What We Lose(16)
The book told me that people behave in death as they do in life. The more relaxed we are in life, the more free of stress, the more likely we are to go quickly. The fearful, and those with unfinished business, will cling to life as long as possible, afraid to enter the next stage. Protective parents, it says, belong to this group. They will struggle to the very end, unwilling or unable to leave their children behind.
From the list of symptoms, I realized that my mother had been dying for months. Sometimes I would stand in the doorway of her room watching her, waiting for her chest to rise to make sure she wasn’t dead. I was afraid to watch, but also afraid to leave. I realized that as much as I was holding on, she was too.
My mother died between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the final cruel stroke of this whole experience. I will hate the holidays for the rest of my life.
At home, in my family’s empty apartment, my father and I pulled the two-foot-tall Christmas tree from the back of our supply closet, and shoved it into a corner, and plugged it in with begrudging acknowledgment.
Aminah invited me to her family’s house for their annual tree trimming party. They all hugged me and said the right things, and at the end of the night, Aminah and I found ourselves alone in the basement. We sat in front of the fire, a couple glasses of wassail in. I cried openly in front of her, so much that my snot dribbled down my lip. She laughed.
“Can I stay here forever?” I asked her, feeling, for the first time, warm and comforted.
“Of course,” she answered. But I didn’t. I didn’t even stay the night. I had another glass of wine and carefully drove home through the dark, snow-covered streets.
We received a pamphlet in the mail called “What We Lose: A Support Guide,” published by the hospice. It had tips on what foods to eat, the constant exhortations to exercise, the expected warnings against caffeine and alcohol. And one page had this glossary of terms:
Grief is a response to loss. It is a process, describing how one feels and thinks.
Mourning describes how a person expresses their loss.
Bereavement is the event of loss. It is also a change in status; when a husband loses his wife and becomes a widower, or a child loses a parent and becomes an orphan.
I lingered on that word, “orphan.” An orphan was always a person without parents, without roots. I had one parent, and one was not none.
Orphan (noun)
1: a young animal that has lost its mother
2: one deprived of some protection or advantage, such as “orphans of the storm”
3: a child deprived by death of one or usually both parents
But the condition isn’t mathematical. The loss is what creates the condition. It’s not the fact of one parent, but that the loss has occurred.
It’s the wound, not the parts that are left untouched.
She left us with no debts. Three closets full of clothes and shoes, sixty-three pieces of jewelry—precious, semiprecious, and costume. And other things.
My mother loved buying kitchen tools of any type, from measuring cups to appliances, small and large. Aprons, place mats, napkins. Cutlery with handles shaped as objects—branches, small animals, even human hands. She marveled at the variety, as she did with most things available in America. In South Africa, everything was utilitarian. They didn’t have so many gadgets, so many different types of one thing. Choice. This was the biggest advantage America offered, even though she recognized that it was not always good. (This was also the problem with my generation, of course.)
A cache of prescription narcotics had to be disposed of at the hospital, carefully logged by the pharmacists, and signed by us.
When I was a child, my mother would try to convince me of a woman’s need for a secret stash. “It can be anything: land, property, even a couple hundred dollars. You know, in case anything goes wrong and you have to get the hell out of there.” Her mother had told her this, as her mother before had told her. When I insisted that things were different in America, that we have laws to protect assets in divorce and alimony and women’s refuges, she just smiled at me knowingly. I knew to expect a surprise, but I didn’t know how big the surprise would be.
Aside from her retirement fund, savings, and investments, my mom kept small amounts of cash socked away in separate accounts, some in tiny sums, others in fairly unbelievable numbers. We divided the money, per her will, evenly between me and my father. Even though I was the daughter and he was her husband, she didn’t want to show favoritism. When we finally accounted for all the money and divvied it up, my father and I sat facing the sum in the lawyer’s office, almost unbelieving.
Most of the clothes we gave away, to either her best friend or Goodwill. We shipped certain pieces of her jewelry to South Africa, sealing each one in a plastic bag and marking it with the name of the cousin or aunt to whom it was assigned. They sent us enthusiastic letters thanking us for the gifts, no matter their value. My aunt even called us crying. It was such an easy thing—a relief, even—to get rid of the stuff, but the gesture meant everything to them. And that feeling extended to us also. We were all they had left of her.
I put my share of the money in an investment account that could be accessed only by a phone call. I swore to myself that I would lock the money away, like she did when she saved it, and keep it safe. This was all I had left of her.
I read in “What We Lose” that the bereaved need human touch. Aminah booked me a massage at a yoga studio in Philadelphia. I had a sixty-minute session with the lead therapist, who came into my appointment from her afternoon vinyasa class, still sweating. She oiled me up and rubbed me down expertly, pulling my joints back into place, mincing my back, all the while explaining the purpose of each of her movements. She untwisted my body and my mind, which she explained was like a giant overworked muscle, in control of every other muscle in my body, respondent to all its stresses and limitations.