thirty

on grief and death and anniversaries

TW: extensive talk of suicide, suicidal ideation. Please take care.

I have been climbing the walls of my grief, scrabbling the fortress that holds me locked into time and anniversaries. I want to reach the top and peak over to the other side. I have questions and they are not here, at the foot of the wall.

Today marks 30 years since my mother died suddenly from a berry aneurysm, a genetic weakness in the major vessels in her brain. Her death was instant and immediate, and my brother and I found her on the couch that evening, thinking she was sleeping.

I dreamt of Mom the other night. The kind of dream I had nightly the year after her death, where the family discovers she’s not really dead and we are reunited and we get to say all the things we had been wanting to say before the saying of things was robbed from us. Even now, thirty years later, my dream-self fumbled through the complex mental sorting of what it meant that she would leave without an explanation. That she could disappear and reappear, the intervening years lost for us all.

In these dreams, there is always more relief than anger. More desperation to be with her again than a demand for an answer. This is the nature of grief, I suppose, that we would give almost anything to be reunited with love than to sort out why love would leave in the first place.

Photo by Kym MacKinnon on Unsplash

In my dream, I hide away for a bit. Anticipating but fearful. What if this, in itself, is a hoax? What if someone is leading me on? Making my hopes surge only for them to be shattered once again. What is the point of doing that to someone, I wonder, and in my dream I wander around for in quiet desperation.

She is in Holland, they say. I speak to her on the phone and I barely recognize her voice, but my heart seems to know the truth of it. She is here and alive, and she is on her way. We will be together again.

Someone says that she is a cat and I scoff at this, and then wonder (as we do in dreams) if this is the only way that she can come back. I wonder what kind of cat she might be, and whether all the cats I’ve ever owned are some strange reincarnation of her all along.

In the dream, there is a party happening, and I do my best to assist with the preparations. We are in a strange building like a hotel or boarding house, with more bedrooms and bunk beds than one house could possibly need. There is a pool, but I do not swim. I don’t want to be wet when Mom arrives.

My sister sees her first. I find them in a corner talking and crying and Mom is not a cat and is very much Mom, and I pace anxiously for my turn. Why are they taking so long?

The anger I feel about her long disappearance vanishes when she hugs me. I make her tea and we sit side by side, touching, always touching, and she is warm and soft and her laugh… I know her laugh. Her eyes are wide and wet and sincere and she does not apologize but we talk about things I cannot remember, and time stands still the way it always does in these dreams.

She turns into a cat then, and she explains this is how it must be. But she will return and visit, and it won’t take 30 years this time. She promises me, and I think of other promises made and not met and I do not trust it to be true. I am well-acquainted with sorrow, even in my dreams, and I feel myself pull away into the tangled threads of who I have had to become. I have so many questions. I have so many things to tell her. There is not enough time. In dreams, there is never enough time.

I wake as Rinna comes up the stairs, and though I am desperate to stay asleep and with Mom, my first dog’s whimpers at the edge of the bed remind me of what is real and what is not. It has been thirty years without her and she is not coming back, though there is nothing I wouldn’t give to hear her voice and the warm embrace of her body and the way only she could say my name. I want to sit on the couch where she died and hold her hands in mine and tell her that she is beautiful, the way I always did.

I would have her back. Logic and reason and declarations of better off and snatching someone from heaven mean nothing when it comes to my desire to see her again. To be with her again. To sit where we always sat, and remember. For her to forget her tea in the microwave for the ten thousandth time and for me to tease her about it and for her to accuse me of sneaking chocolate chips from the cupboard when it wasn’t me, because chocolate chips make my teeth hurt.

I would take all of that back. I would give anything to take all of that back.

A few years after she died I heard her voice in a video. She was giving a speech at my sister’s wedding, dressed in a sweet peach dress because she had gotten her colours done and she was a spring and peach made her glow with a radiance only she could pull off. And I remember listening to that video and trying to make sense of her thick accent and the far-off sound of it, and how there was such a profound disconnect between what I remembered and what was. The way people say my dad has an unidentifiable accent when to my ears he is simply my dad. Watching that video of her speech,I remember thinking then I was losing her and eventually she would be gone forever and I would go down in history as the very worst daughter. Most of my memories are like that now. Silent, like old movies, where there is movement and colour but no sound. Her laughter is simply the shake of her body and her singing a silent echo of nothing.

