love, hate, good and evil

Her swollen eyes looked through me. They had a certain grayness to them, not in their color but rather an illustration of the life slowly leaving her. All the anger, the resentment and frustration I had ever felt with her was absent when I was in this room. I could only love my mother when I stood in that room. The pallid walls matched her skin, and her mouth twisted with great effort in order to speak to me.
I don’t remember a single word she said to me that day. The cancer had so much of her brain by then, her words her meaningless. It tore at me, watching this woman who brought me into existence struggle so hard to express herself, only to day something meaningless. While her words slipped through my memory, I will never forget that ghost of a face, and the pity I felt for her and myself, and the rest of my family. The pity, and the shame for feeling pity. Feeling like I was patronizing myself for wishing something so awful hadn’t happened. Not letting myself have permission to grieve, but instead listening to the voice in my head that told me that you are the oldest, you do not have cancer, and you need to be stronger than everyone else.
When I left the nursing home, I started thinking about all the venom I had for her before she got sick. Eight or so years of adolescent resentment that had never been dealt with. Her illness got in the way. Her denial got in the way, as did her poverty and the well being of my siblings. I never really could confront her on how she made me feel. And sometimes I hated her for that. I hated her choices in life and I hated her cancer. There was a cauldron of anger boiling over in my heart and I had nowhere to put it. I could only try to put the fire out. I sat in the driver’s seat of her van, in her driveway, and finally admitted to myself that she was going to die. Soon. After six years of fighting cancer, my mother would be dead, this nightmare would be over, and my family would be shattered. And for the first time, I let myself cry. It was the ugliest cry I’ve ever experienced; soaking wet warm tears flowed down my face and dripped onto my chest. I was so angry, and so sad. I had never been filled with hate and love simultaneously, the emotion was overwhelming. I’m not sure how long I sat in that driveway, feeling ashamed that it had taken me this long to realize I loved my own mother.
Two memories emerged then. The first made me smile; she was laughing and saying “Is your mama a llama?” something she said in a silly high pitched voice to me while stretching her neck into her best llama impression. She got a lot of enjoyment out of the children’s book of that name. The second was the sound of her voice telling me that “if you would just lose 15 pounds, you’d be so pretty.” That was her argument for trying to get me to audition for Miss Lewis County. That was her dichotomy: she was either making me feel warm, welcome and fun or she was filling my mind with guilt and self-consciousness. It wasn’t that she wasn’t proud of me, we just valued different things. She always thought I should look nice, find a man, stick close to home and have a couple of kids. I somehow viewed that plan as my own personal hell and made no secret of it.
And while pondering this, I thought about how much pain I likely caused her in my rebellion, and somehow that freed a large portion of my mind. Her and I were just different people, and that was okay. We loved each other the best way we knew how. The fact that I would never come to interact with her in this new perspective suddenly came bubbling up soon after, and I felt like a hand was squeezing my heart. Somehow, I would have to cope with my mother’s death and also forgive her and myself for things we had said to each other in the past. All the regret I would have to swallow during this time of grief was an extra layer of blackness in my life. I was drowning in darkness, and it was driving me insane.
I went inside and hugged my sister. I held her as long as she would let me, calming my nerves and letting reality take over. I still had to eat, feed my brother and sister and somehow manage to sleep and just keep living. It felt so superficial to run through a daily routine, while I knew she was back in that bile colored room trying to grip life as it slipped away.
I wasn’t with her when she died. My two aunts called when it was over, and being honest about her struggle to the end, the slow breaths, and the long pauses of silence in between violent gasps. I was horrified. I pictured her there trying not to die and failing. I looked across the room in my mind and stared death in the face, full of hate. Death looked at me with a straight, assuring face, like a doctor administering a shot. The shadowy figure in my mind whispered to me that he has no say in when he comes, but he must come. Death must come. There was nothing I could do.
My eulogy at her funeral was an affirmation of what she taught me. No one asked me to speak, but I felt compelled. I had to tell the world that she was indeed half of me, that she taught me how to laugh and to love and to stand up for my opinions. She taught me how you shouldn’t worry so much, or at least not let anyone see that you worried. I spoke about all the good things, and all the while releasing the bad. I want to say the funeral helped me close those feelings, but I still see her in my dreams, I still look for her in my contact list, and I still wonder what she would say about my decisions. I don’t know if that will ever stop. The ugliness hasn’t left me, but it has given me the gift of appreciating the blessings in my life.
Sometimes, you need that duality to fully experience your life. You need to face evil in order to understand good. The sacrifice in my case was perhaps too great, but today I look back and know that my pain has shaped who I am as much as my triumphs, and there is something to be said for that, although I am not sure what yet.