After Mother Died

[TW: Loss of a parent, mental health]

“I’m not homophobic, you know,” was the first thing Sanvi said to me after Mother died.

She was braiding, unbraiding, rebraiding, unbraiding the fuzzy strings of her ripped jeans while she sat across from me. Her eyes were a weird, wide type of glazed-over, feet tapping up and down on the hardwood (Mother had the floors redone years ago, I never quite got used to them not being carpeted anymore). I could see the outlines of her toes through her worn socks, but no shoes. The shoes she did wear were next to the door with everyone else’s, piled up against my coat rack. When we were growing up, Mother never let us wear shoes in the house and I guess that habit, if nothing else, stuck with me. She would tell us that if you’re going to be somewhere then you should be there, not one step away from leaving.

“Like, I never even really thought it was bad…”

She was unaware of the fact that I had long since tuned her out, her voice had become not much more than a buzzing in my subconscious. Sanvi was just one of the many people who came to visit while my siblings and I sat Shiva for Mother and, while everyone felt some sort of creepy guilt about her death, she had been the most vocal and direct about it. She kept making offhand comments about her belief in equal rights and how evil taxes are. She seemed to have this weird idea that I was some sort of wild liberal and, at some point while she spoke her words of radical leftist affirmation, I attempted to convince myself that she was just being considerate; She didn’t want to make me sadder than I already was by opposing my political views.

“...I’ve been thinking about adopting, actually…”

When people die, other people take it as a wake-up call to remind god/the universe/Mother Nature/the tooth fairy that they belong in heaven.

Sanvi was the last person to leave Thursday night, the last visitor we had during the tail end of the week. I watched as shoes dwindled until only hers were left and, by then, she had moved to sit across from my brother and stare up at him with doe eyes while patting his knee reassuringly. I didn’t really want to comment on how awkward it was, nor was I planning on it, but, had I been bolder, I would’ve said something for sure. She spoke in a half-quiet voice, as if there was anyone besides me and Ben and our sister Carolina, who sat beside me, to listen.

“...I’m just so sorry for your loss…” could be made out, among other platitudes.

“Don’t you want to get going Sanvi? The sun’s set so technically this is over. You don’t really need to be here anymore,” Carolina had said, standing up and beginning to fold the chairs scattered around our living room.

Sanvi looked around as if time was a new concept to her before getting up and putting back on her shoes, which were little black (vegan?) leather ankle boots. She waved goodbye to me, gave Ben a weird little shoulder squeeze, hugged Carolina (which Carolina would later tell me she was very much not a fan of), and walked out our front door. Carolina and Sanvi had once been friends and, although it had been years since the time Sanvi had tried to kiss her high school boyfriend, Carolina knew how to hold a grudge. I’ve always not-so-secretly envied both this and her ability to tell people to leave our house when she has had enough of them. 

I have only recently begun calling it “our house”, by the way. It was Mother’s house first and I just couldn't bring myself to leave the tiles in the kitchen and my stuffed animals and the creak of the attic ladder. We lived this way until the point where she moved to a retirement home (at her own request because her best friend Bren was moving in too (Mother had never ceased to amaze me, even in her final years)). It was my house for a while after that, until one afternoon Carolina caught me sitting with a broken glass on the floor of my kitchen when she’d come over for a visit; I had missed work because I was so caught up in something about it. You would think I was an artist, you would think I wanted to capture it on the page or film. Really, though, I was considering how many pieces it could break into and how small they would be and what they would feel like if you put them inside the hole of your pupil.

Sometimes, I do things only because I think they’d be cool put to music.

After that, though, she never really left; She had come for lunch and stayed for life. She likes to tell me that it’s the best decision she’s ever made because now we have each other’s backs throughout Mother’s death but, really, I know she only sticks around because she worries about me.

I want to tell her I don’t need to be worried about, but I’m not a good liar.

Sometimes, I think that we’d all be better off if Ben was the one fucked in the head. I know Carolina, if no one else, would lead a brighter life, full of acai bowls and cashmere and expensive protein trail mixes. Ben is more fun, we all like Ben. Even if he wasn’t fun, though (which is quite difficult to imagine), Ben has, at the absolute very least, a life: He studies performing arts in the city, he smokes weed on fire escapes, he eats dinner on reservation in nice nice restaurants. If I could move out of my own body and into Ben’s dorm room’s broom closet, I think I would.

He’s the only one of us who’s really going somewhere.

The only place I’m going is the supermarket.

When you sit Shiva, you don’t leave your house for a week which is really so absolutely wonderful, in my opinion (I wish I had an infinite supply of dying family members so I could sit Shiva every week for the rest of my life). All you do is smile very very sadly at the people who come into your house like drivers passing an accident; they stop to look, but not long enough that they will be expected to help. Some of them you don’t even recognize, most of them just hover in your dining room and eat from your charcuterie board and drink your Brita-filtered tap water. If they had those early 2000s teen magazine quizzes for Jewish traditions, sitting Shiva would line up best with my personality; It’s food and silence and, frankly, enough people around to keep me from tearing up my curtains and eating all my AAA batteries. My only problem with it, really, is that it ends and, once it does, you are expected to reintroduce yourself to society, all new and shiny and grief-free. I’ve heard that the faster you get it over with the easier it is, and I’m a fan of easier things.

