Mom

would have turned 91 today, but she finally got her wish to be reunited with my father (who died of Covid in 2020) last October when she finally succumbed to a number of medical ailments which included Parkinsons. As with many diagnosed with Parkinsons, she'd exhibited diminished cognitive skills including dementia, so my mother had stopped existing as I knew her for quite a while before she actually passed away. 

I've already posted an attempt of a eulogy but the reality is that it was more a biography based on what I'd learned from her over the years. And as it is with all parents, much of what we learn from them aren't things that are overtly communicated out loud.  

The relationship I had with my mother was complicated. Even as I am contemplating what to say here, I realize that I can't identify my target audience. My story is my own. I wouldn't presume to claim that it was unique, but at the same time, I can imagine that there are others out there who've experienced something similar and might in some way benefit from knowing that others have experienced something similar even though my responses to those experiences may be very different from the choices they made in the same circumstances; in no way would I want to claim that my experience is prescriptive, yet there may still be a significant minority who would benefit from know that their experience has not been unique, and that there are ways to come to recalibrate the behaviors and beliefs that resulted from these experiences. 

I suppose the first thing I need to make clear is that I am not angry with my mother, but I did experience a great deal of ambivalence when she passed away. No child should be able to justify wishing that a parent would die, but as I stated earlier, my mother had dementia, had been confined to a bed for the last four years of her life and when my father passed two years ago, her only wish was to join him in death and she expressed her desire to die quite openly. She'd been at the weight of about 78 lbs for months when she finally passed. Even before the dementia symptoms became more pronounced, our conversations had always been fairly pragmatic. The language/education barrier was a major factor, but there were things that weren't necessarily said out loud that was influencing what I was learning to believe about things. 

There are therapeutic terms that might accurately describe my mom's behaviors over the years, but I want to avoid that, so I'm just going to say that my mom believed herself to be inadequate all of her life, so she developed a lot of different behaviors to cope with that. One of the results of that was that I spent a great deal of my life being that I was inadequate as well, which led to my developing my own set of coping mechanisms and behaviors. I'm happy to be able to say that I've come to grips with a lot of that, but as long as my mom was still alive, I retained a hope that I could someday have a meaningful conversation about some of the things she'd done and said over the years and what I'd learned from that. And when my mom finally did pass away, my greatest sense of loss was not over her dying, but that this conversation would never take place.  And until now, it seemed wrong to want to mourn about this. For all intents and purposes, my mom died a couple of years ago when it stopped being possible to have even pragmatic conversations but even before that, I'd spent almost all of life feeling unheard. I've described it this way to many people: "If I went to mom with a bump on my forehead, she'd put a bandaid on my knee, send me on my way and she'd feel good that she did what she thought a good mom should do." I have only one significant memory where I told my mom something and she responded in a way that made me feel like she'd heard me and supported me. 

It's tied to another significant experience in my life - when I was almost killed by a box cutter wielding assailant while serving dinner to the homeless in a public park in Pasadena, CA (where I still live). While recuperating in ICU for the better part of the week, the only thing I was worried about was how I was going to break the news to my mother, because she was the type of person who always imagined a worst case scenario when I shared any concern (which I learned not to do). I eventually called her and told her that I'd been hit in the neck during a church event (which was technically true) and while I was still in the hospital, I was going to be OK.  My father turned 90 later that year and I went back east to visit and on the last day of my visit, right after I'd finished packing and has a few minutes before I had to leave for the airport, I told my mom more of the actual details of how a branch of my carotid had been severed, how long I'd been in surgery, etc. but clearly I was OK now. My mom agreed that it was wise not to give her all that detail before she saw that I was OK (I didn't tell her that I'd slept about 14 hours a day for the next four months or so). I also told her that I was going to continue to feed the homeless because it was important and I thought it was what I was called to do. My mom sat there for a couple of minutes, then went into her bedroom and gave me about $200 in cash and told me that this was to pay for food to support what I was doing. 

That's the mom whose passing I now mourn. I wish I'd seen her more than once my whole life.