Mama in the Morning
Returning to Love and Loss (Again)
Hello, dear readers and writers.
It’s been a while.
After my friend’s death in November, returning to writing has been a bit of a struggle, but I’ve been slowly finding my footing again in this world of the living. The holidays were difficult; I was caring for an elderly dog whom I was sure was going to die on me one night (yet he rose, like Lazarus, the next morning, ready to eat from my hand). As I write this, Augie is alive and well, but that close call made me realize two things: 1) people that work in the veterinary field are angels and 2) I can’t handle any more loss in my life right now.
Still, those of you who are familiar with my work—and my teaching—know that I always circle back to love and loss as major themes in what it essentially means to be human. To love others is to accept that we could lose them. And perhaps that is the foundation for our love: gratitude for our time together.
So this week, we’re writing about love and loss—and gratitude—again. Let’s begin this beautiful quote from John Koenig, from the introduction to, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
The word sadness originally meant “fullness,” from the same Latin root, satis, that also gave us sated and satisfaction. Not long ago, to be sad meant you were filled to the brim with some intensity of experience. It wasn’t just a malfunction in the joy machine. It was a state of awareness—setting the focus to infinity and taking it all in, joy and grief all at once. When we speak of sadness these days, most of the time what we really mean is despair, which is literally defined at the absence of hope. But true sadness is actually the opposite, an exuberant upswelling that reminds you how fleeting and mysterious and open ended life can be.
The writing prompt this week honors this type of sadness, and is an example of what Suleika Jaouad describes as “holding the cruel and beautiful things in the same palm.” It’s one of my “Two Lists” exercises, which requires a bit of explanation, and involves three steps:
First, generate two lists. At the top of one list write, “This is what loss does,” and at the top of the other write, “This is what love does.” Generate as many words, sentences, or phrases as you can for each list for about 10 minutes. Just write whatever comes to mind.
Next, choose three from each list and read them out loud. If you do this with other writers, in a pair or a group, read them around, one at a time, until you’ve each read all six. And let the images or words of the other writers sink in.
Finally, choose at least one phrase or image and write for 15 minutes.
List exercises are particularly effective, because the free association gets us right into the dream space, the place where we allow images or ideas to float through our minds. And you can do just about anything with the list titles, although I find opposites generate the most interesting writing.
I wrote in response to the phrases, blurs memories and still makes me angry.
You can find what I wrote below, followed by a poem from Marie Howe (followed by a photo of Augie).
What I wrote in response:
It really isn't fair, the way I've laid all this love and loss on her. I mean, plenty of people have loved me, and I've lost plenty of people too, so why her, always her?
"I feel like such a gay cliché," I told my first therapist in college. "Coming here and talking about my mommy issues."
"What do you think most people talk about when they come to therapy?" she asked.
"Their parents?" I guessed.
"Their mother. It's the first relationship you have with anyone, and it's one of the most intimate and profound. Even if they die in childbirth, you will have a relationship with that loss your whole life."
Did I consider myself lucky then, that she hadn't died in childbirth, that her one good kidney didn't fail her while she carried me to full term. "The doctor recommended termination," my father told me years later. "Because pregnancy is hard on the kidneys. But your mother just said, 'Oh, I'll be fine.' She wanted you."
Mama.
How I still exalt her. Like the Virgin Mary, or Mother Theresa. And it's easy to make your mother into a saint, especially when you were so young before her disease that most of what you remember is simply her kindness. The way she offered my sister and her friend milk and bologna sandwiches when they got drunk at 16, how she sobered them up before scolding them. "Are you going to tell my mom?" my sister's friend asked. "Of course not," she said, "every girl tries alcohol eventually. Just make sure you eat something next time, and don't drink so much at once."
Mama.
She liked to surprise us at Christmas, so she hid our gifts in places we never found, except one year, when she hid them in the top of the front hall closet. Uncharacteristically obvious. Maybe she was already starting to lose her memory then, the little threads of neurons unraveling.
"I can't help it," she used to tell strangers when she blurted out greetings, when she thought she knew them from 40 years ago. They often stared at her confused, in grocery store lines, or suburban parking lots. "Oh. I thought you were someone else. I'm sorry, sweetheart. I'm sick," she'd say, "I can't help it, I'm sick, I'm sick."
I want to erase the painful trajectory, the fall from grace. Make up some tidy, moving narrative about a stoic illness or a tragic accident. How I was able to bathe in her wise and loving presence until the very end. How I took a seat at her bedside, holding her hand as she took her last breath, or woke to the shocking phone call in the middle of the night. "What?" I would have screamed into the phone. "But, but, I just spoke to her yesterday!" It sounds morbid and unkind to wish another type of death on her, but anything would have been better than the slow erasure of her very self, the terrible fear that caught us both in such an awful, glaring light.
Somedays, I think I've really let her go. Like when people ask where she lives, and I nonchalantly say "Pacifica," because she's that's where we scattered her ashes, and I go there to visit her sometimes. Or after my father died, when the nightmares stopped. Finally, I thought, you are at peace. And so I can be too.
But then I drink too much, or someone posts a selfie with their mom, and the pissed off teenager comes roaring back again, surprising me with a rage I never was allowed to feel, rage I still feel guilty admitting I have harbored for so many years, silently. "God damn you, Mama," I said not too long ago, on a night when I felt rejected and unlovable, “God damn you for leaving me with this mess."
Really, though, it wasn't her fault. And it wasn't mine either. After 30 years you'd think I could land somewhere between making her into a saint and blaming her for my baggage.
Still, I was loved. Under all the shitty feelings and confusion there is that foundation. I was loved. We really loved one another. Not everyone can say that about their mother. It's the one good thing I always carry with me. I was loved. Some nights I forget that it's true. But in the morning, she's often there to remind me. Sometimes we sit together, me and that old ghost, we sit together in the morning, drinking our coffee in a knowing silence.
My Dead Friends, by Marie Howe
by Marie Howe
I have begun,
when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question
to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.
Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?
They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,
to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy’s ashes were—
it’s green in there, a green vase,
and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says yes. Billy’s already gone through the frightening door,
whatever he says I’ll do.