The Weight in Strangers’ Faces

I can’t remember if I hugged my mom goodbye.

It’s been almost five years since I saw her, and I can’t remember.

My daughter has doubled in age since the last time I saw my mother, and I can’t remember.

I do remember that it was at my daughter’s fifth birthday party.

I remember that it had been a long day of preparing and hosting a child’s birthday party, I remember my mother asking if her and my daughter could go to my daughter’s room to watch Cinderella. I remember agreeing so my wife and I would have some time to clean up the icing smeared tables and balloon littered floors. I remember that my kid fell asleep, my mother sneaking out of the room with the agility that only mothers seem to ever master.

I remember that she smiled at me one more time. She said, “She fell asleep, I should probably go.” My wife and I agreed. I walked her to the door. I remember my wife hugging her, I remember opening the door for her, but I can’t remember if I hugged her. Five years of trying to force a memory, to try and convince myself that I hugged her.

But I can’t. I can’t remember.

The last opportunity I had to embrace her, and I can’t remember if I took advantage.

A few weeks later I got a phone call from her number on my cellphone, I muted it. I didn’t want to talk yet, it was too early, I had just gotten to work, I wasn’t ready to chat. The office line at the front desk rang, I heard someone else answer it. They came to me and said I had a phone call.

I picked up the phone, it was a voice I didn’t know. It said, “Eric, I am a friend of your mom. You need to get to her house now.”

I asked if everything was okay, they only repeated; “You need to get to her house now.”

I remember the drive. It was only a few minutes but it felt eternal. I keep internally repeating, “As long as she’s not dead I’ll be okay, as long as she’s not dead I’ll be okay.”

I don’t know why I was chanting this. I had no reason, beyond the mysterious phone call, to think she’d be dead. She was fifty-six, no fatal health problems, no reason to stop being alive.

When I pulled up, the porch was filled with people I didn’t know and one person I did. None of these people were my mother.

That’s when I knew.

I approached, the feeling in my legs quickly running away, my body preemptively attempting to escape the darkness ahead. The voice from the phone stepped forward, it was a woman I had never met, never heard of, but she introduced herself as “Kim, your mother’s best friend”. I found this to be a recurring theme. Through the visitation, the funeral, and all the sympathy cards, I met a lot of people who claimed to be my mother’s best friend.

But that’s what my mother was, she was a best friend. That’s what she was most comfortable being, she wanted to be the ear you confessed to, the shoulder you cried on, the face you could trust.

The one person on the porch I did know was my mother’s husband, he stood back from the rest, his body had already ran away from the grief. I embraced him because I thought I should. It was muscle memory. I then stood there, looking past the group of strangers to the police officer standing in the doorway, waiting for the funeral home to pick up the body so he could get back to work. I nodded to him politely, he returned the favor.

Kim grabbed my arm and led me to the doorway, “Come see your mother.”

I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to see my dead mother. I wanted to fall down on the porch and let the shock take over me. I didn’t argue though, I allowed her to lead me. I felt my mother’s husband follow me in. They led me to her, she was lying on the couch. She didn’t look like my mom anymore.

It wasn’t a case of ‘it looked like they were sleeping’. No, she looked dead, she looked gone. After five years, I sometimes close my eyes and still see it.

I remember battling internally on wether I should hug her, if I should kiss her forehead, or if I should stay away. I stayed away. I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t move closer to what had been her.

This is where the day falls from memory and melds into flashes of events, moments of details, and the overarching feeling that I wasn’t in control of my own body. When people touched me it felt distant, when people spoke to me it felt hollow, when I saw anything it felt hazy. Life become detached. I remember seeing them roll her body into a hearse and drive her away, I remember someone asking me about what jewelry she should weary her funeral, what dress I thought would be appropriate, I remember someone telling me my mother was in a better place, but none of it felt real. It was all floating about me in pieces, none of which fit together.

All I wanted to do was to leave, all I wanted was to drive to my daughter. I wanted to touch her hair, to hug her, to feel something real, to feel something that was connected to me. My mother, myself, and my daughter, we were a trinity of my bloodline. My mother was the source of my life, my daughter the result of that life, I needed to grab ahold of something that was me. My daughter was the only piece of me, and my mother, that I had left.

They wouldn’t let me leave though, they took me to lunch, then to the funeral home. They asked me to choose what I wanted to eat, and then to choose the color of the lining for my mother’s coffin. I couldn’t do anything but focus on my wife’s hand holding mine. I heard the group talking, agreeing on what colors my mother would want, agreeing that she deserved the best coffin, agreeing that she should wear her glasses. I could just look at my feet while squeezing my wife’s hand.

Suddenly I heard silence, I looked up. Everyone was looking at me. They had asked me something. The funeral director repeated it, “do you think purple or gray would be a more appropriate color?”

I answered too quickly, too honestly, “I don’t care, she’s still dead.” I stood up and made my way to the door. Silence followed me.

-

A mother is your physical attachment to this world, it is the living embodiment of your relation to this existence. She is the being that created and fostered your life, the one who put you on this Earth. You belong to her body until the umbilical cord is cut. When a mother is gone, when a mother leaves this mortal coil, so does your attachment to it. Your existential cord is cut. You float, detached from it all. Everything that made sense, everything that was tied to order, turns chaotic and shiftless. Solid ground becomes shifting sand.

