Personal Update: Loss & Identity
A note on life lately...my mom, grief, and me
I started this Substack in exploration of psychology and writing. Life, as so often happens, has interrupted. Or, more accurately: ruptured. In March, I temporarily moved in with my mom, to support her as her husband declined in hospice. We lost him abruptly to a stroke. The following day, I rushed my mom to the ER, and we soon discovered she had Stage 4 cancer. We took her home, with an oncologist appointment on the books; but…I’m not sure how to say this: she also rapidly declined, and died only 12 days later? That doesn’t feel honest—she collapsed like a sandcastle in my hands, falling through my fingers; she soon began dying, and then she died—in her bed, beside me.
I don’t have much to say about how I’m doing, in a general sense. I eat three times a day. I sleep eight hours a night. I am completely shattered.
So, instead: here’s a little ditty reflecting on my mom’s influence on my identity. Here in the West—under the trend of the psychodynamic and family systems modalities—we tend to see our parents influence as something fake, inorganic—something to be removed. As I gain interest in more Eastern therapeutic perspectives/approaches, I’m ready to push back against the idea that we are born pure and become polluted by our parents. My grief makes more sense to me when I admit that, yes, my mother was flawed—and also, I am so proud, satisfied, grateful, to be of her.
Get ready for a lot of em ashes—for which I will NOT apologize.
One Particular Grief, on the 157th Day
I loved charming my mother.
I learned the toast: “There are big ships and small ships / ships that sail the sea, / but the best ships are friendships / may ours forever be.” I knew it was perfect to impress Mom, and stuck it in my brain for the right time to happen.
That Thanksgiving, we were a sad bunch, like we were every year the last few years—just Mom, her husband, and their sad friend Terry.
Sitting down to eat, there was that pause that happens between people who aren’t close (except for Mom and I—we were the only two who had grown closer rather than drifted apart).
Automatically—possessed by a sense of duty—I cleared my throat, raised my glass, and recited the toast with the casual confidence I’ve been practicing my entire life. Mom giggled with delight—“Oh, very good, Alex!” clapping her hands like I had done a magic trick. Her tickled smile, her shoulders bouncing, is the only thing I remember of that Thanksgiving.
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I’m so much less impressive now, without her in this world. I’ve become much smaller. This is one small grief of many (many many many).
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Impressing my mother was my gift to her—my offering of gratitude. To impress her was to affirm she’d done something (a lot) right. To charm her affirmed she had chosen the right man in choosing our dad. And to affirm these things was to create—so it felt to me—a healing between us. A space where we could forgive ourselves for all the ugly little things we did, those years it was us two—in the rental, then the other rental—four jobs between us—two separate stories about who dad was and why he was in prison—a forbidden grief—and a crazy neighbor, and then raccoons under the porch—
So I wonder, today: How much of my personality boils down to that casual confidence—that way of being, tailored to soothe my mother’s broken heart?
I wonder without fear—because none of this feels pathological to me.
My mom and I—we were flawed. In my teens and 20s, I needed to be angry. She did, too. But at some point, we got sick of anger. And somehow, it occurred to me that I could just get to know her. I found she wanted to get to know me, too. In other words: I grew the fuck up, gained a shred of perspective, and she was ready for it—unconditionally.
She had never asked me to make sacrifices for her; and, once she became my friend, I no longer resented the sacrifices I had made. In fact, I loved them—and I sacrificed more, with glee.
That’s the greatest gift I will give myself—it yielded my most precious friendship; it gave me back unconditional love. It gave us evenings together spent basking in our forgiveness, in our shared secrets, in pride of our survival, in admiration, in laughter; and in moments of such radical honesty, that I have the small peace of knowing we had said all the important things by the time she had to leave me.
All of this is to say—I wonder how much of my personality is from her—is of her. I realize now, this is the better question.
And with each discovery of more of me,
of more her,
I whisper—more, more, please—