So I stand, well polished on a Friday, in an Acme with a cart holding carrots and cheddar cheese.

By the time I find my way back to the front of the store, five people are in the checkout line in front of me, three women and two men. I’m the type of person who will never point out somebody they know in public simply because I would not want the same done to me. When I leave my house on rare occasions, I want nothing more than to be invisible. I’m the type of person who doesn’t know many people to begin with.

The woman in the front of the line carries a toddler on her hip and has a newborn in the cart seat. Something about her tells me her boyfriend knocked her up twice in a time she was not prepared for; her hair is a little bit all over the place, her clothes are business attire. My second guess is that she is divorced and has the kids for the weekend. Or she's a raging lesbian and fostering. When she finally steps out of the line, everybody shuffles forward with robot-like efficiency. Her toddler throws a toy truck on the floor, she stops to pick it up.

The suit-dad who was up next steps up, checks out his almond milk and (whole-fucking-grain) Cheerios, and leaves the store with his little blonde daughter trailing behind. I doubt she’s a fan of the health kick that has them drinking almond milk. Or she’s lactose intolerant. Or she’s a vegan at the ripe age of seven and suit-dad is simply a sick enabler.

I see him talking to the toddler lady through the large glass windows in the front of the store, suit-dad meets business-mom, they could kiss, they could fall in love. I imagine they will have many deep, thoughtful conversations about the cruelty of divorce or death or the texture of paper.

When I finally get to the front of the line, I have forgotten all the small-talk points I always make sure to practice with myself on the way up. You’d think if you do something enough, you will learn to get it right. News flash: you will not.

“Do you have a number with us?” the cashier (Patrick) asks me after he scans out my carrots and cheddar cheese. I think it’s out of spite. I come here rather often, whenever Carolina can’t make the trip after work (she’s the superintendent at an almond-and-Kambucha-type private school), and Patrick knows me. Patrick knows my number, too.

I recite it without even saying “Yes,” he almost smirks, I can see he wants to. Patrick also knows he’s a bitch. 

I bag my own items, I step out into the cold of the parking lot. It’s not quite freezing, but it’s the kind of cold that makes your skin sizzle like when you lick the plus-side of a battery (I have no obsession with batteries, mind you, thoughts just enter my head every now and then and cannot be fought off).

I reach my car, parked at the back end of the parking lot. I start the engine, and the rain, which has only just begun, dissolves into smoke against the glass of the windshield.

~

Carolina is driving Ben back to college.

She had to take an extra day off at the school, but she didn’t trust me to do it, I guess. I’ve never given her reason to think I’m irresponsible, but I think she just finds Ben too precious to put him in my hands, or, worse yet, my car. I can agree on this one, I didn’t argue when she told me she’d be the one to take him.

Either way, though, she is gone and so is everyone else and, for the first time in quite some time, I feel shamefully alone. Should there be shame in being alone? Is there even shame in being alone? I don’t know these things and, if there was anyone else in the house with me, I could ask them.

But there is not.

I’m not good at loneliness, if you can’t tell. I can’t say if I have never been or if this is simply a trait I’ve acquired as a part of metamorphising into an adult. I think there must have been distinct years when I spent my days by myself or locked in a bathroom leaving lipsticks stains on the mirror. I think that, realistically, I must have not always been this way.

There was Mother once, after all, she called me Syd and braided my hair with grass. She would sometimes let the braids come undone, though, and the only way they’d ever become fixed was if she sat and spent the time to redo them. I think that maybe that’s what happened with my mind, frankly; I think that it started to come undone when she wasn’t watching close enough to notice and so she wasn’t there to put it back together again. Maybe she was at Bingo, maybe she was doing pilates. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter much. I am a collection of my experiences, my trauma compiled. I am soup that is boiling over, an underwatered cactus. I suffer from too-much-attention and, at the same time, not being seen at all.

I suppose one day I will fall into disrepair, I suppose then people will call or, at least, visit Carolina and Ben when they sit for me.

~

Mother’s bed has been made since she moved out and, if not for me, it probably could’ve remained that way forever (or at least as long as the house stayed in our family). Something about that is nice and I bet Carolina would tear up thinking about it. She’s more sentimental than me, she holds onto Valentine’s Day cards and dries all her flowers in the upstairs guest bedroom window with purple strings. 

But Carolina is not around to cry or to tell any sad stories and I am around and the house is around. Loud thoughts and bright lights and missing utensils are around as well, and they lead me to the side of her bed, mismatched socks and broken TV remotes and crushed ice let me climb under the blanket which really only smells like me because we always smelled alike.

I can imagine Carolina being upset about this kind of thing and telling me to please just get up, to please not ruin another thing. “Sydney, please.” She says it all the time, after all. I ruin things all the time, after all.

I can imagine Mother again calling me Syd and running her fingers along my birthmarks and saying we are just the same and it being good enough to justify the wreckage that is my mind. We were just the same, after all.

Pools emptied for the winter and bandaid-ed knees and rotting tree houses and cotton stuffing and leaking faucets and pants with holes and birds with broken wings tell me that forever is too long to just let something be.

~

After Mother died, so did I.