I was fifteen when she died, and in a few days I turn 46. I don’t understand how this happens. I do not understand where 30 years has gone. I do not understand how I remained living when I only wanted to die. When I sat and considered what it would take to get back to her. When living was a waste of time and I was so done, done done.

I was fifteen when we found her. I turned sixteen the day after the funeral. And I (being the undiagnosed autistic young woman I was) slipped into deep disassociation without knowing that’s what it was called. I have Polaroid shots of memory during those years, snippets that cannot reasonably be strung together. Faces float in front of me, and they are trying to say something but I cannot hear or understand them. I am robotic in my movements, in my care of my self. I am sick constantly, one round of antibiotic to another. I cough so much from consecutive bouts of bronchitis my soprano capacity diminishes and I demure to an alto.

There is a reckless undercurrent to everything I do, in the hopes I will die and the grief will be over. I drive too fast and kiss too many boys. I drink and smoke and drink some more. I hang out with reckless individuals who drive fast cars down curving roads, and we do idiotic things like climbing from one moving car to another. They are invincible and I don’t want to be alive, and every moment feels like an entrance to death and the warm embrace of my mother.

The dreams? They lasted for a long time. This idea that she wasn’t gone, and there was some grand conspiracy and injustice keeping her from me. I was a zombie for months, until one night… another dream. She is gone she is gone she is gone. The death sentence repeated over and over, my dream-self running and screaming through our old house demanding she show herself, the way I had done days after her death, my panicked boyfriend chasing after me and trying to settle me. I woke from that dream in a strange bed under a thundering sky and in that stormy moment I understood this was real and I was lost and everything was worthless. And I wept then like I hadn’t before, because the parts of me that died with her were calling me to a darkness sweet and warm and inviting.

She has been gone 30 years today. The trauma dances along the edges of my bones. It has not left. It never will. I will be 80 and counting the years and I will still feel the haunting of an ancient ghost from the night my mother died. To the slow, incessant screaming that began in my head and would not stop for many, many years. We did not talk about trauma in the late 90s. That wasn’t a thing. The internet hadn’t opened our awareness to email, let alone social media and online research journals and the vast array of information that would flood our minds and change our lives. We had none of that. We had the language of faith and the language of medicine and everything else in between had to fit into one of those two categories. For the living, at least. For the zombies, neither of those suit particularly well, and so we find ourselves detached and those who see us find us a puzzle they cannot sort or piece together. And so we leapt from moving cars with the wild hope that we would fall and die and we could transition to whatever vague categories exist for the dead.

I envisioned my death a thousand ways. Drowning and violence and accidents and the sweet invitation to simply never wake up. I could not tell anyone this, of course. Even writing it now feels dangerous, though I know I am still here. It takes little effort to recall the devastation of those days and the wide open door of death’s welcome. Tell me what you will of faith, but I had no desire to be with Jesus in those days. I wanted my mother, and I was determined (in some respects) to find a way back to her.

When I got my license I would drive whatever car someone was willing to lend me and sit at her gravestone. I considered how long it would take to dig down to her coffin. To open it and crawl inside and let the dirt slide back down over both of us. I wondered if it would be more efficient to kill myself at the cemetery to make it easier for everyone. I wondered where I could get a gun.

Fake it ‘till you make it. You know? As an undiagnosed autistic, by 15 I was a pro at masking. I could convince anyone of anything. I could convince the well-meaning (and loving) adults who stood in my life that I was fine. Sad, but fine. I don’t think they knew I was actively hoping for death. Pretend, pretend, pretend. Plaster a smile and wash your hair and go to school and do the things that make it seem like you’re well-invested in your life and no one sees the deep darkness of nightfall and the desperation to press the delete button on your life while your head is on the pillow.

