My Layaway Grief

Paying debts, plus interest

There’s something so sharp about the sun when it cuts through Maine’s winter mornings. It hasn’t been especially cold yet this year, but we all know it’s coming. In San Diego, where Ian and I lived before moving to Portland, we laughed at our old-selves, trudging around Toronto in our heavy winter garb well into April, sometimes May. We spent almost five glorious years in San Diego rolling from January to January, salty and sun-kissed.

Ever since I met Ian, we’ve been chasing the idea of home, wondering what city might be the right one for us. Reflecting on our twenties together, I picture ourselves like those weird slime putties kids are into these days (stay with me here folks…). Every time we were allowed out of our containers, our glittery, oozing selves just spread across whatever surface we could latch onto. Not yet solid, so vulnerable to the hands that grabbed at us, threw us around. So shiny to look at, our sights only on the hedonistic pleasures of then.

Ugh, what am I really trying to say here? Basically — we ran wild in circles, and finding a “home-sweet-home” wasn’t really part of our city wishlists. Instead, we threw darts at maps in the general direction of friends, oceans, party towns, and mountains.

For a long time, my Kerouac quotes hung as post-its, thumbtacked to rented apartments. Being ‘on the road’ helped me cope with the fact that I no longer had a relationship with my mother. If I stayed put in my hometown, I had one less excuse to not see her. She used to tell me, even in our pained last years of togetherness, that I was destined to travel the world and live in a sort of bohemia. She’d cue Enya’s Wild Child in her kitchen, a glass of pinot grigio tattooed in hand. I slugged back beers with her, finally bonding over something, and she’d tell me to keep dreaming, keep going, as if predicting my permanent departure.

Today, I am paler, older. I don’t chase desert hallucinations as much as toddlers around parks. As many of you know, we landed in Maine, a bit of a left-fielder from SoCal. But as I’ve tried, and perhaps failed, to explain in so many haphazard ways in these newsletters, there’s something about this place that slaps you across the face (see: cold) and wakes you up to any kind of dormancy you hoped to bury.

Now, Ian wakes up searching for the sting of winter surf, I relish in the jagged coastline that laughs at you if you try to lie down. My skin doesn’t have that tough-sunned-barrier, awake finally, I feel it all.

Last week, on December 5th, my Mom died at 64 years old. She was terribly young, but it wasn’t necessarily sudden. When she was told she had months left to live in June, she continued her cancer-causing habits, now really given the excuse to approach the scenario with “why the hell not?” But it goes back further.

My Mom has approached her life with that mantra ever since I can remember. Even when she was fit, beautiful, and healthy,* the inflection of the question: “why the hell not?” was more in reference to her indestructible vigor and youth. So, she smoked and drank like it was her last day on earth. She talked to people, friends, strangers, and family members all equally, with the same amount of honesty served to each, no matter how personal or how blunt her thoughts were.

*Many people in the 90s said Kirstie Alley (in her Cheers days) was her doppelgänger, and I find it incredible that Alley also passed on the exact same day this week.

I’m finding that grief, like motherhood, does not truly reveal itself to someone until they pass through it themselves. No amount of books on either life-changing event has come close to injecting any kind of empathy in me when I was in my twenties and early thirties. Living it up a mile from the ocean, and twenty minutes to Tijuana, definitely helped me coast comfortably along in the dreamland I had built myself.

Because my Mom and I hadn’t shared a conversation with one another since 2012, let alone a meal, a laugh, or a holiday. My sadness and nostalgia come from memories of us together when I was a teenager and a young child. I feel frozen in those years, and sometimes I wake up and feel like I need to put my kilt on and get ready for school. My grief seems to have this compounded quality to it. As if I’m not only mourning her passing in the present, longing for the future things that will no longer come, but for all those things that could have been if we had stayed in touch. This, I am trying to remind myself of hourly, is not to be confused with regret. As painful as it is, I know I needed to leave her, but this doesn’t take the sting away one bit. If anything, those deep saddening depths I find sometimes myself in, the ones where my breath gets lost and my mind turns dark, I linger there longer pushing myself to figure out why we couldn’t save our relationship.

In ways, I have been practicing for this moment. I have been grieving for my Mom since I was very small. She spoke about her own death so much, I would often run to her in the morning to make sure she was still there. I would pick out funeral clothes in my head before falling asleep each night, wondering what to say at her funeral. As I grew into an adolescent, my reverence and incomprehensible adoration for my mother turned into fear. I would meet other girlfriends’ mothers and almost feel compelled to tell them my mother died when she was alive and well. As an adult, I felt like she had died, that feeling peaking twice: when I walked down the aisle and when I had my daughter, both happening in the years without her.

When I decided to “divorce” my mom in my early twenties, a different type of grief came into me. This one seared, like an open wound that I cauterized quickly with drugs and alcohol. Even though it seems like a terrible and difficult decision, to leave your mother, there was an ease to saying goodbye. I felt unbearable freedom. But that pinprick of relief always had a somber undertone. Tracing the strands of fault, I rationalized over and over again that cutting us apart was right, but it never took away from the shock of looking in the mirror and seeing that it was my hands holding the scissors.

In a way, I started the very slow process of letting her go then. Anger, denial, and sadness all came without the pomp and circumstance of a funeral. I chose to surround myself with gigs, people, and experiences that were (here it comes…), much like California. Beautiful, warm to the touch, easy-going. The perfect distraction to all my pain. But during all these years, it was also like going through all the administration of a funeral without seeing a casket being lowered into the ground. My grief hung around me unfinished, but still expensive, and unable to pay the total sum, I chipped away at my debts little by little, satisfied enough to go on another week.

But, now, it’s time to say goodbye. And I did.

I drove to Toronto two and a half weeks ago and saw her. She wasn’t awake, but tears leaked from her eyes when my siblings and I held her hands, attempting three complicated goodbyes. It was traumatizing, it was painful, and it was also funny (because she was, and therefore, we are). It was decades of pent-up darkness, second-guesses, and lost memories.

Later this month, when I choose my black clothes, I am holding that little girl finally, telling her it’s time she can grow up now. Reconciliation can only happen post-mortem, so I have to grieve for the 13-odd birthdays, Mother’s Days, and Christmases without her. I grieve for the laughter I am sure we would have snorted together. I grieve for the dreams of visiting Ireland together. How terrible it will be to grieve these things.

But also, oh, to finally grieve.