The rest of the week was filled with floating grief, shifting sand. Trying so hard to make my body function properly enough to get my suit dry cleaned before the funeral, trying to get the car’s oil changed before we took the trip to where she would be buried. I wouldn’t let anyone help me, I wouldn’t let my wife stay home with me, I pushed it all away. I demanded I was fine, I was fine to make my daughter dinner, fine to prepare her shower, fine to read her bedtime story. This resulted in food left out on counters, showers left running, towels left on stairs, bedtime stories unfinished. I could only stumble.

As I was growing up my mother taught me, in words and in deeds, that we are here as servants. It is our duty to help others, to make sure everyone is comforted, to make sure no one is discarded. The only problem with that philosophy is that it does not prepare you for when you are the one who needs to be comforted. I couldn’t allow someone to comfort or help me because that would mean I was failing at being the comforter.

Instead I insisted I was fine and I distanced myself. I’d cry alone, i’d separate myself from my wife and child when I felt sad.

I also started seeing things. I started feeling things.

I wasn’t hallucinating, I wasn’t losing my mind, but I was seeing and feeling a whole new world. I’d wash my hands, holding them under the water for far too long. I’d change the temperature and return my hands to the streaming water, I was feeling it. Every nerve-ending suddenly all too aware of existing, all too aware of their purpose.

I would sit outside while my daughter played, I’d watch her strawberry-blonde hair shimmer and shift under the sun, almost sparkling with their own internal radiance. They would dance over her tiny, still growing, ears.

I would hold her hand, I would see and feel her fingernails against my skin.

I would see the branches and leaves of trees wave in response to a force I couldn’t see. They moved with intention, with deliberate life.

I couldn’t focus on anything, but I saw everything. The world was exploding with life all around us and I had never saw it. I never saw it until mortality collapsed upon me and reframed everything. Life was now moments. Moments were now everything. Moments were now everything because I suddenly and intimately knew that every moment passes until there are no more.

I did all of this alone, I didn’t share it, I didn’t communicate it, I internalized it. I hid it while trying desperately to pretend everything was normal, everything was fine.

And that’s what nearly destroyed me.

I kept it all in, trying to arrange it all in a way that made sense in my own synaptic universe. The trouble was this, all of it was completely alien to my universe. I had no tools to interpret it. This led to two results:

1. I was overwhelmed. Alot. Each moment being unique and important is a valuably discovery for living, but when each moment seems to carry the weight of you and your entire world of experiences you feel crushed and overwhelmed all of the time. Decisions seemed terrifying, interactions seemed monumental. I couldn’t place all of these moments appropriately. They were all the most important thing.
2. I blamed myself for everything. My mother was dead, she couldn’t be wrong. Any emotional baggage or interpersonal failing was suddenly on my shoulders. I couldn’t let my dead mother carry any of the blame, dead people don’t have blame. Our lack of communication during my adult years was all my fault, our lack of affection was my fault, our lack of hugging was all my fault. I wanted to fix it. I wanted to have one more moment to just apologize to her, to tell her how petty it had all been. I wanted one more moment to say, “I love you”. But that moment would not come, could not come. This was one problem with no solution and, that too, was my fault.

This is when I should have gone to therapy, to get help from someone who has studied grief, someone who could guide me through it. But I didn’t. I looked to self medicate. I drank. Alot. I drank a lot and I continued to push my wife away. I didn’t push her away because I didn’t love her or trust her, I pushed her away because of what I learned as a child. I am here as a servant. I am not here to burden.

So I continued to stumble for years. I became much better at approximating normal, my poker face became convincing. I could smile, I could make jokes, I could even mention my mother without sobbing, but it was all play-acting. I would wake up, the curtain would rise, I would play the part of trouble-free husband, father, and friend. I would be the fun guy who drank all the alcohol and said and did all the hilariously awkward things.

People loved it.

At night, the curtain would fall, the acting would cease, and I would go back to feeling lost and empty. I thought this was post-grief normal.

Then it happened.

I saw it in my daughter’s eyes.

These were her moments too, the moments of life I now held in such high regard, the limited moments that contained all meaning and purpose.

Her moments included looking to her father.

I had to be a better father.

That’s when I went to therapy.

That’s when I talked with someone who has studied grief, someone who could guide me through it. I learned two things:

1. Yes, moments are precious and important. They are important to be present within, they are important to appreciate, but they are still a conglomerate. They are not individual. One moment does not define a life. Moments are meant to be lived through, not to be feared.
2. My mom could share in my blame. Her death did not absolve her from her humanity and the faults that were associated with it. She could be both a great mother and a source of strength as well as a woman who had conflicting motivations that led to troubled interactions with people she loved.

It’s not to say that the pain went away with these realizations, that the grief was suddenly vanquished. No, I still think of my mother everyday, I still miss her everyday, I still regret things everyday. Now, though, I can at least realize the weight of this is not solely on my shoulders. It is the weight of life, the weight of being a human spinning through moments that make up our all too short lifespans.

We pass each other everyday, strangers speed by in cars on the highway, strangers pass each other on the street, strangers stand together in elevators. All of us, all of the strangers, have similar experiences, we have all(or will) lose someone to death. My grief is not my weight alone, it is the weight of being human.

It is the weight we all bear, it is the weight we see in stranger’s faces.

It is the weight of being alive.

And I am thankful for it all.