Innocence Lost, Paradise Pending

I love eating sweets during the holidays. I’m a sucker for things like toffee and chocolate with peppermint, and my mom was too. For our Christmases, she would bake a variation of a cereal bar that she covered in chocolate and butterscotch and was certainly all too good. I had almost forgotten about it entirely until my aunt made it again this year. We called it Special K candy. The moniker didn’t age well; but, I don’t come from a family of drug users, so I’m assuming the Special K reference may have been over their heads at its inception.

Baking was always a piece of our kept home, much to my benefit and to her saying “I just really shouldn’t” before warming up two cookies in the microwave. I can understand why she leaned so much into something so sweet; she had been fighting for normalcy and happiness before I was even born, and seemed to pretend like she wasn’t dealing with the challenges of brain tumors. Something like that changes everything. For her, it brought larger-than-fathomable medical bills, issues with socialization, and a harried and erratic romantic life.

When it came to Christmas, she always gave more than she had and never with any apparent distress. The older I get the more thankful I am that she was able to keep worry away from me. I was none the wiser.

December used to be one of my favorite months, but now I hold my breath from the first to the twenty-seventh. My emotions balloon and pop magnificently on the anniversary of her death, and I begin grieving and wondering more palpably again the following year. It’s a cycle that shakes out new memories and changes feelings. It’s been three years since she passed away, which isn’t that long, but each year feels markedly different than the last and more permanent than before.

This particular December had its ups and downs; I finished editing a non-fiction book, I went through a break up, and I finalized two graduate school applications. My editing website is live, and I’ve been writing frequently. There was almost enough going on to make me forget that it was “December,” but it’s a period of time that I can’t help but notice. It’s taken new shapes I don’t fully understand. The anniversary date of her death feels like an animate thing that breaths on my neck, forcing me to remember her illness, remember her love, and remember what the entirety of the process, whether it was the first mention of brain tumors to the last time we saw each other, did to me. It is both earsplitting and pin-drop quiet.

I deal with many of the things in my life by writing in a journal or writing essays or stories. The first year following her death, I wrote essays every month, birthday, and special holiday. The second year, I just let it all go. It wasn’t until this third year that I’ve realized: I’ve been working through the feelings of a loss of innocence, a solidification of abandonment and loneliness. And, I feel guilty for those feelings.

Throughout the process, those close to me gently encouraged me to be sad and give myself allowance to grieve, but it hurt so much that I just wanted it to stop. This wasn’t a sadness I knew what to do with, and there’s only so many places an emotion can go in a body. I wanted to function and not feel so desolate, but the truth was heavy: My mom and former self left together and I didn’t know how to fill those gaps. My heart paid a price and I was grasping for someone that wasn’t there.

I’ve developed a healthy, thick, almost gelatinous sense when I feel the tug of her sick memories. It keeps me safe. The saddest part of it all is that Mom had been changing my entire life, not just in her nursing home years. When my aunt and I talk about her surgeries, she always notes sadly that Mom was different after each one. You have to wonder at what point it’s enough. Neither of us know if we would’ve fought to the point she did.

She had her last surgery late in December of 2019. I have never felt more worry or pysical illness than when I saw her state when I arrived at 4 a.m. to pick her up. Her eyes were vacant, jaw slacked. She couldn’t speak or really acknowledge anything. She could barely sit upright and getting her into the car was essentially like moving large bags of sand; she had no strength. I still think I have some years before I can write fully about this moment, because it is the closest I have ever gotten to hell. Brain surgery day is quite the production, and it took a while to get her situated. While they were prepping her to go under, the doctors explained their plan and timeline with me, to which I answered with tears that escalated into sobbing. They responded with smiles that were meant to be reassuring but felt surreal and Kafkaesque. Her lead brain surgeon assured me that it would be ok, she was considered one of their successes, after all.

The last few years of her life had been tortured by paranoia and long-term care and then adult family home living. I still do not know what they mean by success, and that day was the worst day of my life. Worse than the day of her death, four days later. Sadly, I doubt it was her worst day.

At least two years following her death are tainted time: the memories are fuzzy or pitch black. My emotions were completely exposed. There were months that I only remember as feelings, but don’t remember what I did or who I saw. I felt things I didn’t even know I was capable of and exhaustingly tried in vain to control their route. It’s a bit like watching you saw your own arm off and being rendered incapable of doing anything. You just watch your flesh rip apart at your own hand.

We all have different ways of coping, and while mine have grown to be typically healthy in normal scenarios, the vastness of my mom’s health drew me into coping with an immature and quick-fulfilment lifestyle alongside the resurgence of my PTSD symptoms. I’ve read about reverting as a coping mechanism, but watching myself knowingly slide backwards and having no way to stop it was emotionally, internally humiliating.

This had been incubating for years. The realities of nursing homes, cancer, and watching death pursue someone I cherished changed my positive nature, and I became inconsolable and angry. I was bitter. Most things people did or said to me made me upset. I constantly questioned people’s motives, their kindness, and wondered when they’d have enough of my shit show of emotions; I always expected them to leave and wanted them to. Text messages began to give me anxiety and they would pile up alongside my self-pity. Being around people and being alone held the same feelings, and I couldn’t tell which I preferred.

