Mom,
If I still write to you, does that mean I’m still grieving?
Or does it mean that I’ll always be grieving, that I should be…? I don’t mean that I’m still in my mourning stages. I remember after you died I wore black everyday. It wasn’t to show that I was in the mourning process, it was because it expressed my emotions. I felt black.
I realized something then. People didn’t start wearing black out of respect for the dead, the first people started wearing it because they felt like total crap.
I still can’t believe that you’re dead. You are dead. My mom is dead. I have no mother. Seeing it on paper doesn’t make it seem real. I don’t think it will ever seem real.
I think that everyone around me has a little bit of you in them. Carlye, Michelle, Caitlyn… But that makes you seem kind of… inanimate… or that you’re really gone. I don’t like to think that you’re gone, just not with me. That you’re floating around watching me. That you can still see me, feel me, remember me. I hated the doctors talking about you being brain dead. Don’t they know how to talk to a 15 year old? You do not tell her that her mother has lost all her mentality. That makes you… not you. That makes you a vegetable. I know you were. You couldn’t breath or move or talk or even work up the energy to live. But that makes you a statistic, that makes you a waste of space. It makes you just a thing. Not my happy laughing mom. Not my mom with advice and love and… memories. That part of your brain went first, didn’t it? Is that how you stayed? That to this day you are dead AND your brain is mush. I know that brains aren’t important in heaven. No organs are. All that’s important is God. Which just adds to my fear that you don’t even know who I am. Humans find it safe to believe that you die and go to heaven and see all your loved ones. But if nothing matters but God, then it wont matter whether you remember me or not… to you or me. But at this very moment in time I am not in heaven. I am on earth and living and breathing and you’re not and there’s a chance that you don’t even remember I exist. That you’re just having a gay old time up in heaven, and you have no recollection of me or summers at the lake or teaching me to walk or my first word or when I won an award for my essay about Amelia Earhart. You wont remember when I fell off Radar and you cried while I laid unconscious in a hospital bed. Or how I cried while you laid unconscious in yours. I can tell myself over and over again that it won’t matter in the end, because I’ll be partying it up in Heaven… but it DOES matter. It matters right here and right now and will every second of every day until the day that I die. The day I lay unconscious in a hospital bed as my daughter cries and the doctors tell her I’m brain dead.
Maybe we can be brain dead together. We can chill on fluffy clouds holding our ineffective brains in pickle jars.
Why am I writing this? When did I become such a seething pessimist. I’ve been reading my old journal entries. From before you died.
March 24 2004
Mom’s sick again. She was just getting better. Her stomach is enlarged again. I’m scared.
Today in science we were talking about how we’re all nothing. Nothing is what it seems. Just like my conversations with Alexis. What if your red is someone else’s green? If everything, like bodies and stuff, are just shells, cells for the real us, then what’s the difference between being alive and being dead? I was talking to Oma about my whole death thing-- she said Grandma Molly was the same way. She always said “This body, it’s not the real me. I’m inside. The one with feelings and dreams is inside this capsule. What happens when the capsule dies? Where do I go? The real me?”
Alexis isn’t scared of death. Lucky her.
To be honest, I wasn’t scared. I was too self absorbed to be scared. I just liked how it looked on paper. This was back when Lennie and I would trade journals everyday and write responses to each others thoughts. Maybe I just wanted to seem deep and introspective in front of him, so I wouldn’t be traded in for a new best friend. I wasn’t worried. I was worrying about Sami and Veronica both being in love with Lennie and me dealing with their dumb best friend backlash. I was worrying about my mark in PE, because Alexis, Chelsey and I kept goofing off and Bevi totally had it in for us. I was worried about my lines in the school play and being initiated into Sami, Shannon, Veronica and Hollie’s stupid secret society.
But I wasn’t worried about you. I hope you’ve forgiven me for that. Trust me, I worry enough now to make up for it. What would my worrying have done, really? I didn’t have my medical degree. If the doctors couldn’t find out what was wrong with you, how was I expected to?
I wish that if you had to die, if it was God’s will for you to do so, that we would have known. I know it’s supposed to be better if someone dies quickly. But I never got to say goodbye. Ask you questions. I don’t know what I would have asked… probably nothing relevant now. But we still could have talked. Had a last conversation. I don’t remember our last conversation. It was in a hospital and your skin was yellow and you were on a morphine drip.
Jacob remembers his last one with you, even if it was over the phone. I’m sure dad remembers his too. I just remember yelling at you for ruining my life and slamming my door a lot. Why didn’t I appreciate you more, Mom?
Better question… why is this 4 pages of pointlessness?
I’m so sorry. I deal with this dumb guilt everyday. I take it all out on dad because he’s an easy target. The whole unconditional love thing is really amazing. The strange thing is, I’ve never taken it out on God, and he has the best case of everlasting lovin’. It’s like I can never do that to him, but I have no problem beating up on dad all the time. Honour thy father and thy mother. Well, sorry to play the “I’m a bratty teenage girl” card, but he started it.
Why did he have to leave? Why did he run away when I really needed him? You were gone. Jacob was gone.
The rest of the family spent all their time hating dad for pulling the plug. It’s weird, how I always end up defending him in front of them, but I can’t defend him against myself.
I guess what he did to me is personal, but with you, he went with your wishes… “do not resuscitate”. I don’t think I’ll ever make a promise like that with my spouse. I know that at the time that you said it, you thought that you wouldn’t want to kept alive in that state, but none of us REALLY knew what you wanted when it came down to it, did we? People can change their minds about stuff, right? What if you were trying to scream “Wait! I’m feeling better really! I’m not ready to die” and we just couldn’t hear you. It’s not your fault your brain had exploded. Yeah, I know, every science class I’ve ever attended tells me that you can make very little conscious decisions when you’re minus one cerebral cortex, but if it’s true about bodies just being capsules, then anything is possible isn’t it.
This is my letter of bitterness. I have very little chance to say any of this. Who am I supposed to say it to? I mentioned it once to Teresa and Dori… once.
I’ve never told anyone else.
All the thoughts that go through my head about brains in jars and exploding heads. Does it make me crazy?
Mommy, are you proud of me?
Do you look over me with your pickle jar and smile… or shake your head? (do you have a head? Back to the whole heaven with no bodies thing).
People always seem to be worried that when I think of you, I remember swollen, bruised you, with tubes coming out of you and an iron lung making your teeny tiny body jolt off the bed. Well I don’t. I think of the you when I was 3 years old… when you had that fuzzy pink housecoat with the button shaped like a pink rose. In our living room in Youbou sitting on the couch in the mornings in May watching Regis and Kathy Lee. And I’d come downstairs in my nightgown and cuddle with you on the couch and then you’d make me French toast, and we’d walk Maginty, or pick peas from the garden or color together in my Aladdin coloring book until Jacob came home from school. (Like when you taught me to color in circles because a girl in your grade 4 class taught you and she became an amazing artist.)
I’m not saying that I don’t think about those times in hospital. I do… a lot. But that’s not what I think of when I think of you. Maybe that’s one of those good things about the dying quickly thing. My bad hospital memories don’t overpower all the good pink housecoat ones.
But I still wish we could have talked before you died.
I wish I could have told you how much I love you.
I wish I could have said I was sorry.
I wish I could have thanked you for being my mom.
But I guess I also know that it’s still okay.
Because, well, maybe I really AM crazy, but I’m positive I just heard your voice say “I love you too, I forgave you before it happened, and thank you for being my daughter.”
Sweet Dreams Mom.
I will never forget you.
Molly
