Mothers Never Die
(Written on June 15th, 2022, while I was home from College for the Summer. For the last time.)
I hate leaving my mom. I detest it. Everytime I say goodbye to her, I feel a piece of my soul detaching and floating off somewhere into the distance where I’ll never see it again. And everytime, she smiles and waves. I guess I am foreign to the motherly intent of watching a piece of one’s self grow up and touch the world. I have not seen that hidden sector of life’s wisdom. I think it scares me that someone loves me so much. It’s not like I don’t reciprocate it, because I do immensely, but it’s different. Everyone who knows my mom says they are sucked in by her love, and they drown in it. It's consuming. That’s not a bad thing. At all. To be pulled in by her heart is an honor. There are few who will ever get to experience that sort of peace in their life. To be loved by my mother is to be loved by God.
This is morbid, but sometimes I force myself to grieve for her. In small increments every day. Some delusional part of my brain believes it will make the acceptance of her death even the smallest bit easier when it actually comes. The day I dread most in my life. The day I lose my best friend but also a large sum of myself. I hate that I know it's coming. Not when or how, but that it is inevitable. This isn’t some surprise only I am suffering, everyone dies physically, but my mom shouldn’t be allowed to leave me.
I understand now, though. I have listened, I have read, and I have learned. She has the whole universe inside of her, so when she dies she will not be here, she will be everywhere. In the trees, in the grass, in the sea, in the veins of color on flower petals, in the breeze, in and beyond the celestial sphere. She will be in strangers who turn to friends who turn to lovers who turn to family. She will be in me.
(I moved into my third New York City apartment on February 23rd, 2023. My mom came to help me move in.)
Seven stories above the Bowery Ballroom. Just six flights of stairs, I pushed on my mom. She seemed nervous to make the climb carrying my inconvenient amount of things. With help, we loaded up our Uhaul in Brooklyn. My bed, box spring, mirror, desk, and bags of shopping habits. The drive across the bridge was sunny and trafficked. Our windows rolled down letting in the February air to cool our sweat-damped clothes, both of us prone to overheating. I played our favorite car songs, and we sang along poorly, laughing and chatting as usual. Time spent being with her is my most natural mode of existing.
Our groaning van pulled up to the curb in front of my apartment. We exhaled our gratitude for the immediate parking space and put our trek in park. My mom’s eye has always been critical of the city. Urban life never appealed to her rural roots. Her eyes scaled my rickety pre-war building then darted to the homeless man wobbling up from the J-train station merely twenty steps from my front door. He’s not bothering anyone, I assumed. Mhmph. I know her inclination to provide my safety out-sourced her judgment.
We began the dreaded un-load. With help from some willing friends the lift moved along smoothly. More hands made the heaviness a little more manageable. My mom insisted on carrying the lighter of the heavy. At first, I was teasing her. Come on old lady. She would smile up at me, pushing an exacerbated sigh through her teeth. I would be four flights up the stairs, and she’d be taking a break on the second turn. In the empty hall I could hear the echo of her fatigue. Her knees would click with every step, and the hollow noise would chip away at my immortal view of her.
Watching her try her best. I have been watching her try her best my whole life. Her best is better than mine ever could be, but her body was putting up a fight. Gravity had a stronger effect on her bones than mine. Her lungs squeezed a little tighter than they did that summer prior. Time smiled sinisterly at me over her shoulder as she climbed my wretched stairs of slanted marble. It was then I felt the premature grief. I felt it settle in my stomach. I felt it scrape at the marrow in my bones. I felt it pushing its black palms against the backs of my eyes. My mother stood alive, breathing and sweating, right in front of me. She stood fifty-six, forty-three, thirty-four when she had me, twenty-five when she became a mother for the first time, sixteen when her dad died, ten when she mothered her sisters, a baby so new. She stood below me, all the versions of her pushing her up the stairs.
When we finally arranged all my too big furniture in my too small apartment, we collapsed onto my bare mattress together. She set her alarms for the next morning and lathered on her night time serums. She reminded me to do the same, so I don’t get as many wrinkles as her. She gave me a hug before she yawned and opened solitaire on her phone, reading glasses perched on her nose.
“Goodnight, bear.”
“Goodnight, mom.”
Eventually she shut off her phone. The echoes from the street traffic and the bass from the ballroom wrapped around my pillowhead. My mom’s high pitched snores added to the noise. I laid wide awake, paralyzed by the fact that everyone dies. Even my mother. Her soft snores settled into a rhythm, sleepless minutes turned to hours. As she slept peacefully, I wrote her eulogy in my head.