My Year of Cynical Thinking

Pregnancy, frustrating death/rebirth conversations, and the last time I'll miss my mom's birthday

The night of my mom’s funeral, I found out I was pregnant.

It was a really lovely way to find out. (Mainly because I was with my sister who urged me to test in the first place.) Downstairs, her husband sipped Heinekens with my dad and chatted with my brother. My husband was bathing our daughter in the bathroom next to us. A house full of love during a difficult day.

Eventually, I told a few close people the news in the nauseous haze of my first trimester. The response was always awe. As if this was evidence that death is rebirth, or in more literal replies: “Oh wow! It’s like she’s not really gone.” (Which if you knew my mom, or the relationship we had, her being reincarnated as my unborn embryo is a terrifying thought.)

But I don’t blame others when they immediately grasp onto that silver lining, so soon after finding out about my mother’s death. Our eyes tend to sparkle with desperation, our noses sniff around new age crystals and spells, more so when we’re staring into the deep cavern of “the end.”

Recently, I heard a recorded performance of Fran Lebowitz, who I adore. (Watch this for a little life recap.) In the radio special she says: “Look, if you believe in life after death, you must not really understand the concept of death.”

I let out a long, uncensored “Haaaa!” in my car, followed by a bunch of followup giggles (the mean sounding kind). The more I replayed that line in my head, her dry sense of humor swept me deeper. I found tears in my eyes, but I couldn’t tell if they were the happy or the crestfallen kind. I hid behind laughter, the type comics induce from having one subset of humans turn on the other, muttering “what a bunch of morons,” to these so-called other people. I felt safe and smug as I talked and cried to myself, in my empty car.

Generally, I cling to a cynical sense of humor in times of stress. Absurdity always seems to be hiding where pain lives, and I much prefer to embrace the randomness of the ridiculous, to destiny’s blind positivity. I’m guilty of saying those lines too: “it will all work out,” or “it was meant to be,” but that mindset takes away responsibility of action. I don’t want to let go, and let god(s), I want to hold on, figure out what went wrong, and maybe yell about it a little.

Another one of my favorite comedians is the equally existential Marc Maron. On his latest HBO special, he brings up the floodgate Joan Didion books (The Year of Magical Thinking) that are thrown on your doorstep when someone you know is dying or dies. To this day I have three copies and haven’t read much further than the first pages. I am sure it’s fine, amazing even, for when I’m ready. The simple fact is I’m not, and I don’t want anyone’s take on hope infiltrating my moody grieving period. But — humor? Yes, I’ll indulge in that any day. Darkness and humor are so inextricably linked, Maron muses in his special (and in many, many interviews), and I find that so true. Without the pain and darkness, we’d miss the inky lessons grief and depression affords: perspective on the definition of all things good, a reverence for all things alive.

For the past three months I was sick to my stomach, falling asleep sitting up, and having terrible reactions to prenatal vitamins. Combine that with raising a three year old (during peak snow day season), and running my own business, I simply didn’t have time to think about or process all that grief I so greedily ached for in my newsletter last December.

Our mom would have turned 65, today March 3rd. A number that even looks youthful, full of round orbs. Last summer, when she was diagnosed with oral cancer, she rode the usual rollercoaster that had her saying “I’m going to die tonight,” one hour, and “I’m going to beat this thing,” the next. Watching the cancer grow on her face, while her body disappeared, we nodded tight grins, while we uselessly tried to clean her nicotine-riddled apartment.

There are two “last times” I saw her. The very last will haunt me for the rest of my life. A silent, barely there person, who was unrecognizable as both our mother and a human being. Her blue nightgown tented at strange, deflated angles from her bones, unnatural dark veins around a slacked jaw I can’t unsee.

So, to help bury that, I view the second last time I saw her as really the last. My sister and her husband had taken care of mom the entire time she was ill. (Even though all three of us siblings has no contact with her in her last years, Dakota stepped into the caretaker role without flinching.) So when she started to doubt her honeymoon plans, I flew down to spend a week with my mom.

This was no “to the rescue” feat. Over that week I spent a pitiful handful of days with my mom. I didn’t sit by her side and talk for hours. We didn’t redeem the past, we barely talked about it. I didn’t cry on her shoulder, in fact, I was uncomfortable just being near her, the idea of touching her scared me. I didn’t bring up my husband who she only met a few times, or my daughter, who she never met. A photo I sent of Ryan a year ago sat in the kitchen, curled against the utensil rack.

I took her to one doctor’s appointment that week, and I cringed the entire time. She cursed out doctors and nurses, and I let her. Just like a kid, I watched my mother move through public domains, stirring shit up, while I pretended I was somewhere else. A few times she looked at me with tears in her eyes, and I looked away haughtily, repeating to myself: she did this to herself.