I’m still here, obviously. 30 years later and I’m still here and I’ve lived this life and I’m still living it and I suppose that’s something. I have things I would tell my 15 year old self, but most of it is pedantic garbage, and I would much rather sit cross legged across from her irate form and let her lose it completely the way she needed to. To hit and scream and yell and curse and self-injure and let loose all the fury of grief too young. And I would say nothing but remain present for the tirade and my own heart would break at all she did not share and all she clamped down into a dark box of death and I would let her break free into the million pieces she always longed to shatter into.

She would sleep after. The deep sleep of exhaustion and autistic burnout and relentless grief and unattended trauma. It would not allow her to rest but her body would take what it needed for as long as it could until her mind snapped awake and we would begin again. And again. And again.

She still exists within me. The fury and distrust and the reckless ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude that swims happily beneath the surface. There are few things that truly matter once your life has been ripped to shreds. When you are left to sort out the rest of your life at sixteen. Try to collect meaningful things from your mother while family devours her stuff in the wake of her death. Find a place to live. Move in with strangers. Try to forgive the ones who decided you were old enough to do that on your own. Try to be a reasonable house guest. Try not to die in their house or wreck one of their cars as you contemplate steering into oncoming traffic. Try to be a good daughter to your surviving parent. Try to be a good student, though for what reason you don’t know because if life is pointless college is a joke. Try to be a good little Christian because people are watching and this is your witness and Jesus better mean something to you, even if nothing else does.

My brother nearly died in a terrible car accident a year and a half after Mom died. In the hospital he pulled me close and said one of the nurses was Mom, and even in the care of his life he was tormented by death. I wonder if he wished he was dead the way I did. If death was something to hope for, and whether the cease and desist of ongoing trauma was something he longed for more than anything. We did not talk about that. We were on our own, for the most part. Loved, yes. Housed, yes. But we were without the kind of care two traumatized teenagers required and we knew it. It was a heinous form of neglect… one we still talk about today. There is a bond between us now that no one else can touch or see or understand, and it should have been enough but it wasn’t. Not for either of us, because how could it be? We are not meant to do these things alone.

This is January for me. The slow unfurling of all it was and the invitation for trauma to step in and break me. Again and again. We speak of trauma as something to heal and soothe and calm. And, I suppose, there is wisdom in this. The crack that opened along my soul that January night is a fissure too deep to ease closed. It is a part of me, my resilience, my self-awareness and my future. I accept it as the crossroads it is: where I stood in life hoping for death.

30 years and I am still here. I still have much to tell my mom, to ask and learn from her, but she is gone and she is not coming back and there should be some pretty bow to tie on this but a girl needs her mama and she has been gone for two thirds of my life and I stayed alive against my better judgment.

I wonder, some days, if grief formed me more than she did. If three decades of grief in her absence was more than fifteen years in her presence. Whether the blood bond we shared umbilically was overwritten by 30 years of sorrow. I know how I want to answer that question, but I leave it open and dangling… something to consider for the rest of my life.

I am still here. The dreams remain, as does the trauma-informed hyper-independence and the anger of how those first weeks unfolded. The memories of those early years after her death remain hazy and inarticulate, though the deep desire to die thuds with certainty across every wisp of fog and fuzzy cloud. My blood is thick, equal parts the me of today and the me of yesterday. We coexist, though we rarely share space. I watch her, while her eyes are endlessly on the grave, and I know I carry this within me as a burden and a hope. We knit together by what breaks us, though some edges are never repaired.

The question that slices through me each January is this: would she recognize me? Would the beautiful woman who raised me and knew me best walk across a crowded room because she knew, without hesitation or remorse, who I was? The fifteen year old in me wants to angrily slap the question from my fingers, but I ask it anyway. Can you recognize flesh and blood after 30 years? Can you find familiarity across time and distance? Is there a bond that remains across the chasm of grief?

I like to believe she would. That her beautiful eyes would find mine and it would be enough and love would soak whatever gaps remained in sweet and perfect harmony. It remains my constant and desperate hope that the girl she barely got to raise would make her proud, though I will never hear her speak those words again.

For some, 30 years is a lifetime.

For others, a heartbeat.

In grief, it is the stretching shadow of love longing to be seen.