unbound

Precisely.

I chew on the sides of my thumbs until they’re raw. I always have. My mom did too. I used to text her when they were really bad and we’d send each other pictures of the seemingly irrevocable damage we had done to ourselves. I miss her and now I chew on my thumbs because of it.  

When I write now—another thing we shared—I wonder if anything I write about her in the aftermath of her death will do this pain justice. All death is traumatic; some more than others. My mom certainly endured more traumatic death than I have—the deaths of two of her brothers, one by suicide and one by overdose. She was comfortable with her grief after carrying it for so many years—it was something she understood and respected. When her dad died, she wrestled with it but evolved inside of it. When her mom died, her cancer came back and grief’s face changed into something new.

From earlier this year:

“I don’t like to read books or watch movies that have sad or ambiguous endings because I need to know that things turn out semi-okay in the end. I remember reading once that, “If it’s not okay, it's not the end.” That’s a nice thing to think and a nice to thing to hear, but I don’t know if I think that’s true anymore. Not all endings are happy; not all endings are good.

In February, I got engaged to the most wonderful person I’ve ever met. In March, my Nanny died, and then about two weeks later, we found out that my mom’s cancer had returned as a tumor on her spine and then in her hip. In the months since, my mom has been poked, prodded, operated on, radiated and filled with a wide array of drugs to either help her fight the cancer or mitigate the pain in the process. My mom is different but still herself. She often appears serenely calm.

Writing about someone else’s illness is tricky territory and not a challenge I feel up to. But I can write about how I feel about my mom’s illness, which is of course, irate. And then underneath all the rage, there is a lot of fear and a lot of sadness.

When I was a little girl, I went through a phase where I couldn’t sleep at night because I was afraid my parents were going to die. I would sob and shake and my mom would rub my head, nestle me in close, and tell me that they weren’t going to die for a very long time. Now, I feel that same fear more acutely. Only there is no nebulous future slayer to worry about, only the very real cancer that is attacking my mom’s body and rendering us all reasonably helpless.”

I thought up until about two months ago that there was surely a way out of this. I didn’t believe that the universe could do this to her after everything she had already been through. It turns out that there is a randomness to death which feels both more cruel and more satisfactory than everything happens for a reason.

My mom and I were still learning how to navigate our relationship as adult women, but we were starting to get better at it. I’d spent most of my twenties working to distinguish us as two separate people with unique interiorities and quirks. We fought over what our boundaries should be and the expectations we should have for each other. We disagreed over how enmeshed we should be with each other’s emotions. I pushed her hard to do things differently for me, and ultimately, she did.

But her dying reminded me of all the iterations of being we had been through together. She had carried me in her body and given birth to me. She had raised me, bathed me, brushed my hair, and cared for me when I was ill. She had held me through every heartbreak and disappointment. She had celebrated alongside me and cheered for me louder than anyone else. As she got more sick, I felt a pull back to our porousness. I wanted to care for her in the ways she had cared for me. And alongside my family, I did. In July, we visited as she was recovering from her spinal surgery and I told Joe that I didn’t want to leave. In August, once she had returned to the hospital, I realized that I needed to go back and stay this time. So we did. We slept in my parents’ bedroom and drove to the hospital each day with my siblings, trading shifts with my dad. I tried my best to keep abreast of the medicine she was taking and to help her get better by way of food, laughter, and company.

There were days in the hospital where we felt optimistic—when the oncologist noted that the tumors in her lungs may have shrunk, when she stood up to do PT, when she started talking, laughing, and gaining her appetite back. But then something would go wrong—she lost movement in her arm, her brain mets began to bleed, expressing herself became increasingly difficult. When we brought her home, something loosened. At last, she could feel comfortable in her home with the dogs nestled between her legs. At last, we wouldn’t have to drive back and forth from Cleveland every day and be apart from my dad. But coming home also meant that our days were numbered and it brought a new and special kind of pain.

We adjusted her, bathed her, and moisturized her skin. My dad remembered every medication she had to take and when. He fed her, held her hand, slept beside her each night, and helped her breathe through the pain that was ravaging her body. My Aunt Lori, my mom’s best friend, redid her hair, lotioned her hands and feet, helped her take medicine, and sat at her side unyieldingly. My sister painted her nails, brushed her hair, and showed her pictures of Harry Styles. My brother made her laugh and coached her through the tough moments. Alex played her music that lulled her to sleep and Joe made sure she was never in that room alone. Kris consoled her and collected special moments that would help him write his beautiful eulogy to her. Ollie, Ruby, and Sunny took turns giving her kisses and laying at her feet. Bernie, the tiniest kitty, spent countless hours nestled next to her while Stella relentlessly patrolled beneath her bed.

By the end of my mom’s life, we had all become immiscible. Our tears all blended. Our pets all codependents. It became painfully clear to me that boundaries do not hold up in death. The love we hold for someone takes over and our carefully constructed fences dissolve to allow space for service and gratitude.

I hope that my mom felt how loved she was at the end of her life and throughout it. I hope the endless sea of familiar faces appearing at her bedside from near and far brought her comfort. I hope the hundreds of cards and flowers and stuffed animals made her feel safe. I hope she felt the unbridled love that flowed from all of us in the moments just before she passed; I hope she took heed of the void she would leave behind.

In her physical absence, I recognize my deep need of her love, how that never went away or lessened despite all the work I had done over the years to distinguish myself from her. I had wanted to be separate from my mom to define my own identity and now I will cling to the parts of myself that I could never fully delineate from her—like our shared auto-cannibalism of our poor thumbs. I can hear her laughing and saying, “Please stop eating your thumbs, Beebs.” True independence now feels like a sad or silly goal to strive for. Eventually, our dependence catches up to us and when it does, we’ll crave the comfort of admitting and accepting our need, like newborns.

Without her, I feel younger and older at the same time—unmoored and unclear as to who or what I should become next. I miss her calm comfort and simple words of reassurance. I miss that nothing ever seemed too deep or too scary for her to touch. More than anything, I wish I could hear what she would tell me now, how to go on, how to honor what feels inescapable.

The funny thing is, I’ve spent my life so invested in her words, that I can usually conjure up what she might say, or perhaps, what she really is saying. I feel her so vividly, the grip of her hand against my shoulder, her hair against my cheek, her wonderful scent in the air—so vividly that I know she must be here, in whatever way she can be, wrapped around us and loving on for dear life. I bind myself to her and all inklings of her in this new and unbound way of being.