It was difficult to discern reality from my interpretations. I felt crazy.

I began to wonder if this was how my mom felt. Towards the end, she was especially paranoid and often quick to anger. Her take on things was so warped and dotted with suspicion that I would constantly try to show her where the logic stopped to try to ease her worry. This is a side effect of have a personality disorder alongside a brain that’s been touched by the evils it had. It made me wonder, was this as much a part of me as it was her? Because now I couldn’t control myself either.

Grieving made me volatile, and I did what traditionally volatile people do and got fucked up frequently. It was the drinking and the drugs and the irresponsibility that really bothered me about myself. It was the nights I got blasted so quickly, rolling into a hangover with horrible depression the following day, and only to do it again. Because, why not? As those around me surpassed me in career, emotional happiness, or romance, I was stuck in my own quagmire of an overpowering grief. I expressed this to a close friend recently, who reminded me that moving up with writing wasn’t an option. “Yes, a lot of people spend their mid-20’s growing their careers,” she said while pouring us a glass of wine as I cut asparagus for dinner. “But you literally couldn’t. You had way too much going on…and you’re doing it now.”

And while I do enjoy pot and alcohol and no longer am interested in party drugs or smoking a cigarette when I’m edging towards blacking out, I would like to become sober at some point. Or have distance between my evenings and have my evenings of indulgence be lighter rather than heavier. This is already happening naturally as I become more accustomed to shouldering my grief and am pursuing what I love, but my internal ambition is pacing the room for it to happen immediately.

I’m still exploring what it means to be grieving, and, just like all life following the birth of a baby is postpartum, all my years following the death of my mom are postmortem. There are no more hugs or phone calls or naps on her couch before dinner. Sometimes, I feel her absence so deeply it’s as if I can palpably imagine the person I was before she passed. The person I am now is irreparably changed, and while I remember the woman I was before, she is more like a memory that can’t stick. It’s not that I can’t be happy; it’s that I can’t be untouched by my mom’s death.

I sometimes, very occasionally, wonder what our life would be like if she was still here. If she was healthy. I never entertain this idea for long because it’s just never been true. She was always going to leave too soon. It’s always too soon.

Living normally again seemed chimerical as my grief changed shapes over the years before and after her death. I was a long, deep chasm of realizations and acrimony. And it was here that my mom showed up to remind me that her love will never leave.

When we die, someone, usually family, is responsible for sorting through our things and figuring out what to do with them. One of the first times we did this for my mom, several cloth-covered, floral printed journals that she had written fell into our laps. They’re written to me, not reflective, but more documents of our daily life, sometimes with bits of advice thrown in. I had thought the few I have from the first dig were the only sentimental, tangible totems of love of this kind. A few weeks ago, we found another one.

It's not uncommon for items from all corners of life to be stored in different places when you’re alive, so I guess in death it isn’t unusual to keep finding things. My uncle had been storing some of my mom’s things for her, and they lay forgotten until sometime in the last year they were remembered or found and given to my aunt. It began with an old, very old bag that was clearly meant to hold clothing and most likely military issued or encouraged. The buckles were eroded and the straps were broken, the remnants dusty from age and repeated exposure to Pacific Northwest wetness. It was folded in half, as if a sandwich, and when we unfolded it, laid it down, and unzipped it, several military uniforms in nearly perfect condition were revealed. This was bizarre enough, my parents were out of the military by the time I was born; the clothing were pictures come to life.

There were also two books stored at the presumable foot of the luggage, next to a hat case that carried my mom’s navy hat that I can only assume was for formal occasions. One of them was a photo album. The other was a baby book. The baby book was written to me.

It included things like my first words, my birth certificate (the fancy, ornamental looking one), and my baptism paperwork and photos. There were so many moments she captured that I have memory only from seeing pictures growing up, knowing that they were true, and feeling the memory as if I was there. But, let’s be real. I don’t really have those memories, they’re simply shadows I’ve constructed from pictures.

The baby book was just another surprise, probably one she never intended in her death. When I read it, I hear the voice she used when she spoke to me. There are some things I couldn’t realize while she was alive, and it is the cataclysmic nature of grief that made me ascertain how badly she wanted me to have a full life. In her eyes there was no one more special than me, and I’m experienced enough now to understand not everyone gets nurturing moms. Many people don’t.

These writings are old, written before she was seriously ill and unable to healthily communicate. As they come to me in the wake of her death, still, I am able to reconnect with the first person to love me that I never really got to know as an adult. I gradually picked up the parenting role more and more each passing year, sometime in my teens and definitively in my twenties. These journals show how much alike we were when she was healthy and how much she cherished me. We aren’t so different.

I wouldn’t change anything if I could. It’s just who we were, our relationship born out of circumstance but always with love.

Every time I think I couldn’t possibly write anymore about her death, that I am done, having nothing more to say, I find myself writing tangents that later become what you’re reading now. And with that, I’m not sure I’ll ever be finished.

I guess I’ll just keep writing about her, focus on my craft, and love people the way my mom loved me: with warm acceptance and patience.