Uncharted Territory

This story isn’t over and I don’t think it ever will be, because like most things in life, there is rarely ever a tidy ending. 

I try to be gentle with myself as my mind drowns me in memories and sensations of her last days. I let those memories, like a raging, stormy ocean, toss me around and spill over into my eyes. I let the tears roll down my cheeks like hot, salty rivers. I let the sobs shake my body as my world spins on an unhinged axis until the ocean settles and I can resume my carefully rehearsed peace. 

I don’t know what I am doing. I only know what I think I should be doing and so I do that. Clinging to whatever false sense of normalcy that brings me. 

Before this, I had been certain death was not unfamiliar to me. My first memory of the final chapter in life was my aunt’s funeral. I spent it in my grandmother’s lap, gingerly holding her hand while she cried, grieving the death of her daughter she had to bury before her time. Then both my grandfathers died, then my grandmothers and, at the ripe old age of nineteen, the generation before my parents’ was gone. 

But this death was entirely different. 

Mom had been sick for a long time. In fact, she had been sick her whole life but no one had noticed, not even her. I, like the rest of my family, had spent the last three years of her life preparing for the impending doom. It was as though there was an anvil strung up by a thread above our heads. We held our collective breath, waiting for it to crush us. 

Even so, the expectation did nothing to keep my world from collapsing the day Dad called. He told me I didn’t have to come, that it was okay if I didn’t. I called my sister. She said she was already looking for plane tickets. 

The last two weeks I spent by her bedside changed me, but I am not quite sure how yet. 

The night she died, we all stood around the kitchen counter with a glass of scotch in each of our hands. Dad raised it to the ceiling and proclaimed with certainty that Mom was reunited with the family she had lost. That she was looking down on us now. 

As I drank my scotch, I found myself desperately wanting to believe him. I wanted to believe that I would see Mom again. I wanted to believe we could erase the last two weeks, that the way she died had not been all that was left of her.  

There had to be more. 

But I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. I still can’t. I have failed time and again to find the reassurance I crave. 

I don’t think myself brave or strong for this. Rather, I think myself broken, comprised of a million little pieces I can’t seem to put back together. 

Mom was devoutly religious and so was I. I followed in my parent’s footsteps for so long because there was comfort in the familiarity. As I got older, though, I could not push away the dissonant thoughts that popped into my head. I couldn’t reconcile the way my own religion stood in stark contrast against the things I was learning about the world. By the time I was a young adult, I found myself in uncharted territory. I realized I had lived my life in a bubble and I was suddenly looking in at it from the outside. I don’t have the right words to describe the freedom I felt as I began to unlearn all of the harmful things I had been taught. 

I thought about telling my parents this so many times, but I could never bring myself to do it. I was afraid I would break their hearts.  

It’s been a long time, but I still sometimes find myself breaking some long-forgotten neural connection that has remained entrenched in my psyche. But for the first time, I think I’ve learned something rather than unlearned. 

There is no way back into the bubble. 

Dad asked my sister and I to give the eulogy. I stared at a blank page for hours, alone with the kind of sobs that leave you gasping for air. I found myself impossibly stuck between the image Mom had of me and who I really was.  

In Mom’s final days, she had several Pastors come to her bedside. They prayed for her and told her what a beautiful family God had blessed her with. Afterwards, they would always ask me if there was anything I wanted to talk about, anything I wanted them to pray for, and I would smile politely, tell them no, and thank them for coming. 

My sister and I spoke often about death in those two weeks. We talked about what happens afterwards and it was a relief when we found kinship in our beliefs. 

 Before Mom died, we talked about how our new outlook made life more beautiful than before. When you acknowledge there is no next step, things become brighter, more vibrant, and you develop a deeper appreciation for the time you have, because it’s all you have. 

After Mom died I realized that outlook only made facing my own mortality easier. It did nothing to comfort the cold sorrow of losing a mother. So, as I sat before my empty page, I knew those were words I could not speak at her funeral. I needed to find a different way. 

Instead, I thought of the things I knew to be true. I knew that we would never stop missing her and we would all hold pieces of her in our hearts. I knew her memories would survive through me and my siblings and my Dad and everyone who ever loved her. 

So that is what I said. 

We held her funeral three days after her 65th birthday in the field behind my parent’s home. The day had been unbearably hot. Family members had gathered from all across the country and we all sat beneath the broad shadow of a massive tree. 

My sister and I stood before them all and spoke of Mom. Of who she was in life, the ways she had shaped us, and the permanent marks she had left on each of us. But we did not speak of seeing her again. 

In my heart I know she is gone. That is something I need to live with and so I find myself once again in uncharted territory. It’s as though I am a cartographer on the ocean of my own grief. The map I craft myself will show me the ways to soothe my broken heart and maybe even how to begin to pick up the pieces. 

In lieu of the pretty promise of seeing her once again, I find new ways to cope. I speak to her like she’s in the room with me, like I did when she was alive. I tell her about my workday, or that I’m going to the gym later, or about the new seafood place I tried. Sometimes I write her letters and I tell her how much I miss her. Or sometimes I simply find memories of her all around me. In the way the lilac bushes smell, or in the chocolate chip cookies she always used to bake. 

The memory of her is all around me. The time I had with her was precious and it is mine to cherish always.

And that is enough.