On my last day in Toronto, at her apartment, I noticed she was walking around by herself fine. I offered my hand out less when she got up from the couch. I flip-flopped between feeling anger towards her for being this way, and myself for feeling so detached. She offered me wine and cigarettes, with a little smirk in her eye, searching for that teenager that used to be more relaxed around her (when really I was just buzzed all the time). She offered me old photos, old coats and dresses that smelled like they had been left in a 80’s nightclub for 30 years. It was lighthearted banter trying to disguise the morbid task of divvying up her things a final time.

I asked her if I could clean for her, and she refused. When I absent-mindedly started wiping down the bathroom after using it, she yelled at me from the hallway to stop. Sensing embarrassment in her voice, I couldn’t tell if I should really stop or not. What was worse? Leaving your dying mother in dirt, or cleaning it up and leaving her in shame?

At the one hour mark, maybe less, I started to feel like my blood and muscles were trying to escape from my skin. My cells crawled at hyper-speed while she went on about her kimchi making stint. My old friend from high school, Dave, was due to meet me at a local pub and just like when I was 17, I inched toward the door millimeters at a time, hoping she wouldn’t notice when I was eventually gone.

“I have to go,” I finally said, my voice cracking from underuse.

“Oh? Ok sweetie. You meeting one of your old guy friends?”

“Yeah, Dave. Remember? I’m kind of late.”

“Yes, of course I remember. The Duchess?”

“Yep.”

“Ok, go go, have fun. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

My stomach dropped. Did I not tell her this was the last day before my flight back?

I let out a messy bunch of “oh moms” and “I thought I saids” before we both figured out this was a goodbye for now. Beneath her shaky frame, and the swollen cancer on her cheek, I recognized the exact same face that bid me adieu every time I went to hang out with friends as a teenager. Some mix of jealousy, heartache, and I’m hoping, love.

“Well, don’t forget, ask your music friends I want their help in planning the biggest party ever for my birthday.”

With my bag slung over my shoulder, I could barely meet her eye. It was August and March 3rd was months past her terminal diagnosis. It was possible she would make it, but highly unlikely.

“Yes, for sure, the biggest party ever. Should I ask the owners of The Duchess?”

“If they let me back in,” she joked. “Or, maybe we just do it in the party room here. I might be really, well, tired.”

It took everything to hug her unfamiliar shape, and back out of her dizzying apartment.

Down in the parking lot, I hear her crackly voice from the balcony above, “Bye honey! Have fun! Love you!” I wave back repeating the pleasantries. From afar, we look like just a normal mother-daughter sharing their goodbyes with love.

I decide to walk to the bar from there, because I’m not late at all. I have two whole hours before I have to meet Dave. I tell myself I deserve fresh air after the week with her. Halfway down Main Street, the sunny day somehow stays put while torrential rain soaks me head to toe. I duck into a bar patio where I order a beer and pretend I don’t want a cigarette.

I joke that my mom being reincarnated as my second child is a ridiculous and terrifying thought. But of course, being my mother, that’s exactly what is happening in a way too. Intergenerational trauma is only newly being accepted in society, but I don’t have to look further than my family tree to know I have a lot of work ahead of me. To unlearn the kind of mothering that I was exposed to is a tightrope, since whiplashing into bitterness and trying to over-achieve through my children, is equally unproductive.

I wonder how I will speak about my mom to my kids one day, when I still don’t know how to speak about her to myself. I might not be able to get around the fact that I found out about my second child, the night our mother said her final goodbyes to us.

At the end of Marc Maron’s special he talks about his girlfriend coming back as a hummingbird. His delivery is nuanced enough, you can’t really tell if he’s taking the piss out of mysticism, or if a tiny part of him is clinging to it too.

Our mom was a late-in-life Catholic that made fun of church and said when she died, there was nothing but “zilch” after. (This changed a few times towards the end.) But ironically, one of the most valuable things I have from her, is a heavily underlined copy of Ancient Wisdom, Modern World, by the Dalai Lama.

It’s painful to read her notes in the margins telling herself to “be more like this,” or “I have trouble seeing it this way.” Thoughts that she never really shared with us. In her scribbled notes, she is still lingering here in the space her body exited. Maybe that’s why I (and so many of us), have such a deep reverence for writing, as it affords a sense of immortality.

In her markings, I can decode whatever I want: an apology, a reason for our troubled past. I can flip through the pages, while I flip though my memories, matching up what might be convenient answers to the unanswerable. And what is more mystical than that? In wanting rational explanations for to our sloppy histories, we conjure up a little magic where it was lost.