The Inevitability

After excitement, we are so restful. When the thumb of fear lifts, we are so alive. - Mary Oliver

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I remember when I dreamed she died. How old was I? Second grade–seven, maybe. She died and went to Hell. That's what I dreamt. It was so banal and real as I ate my oatmeal and watched her handprint appear, burnt into the grain of the wooden table. I couldn't tell you if I was awake or asleep. I lived a lifetime haunted by her tortured soul in a single night.

When I finally woke up, I followed my mother everywhere the entire morning and cried when we left for school. In the car, I told her about my dream, and upon arrival, she informed my teacher of the reason for my distress. Mrs. Cron, my teacher and mother's friend, told me my mother was an angel. She would go to heaven when she died, which Mrs. Cron promised would be many years from that day.

I don't believe in Heaven or Hell, but as an impressionable youth, the constructs were enough to infiltrate my night terrors. They still do, just not in such literal ways.

The fear of my mother's death lingered throughout my life. She often joked about an early grave. Prophesied, really. As her death neared, the feeling intensified. When the time came and she finally transitioned, the fear left me. With two agonal breaths, the complexity of our dynamic ceased to exist. I began to live.

As many already know, I started hormone replacement therapy after she died. I had feared how she would react. I was afraid our relationship would sour in her final years if I came out while she was alive. That isn't the only way I began to live, though; I sought more peace in my life. I found a better job because I felt like I deserved more respect in the workplace. I finished my degree. I opened my heart and uncovered boundaries I had never honored before. I began to care for myself because I wanted to, not because it made me more appealing or palatable to others. I felt the necessity of loving myself so that I could love others healthily and less dependently. I suddenly felt more secure alone. My anchor detached.

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I had written down the things I wanted to remember during the final weeks with my mother:

I don't want to forget Mom holding me while I cried or me crawling into her hospice bed to stroke her hair and hold her hand. I don't ever want to forget telling her that I love her and that I'll miss her. I can't forget that she squeezed my hand when I called her a badass. I won't forget that I begged her to drink when I learned that people stop eating food and drinking water the closer they are to dying. It is seared into me–the pomegranate smoothie I tried to coax her with instead. Her favorite flavor.

Her refusal.

The peace she displayed after her realization, "Did I just come home to die?"

The resolve. Of all things, to die.

18:20. Full of grace.

At 7:19 PM, the coroner arrived and asked if we needed more time with her. An hour of waiting for their arrival had dragged on with the body of my mother, who was no longer in it. The time would have passed with ease in deep conversation had she been there. All of us quickly said no.

They covered her in a quilt that looked like another mother made it.

After they collected her body, I sat outside, wearing her scarf and smoking a cigarette. I thought so many things at once that I may as well have been thinking nothing. Not a single thing stuck, and I couldn't tell you a word that may have crossed my mind—not a feeling, concept, or consideration worth noting. Devoid. I simply sat, breathing deeply and enjoying the nicotine I had deprived my body of for six months up until that moment.

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Now, as I write this, my mind wanders to Socrates and the book I gave my mother a few months before her passing, The Apology. I wonder if she read it. I like to believe that she did and that maybe she got something out of it, like I had. His decision to choose execution over exile and the calm with which he approached his inevitable end. It reminds me a great deal of my mother's fight with cirrhosis and eventual succumbing to cancer of the liver.

Our healthcare system put her in an impossible position. A lifetime of medical debt, with no guarantee that her life would be saved and the debt wouldn't be passed off to her family. She chose death at home with her family instead of extremely risky and invasive (and uncovered) surgery.

Her last sacrifice and lesson to me:

The inevitability of death does not diminish the opportunity to live well and certainly not to die well. The relationship between the two is clear to me now.

Her last gift:

She quelled my fear.