at both the hospital and the comfort care hospice and since I’ve been fighting postpartum depression, I knew that I wanted the last conversation to be the good one we had.
Do I regret it? Yes and no. I don’t regret that I didn’t allow our last conversation to be potentially laden with toxic words that would cut me for years to come. I do regret that we were never able to truly reconcile.
This is what I posted on Facebook:
1947-2022.
At 4:54 am, California time, the woman who gave me life, my mother. Pat Roberts left this world.
I was going through photos to find some to share, and you know those articles saying that moms need to be better about being in the photo? I have very few photos of her through my growing-up years. She was always behind the camera.
We had an incredibly, deeply, complicated relationship. My mom could be the nicest, most generous person in the world. She would take my friends in and our home was their home. But because of her own trauma and untreated mental illnesses, she could also be the cruelest person in the world.
A few years ago, when she had her stroke, I had my last conversation with her. It was a good conversation. It didn’t fix things by far, but it was a pleasant talk. I chose not to call her in the hospital in the last few months, because I didn’t want anything to happen that would have an unpleasant talk being our last conversation.
I’m alternating between being numb and really sad. My brother is having a hard time with all of everything as he’s been her caretaker since he was a teen. (Long story). I have waves of feeling sad, but mostly I’m just doing what I do and making reaaaally off the wall jokes because humor is my coping mechanism and frankly kind of a crutch and a defense mechanism, but my humor seems to help my brother too.
Anyway, sharing some photos I was able to find of her. In some, my grandpa and even grandma are there. Also sharing a photo of me as a little girl because she took it and despite all the… bad stuff… I know she loved my brothers and me and that we were her entire universe… every birthday, every holiday…even St. Patrick’s Day and April Fools day were made into huge deals…and Christmas… it was just… she made it magic for us as kids.
She loved crafts, and when homeschooling my younger brother learned why I loved science so much. Over the last few years she went from being an agnostic-paganish-spiritual humanist kind of person to being deeply religious.
She didn’t travel very far in the world…just from Tulare to her final resting place in Redding. She’s had so much pain over the years. So much suffering. And even though I know the deeply traumatic and hurtful things she did to me as a child and teen and young adult were a product of that pain, I hadn’t seen her since 2010. I honestly cannot remember the last time I talked to her on the phone. It might have been the conversation I had with her in December 2019, it might have been her birthday in 2020.
I Miss My Mom
In some ways, I’ve grieved my mom for years. She loved us so much. She just didn’t quite know how to let us grow up and wanted so badly to hold on. I know a lot of it came from me being a very very sick child and doctors not knowing why I was so sick. I also know a lot was from mental illness and her not getting the psychological help she needed. My mom died alone, with a chaplain, and that makes me very sad, but neither my younger brother nor myself could emotionally handle being by her bedside.
My older brother passed away in 2015. Grief came in waves then, and it still comes in waves.
This is my mom, looking how I think of her as looking. I think this was when she stopped trying to dye her hair ash blonde. This is the mom who was always down to play board games – or video games – with me, who I coslept with because I was too afraid to sleep in my own bed as a child, who taught me to sew and cross stitch and knit and do all the crafts. The one who would support any rabbit hole I wanted to go down. This is my mom before she got really really sick starting when I was in middle school.
She’s the mom who screamed at the principal when he accused her of writing my reports for me because I was an exceptionally gifted child and wrote well beyond my years.
She’s also the mom who was scared because I was always sick – very sick – as a child and no one could figure out why. She stayed in the hospital with me while I had severe pneumonia as a 6 year old and was unconscious for weeks. She learned how to help me when I had febrile seizures. She brought me Campbells Chicken Soup and 7-up when I was sick. She was strong.
But she also parented from a place of fear. She was always terrified of something bad happening to me, in particular, but to any of us kids. Because of that she was overly restrictive and extremely over-protective in a very unhealthy way that just got worse as we got older.
I feel like if I take all the parts of my mom that were super mom and leave all the deeply hurtful things behind, then I get kinda down because the good parts of my mom were pretty darn amazing.
I miss my mom. The mom I think of who was fiercly protective of us and advocated from us. The mom who taught me how to cross stitch and craft. I’m glad she’s no longer suffering and in pain. But I miss her – not the mom she became in my adult years, who wsa battling untreated mental illness – but the mom I had growing up, who made a HUGE deal about birthdays and holidays, who loved us with all of her soul, and who would loudly (and quite embarrassingly sometimes) cheer us on.
That’s all I wanted to say.
That and even though I had to separate from her for my own mental health and well-being, I still loved her fiercely and I know she did her best with the tools she had.
