The Payout

The Check

I’m holding the check in my hands. The paper feels like a foreign object against my fingers. I’ve imagined this moment for some time now with a myriad of different emotions: sadness, relief, confusion and emptiness. What do all these ingredients add up to? What is the sum of those feelings? I struggle to answer my own question. “My mother’s dead, this is what the life insurance paid out” I say this out loud just ground myself in this new reality. I got the policy when she was in her fifties after my grandmother had passed away and we struggled to pay for the funeral expenses. Most people don’t think about this but it’s expensive to die.

In this moment in time there are many more people who have lost a parent, especially from COVID-19. There’s an overwhelming sense of sadness everywhere I look. The news, coworkers, friends and neighbors all around me are all losing someone that they love. And yet, while I’ve joined this unfortunate club their collective grief offers me refuge. A surreal ability to hide in plain sight. Everyone is reaching out to me, even friends that I have not spoken to in years. Their condolences and best wishes are all the same. “I’m so sorry for your loss, it’s difficult to lose a parent. You two must have been very close”. The similarity of their concern makes it easier for me. My line: “Thanks, yes it’s been hard. I miss her every day.”

The Truth

The truth is that grief is more complicated than the one liner that we give because the people that we are grieving are more complicated than the obituary we want to write for them. My mother suffered from mental illness that went untreated largely because of the stigma that we assign to it as well as her own inability to see herself clearly enough to seek out help in the first place. Having a mother like this is the equivalent of feeling like a ghost haunting someone else’s house. A family lives with you but they are not your family. The mother who makes breakfast in the mornings is not your mother. Occasionally, like most haunted house stories the ghost might make themselves known but the reaction is always the same: horror, surprise and disbelief. We were close in proximity, enough to raise the hairs on the back of her neck, enough to give her goosebumps on her forearms, but never enough to form a connection. After all most people just don’t believe in ghosts.

The Fantasy

I often daydream what type of childhood I would have had if she had gotten professional help. I have “fake memories” stored in my mind that are a collection of different seasons of my favorite shows. They are on demand and ready to stream with strong leading females characters who I will call my “fake mothers”. They are mainly tv sitcom characters who offered me moments of comfort and were there for me for all my milestone moments: first kiss, first date, first crush on a boy, first crush on a girl.

I was a half Dominican and half Lebanese bi-racial girl in a working class mostly white suburb. I had grown up without knowing my father or my Lebanese heritage. I once applied to a job to be cashier at Walgreens and I checked the Pacific Islander box because well…. “who is actually Pacific Islander?” I thought. It seemed an ambiguous enough box for me to check. When my mother would leave me alone on Sunday mornings, I would watch the only tv in the house in her bedroom. On one of the cable access TV channels there would be 1 hour of an Indian broadcast. There was lots of Bollywood stars and beautiful women in jeweled, colorful saris. I felt an exhilaration rush through me… I yell “I’m Indian!” By the end I would bow my head goodbye and say Namaste (or whatever sounded close enough) to the host. She would always bow back at me.

At night I would watch Spanish telenovelas and wait for the appearance of Walter Mercado during the commercial breaks. For those of you who don’t know who he is, he was a flamboyant Liberace character who doled out fortunes like crumbs to a flock of pigeons. My entire household would wait in a silent anticipation for him to call out their astrological sign and for a moment he would bless us all with an enough hope to just keep on going.

When I was 10 years old, I got a puppy. I brought him up to my room for his first night and placed his bed next to mine just so I could keep a watchful eye over him. He was barely just a few weeks old and like a newborn he cried all night. I woke up, wheeled over an office chair, picked him up and wrapped him in a blanket. I cradled him in my arms and imagined that I was his mother as I rocked him side to side and watched him drift off to a peaceful slumber. Dawn broke and I was still up with him, not quite ready to put him down. That first night bonded us like family. In fact, despite being in a household with humans that were literally related to me, that little dog was the closest thing to family that I had. As an adult I reflect in astonishment how abuse and neglect had failed to override my more human instincts. I was able to love, I was able to love in a way that I wished to receive for myself. It might have been all the seasons of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” that I watched, but I felt like a witch myself who had suddenly become aware of her own powers. I had the power to manifest something out of nothing…

The Weapon

It’s day two of having this check in my possession. I don’t know if it’s the lack of sleep but today feels like I’m sleepwalking through quicksand. I’m moving but simultaneously sinking into the past. I am binge watching old memories and I’m not quite motivated enough to drive to the bank just yet. I need to just watch one more season. OK, maybe just one more episode then…

How did I survive? How did the ghost trapped in the old, haunted house break free? Does she become permanently encased in a dusty mirror, old painting, creepy wallpaper pattern? No, she saved herself! She protected the best parts of herself. The truth is I kept a journal; I start to remember. I wrote everything down, every bit of suffering but more importantly every joy that I experienced. It was my secret weapon, the little black book of small victories that would one day add up to winning the great war ahead. I was the heroine in my version of a Greek tragedy, turns out that my mother was really the ghost all along.

The End