What It's Like to Lose a Mother While the World Is Mourning
In the summer of 2019, we began plans for construction on a new deck we’d been contemplating for over twenty years. The barn-style house, a sanctuary from our regimented and over-flowing work life in the city, is on three acres, one and a half of which is a nature reserve.
For years we talked about tearing down the 120 square foot deck that seemed too small for its setting and making it bigger. It was our favorite place to observe the trees coming to life in spring, the birth of the monarchs in summer, the cacophony of bird and insect life from our small precipice, and finally, after the wood had begun to rot and mold over the years of weather we decided it was time. In early March of 2020, the plans approved, construction began. A week later, the outbreak of Covid and our weekend visit to the house extended indefinitely from the city.
The demolition of the old deck with its rusted poles holding up a sad blue awning, sagging from the weight of the years of snow, wind, and rain coincided with my mother’s death during that week.
She’d been in the last stages of a progressive illness, living in a care home, and we were not permitted to leave the state to attend her burial. On the days after she was gone, I often found myself staring out the window, watching the two workers, with their masks on, stripping down the floorboards of the old deck, and like palm bearers, carrying the strips of wood to the coffin’s dump.
As the old deck slowly came down, I felt that I too had lost my foothold. It is a strange time to mourn the loss of one’s mother, when the entire world is mourning the crushing fatalities, now nearing 180,000 in the US alone, from the pandemic. Locked at home, I adapted (grateful to be able to have work that could be done from home), to the new ways of working remotely, and of keeping in touch—Zoom, FaceTime, text, Twitter, Insta. But nevertheless, as the scaffolding for the old deck went down, I felt myself sinking further into sadness.
There were days when the burden of my mother’s care grew so great, and the quality of her life became so minimal, that I questioned whether keeping her alive, was worth it. She had long lost her ability to walk, to go to the bathroom on her own, to shower and dress. She loved crossword puzzles, reading the Cleveland Plain Dealer every morning, watching old movies. (She would have died a hundred deaths for a glimpse of Cary Grant.)
When I used to visit her at the care home, our first stop was the library so she could choose new books. Eventually she could no longer read or focus on a film. She lost her appetite. Even the bagels and lox we brought when we visited, or the donuts from her favor bakery, the pizza from Geraci’s her choice pizzeria, we had to sneak into the Kosher care home no longer held sway, and slowly her body began to dwindle.
Still, I was dependent upon my mother’s voice, her smile, her happiness to see me. I doubt I’ve ever inspired such happiness in another being. At least one or two times I day I went to dial Fran, my mother’s part time aid, who had become my mother’s caretaker and voice, forgetting my mother was gone. During the workday, I was grateful for the hours of tunneling in, and the work’s distraction from my grief. But at night, my dreams were dark and complex and I felt as if I hadn’t really slept, so deeply was my unconscious swimming in the sea of memory, bringing my mother to the surface as if my dreams were an underwater theatre for my desire to hold on to her, to not let her go. There was a tear in the sky that I did not know how to bridge.
What would the world look like without my compass and lighthouse? My sisters and I had always been her lifeline. She was ours first, after my father died at age thirty, leaving her with three young children, Irish triplets, under the age of three. As we sisters moved through adolescence, we all kept each other afloat. Then later, after we left for college, the roles slowly shifted, and we became our mother’s caretaker.
After my youngest sister’s suicide (she was born from a brief marriage when I was ten that ended in divorce at fifteen) my mother, so grief ridden, had lost the will to live. She secluded herself more in her home she’d lived in for fifty years. Depression was like a boulder on her back. Sometimes when I would call home at one in the afternoon on a lunch break from work, she would still be sleeping. I grew angry and impatient with her. Can’t you get out of bed, volunteer, stay on your meds, do something! I was annoyed that I had to bear her burden that at times threatened my own joy of living. It seemed that no matter what I did, it was never enough, and I berated myself for being unkind when she was suffering.
Her mind grew more scattered as years passed. Post-its and lists kept her on track. After getting lost driving home from the corner store, she finally surrendered, and sold her car. One visit home, I noticed that the only food in her fridge was frozen meals. My mother loved to cook wholesome fresh food, one of her favorites was a plate full of fresh corn ears for dinner—it was then that I realized that she no longer was able to remember how. One awful week, she refused to get out of bed, and had fired the nurses aids we had hired. A geriatric nurse we consulted urged us to admit her to the emergency room. An MRI discovered calcifications in her brain. The early stages of Alzheimer’s dementia.
What happens to a life that is consumed by grief, loss and loneliness? For my mother, it was her pleasure in flowers, beauty, her voracious appetite, dreams and hopes for romance that never fully found her again after she lost my father, her daughters. Her despair and sadness tumbled over me. Did I think that if my mother continued to live, even in such a debilitated state that I would be able to finally fulfill her desire for happiness? Did my mother want to die? Had she had enough? Was she now unmoored from her suffering?
The remnants from the old deck tossed in the dumpster in our driveway seemed to take on animation as if they contained shards of memory coming loose, and it was as if with each piece of molded wood tossed into the dumpster my guilt over the quality of life of my mother’s last years, the unhappiness I could not fully bridge grew more immense and threatening.
The buzz of the saw cutting the wood for the floorboards during the early days of regret and the silence in its aftermath became strange comfort. It reminded me of Emily Dickinson’s vision of death in her poem, “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died."
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –
The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –
I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –
With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –
Why do we not see, until we could not see to see? Eventually the dumpster, like a deep coffin that held the bones of the deck, was filled and taken away and the new construction began. It was time to assign away the un-assignable, to let go of what I could not change that was complicating my ability to grieve. I like the sound and activity of things being built. The cutting of wood, the punch of a staple gun, the drill and cement mixer; leveling and measuring, the miracle of creation. The two workers laid out the string line to mark the frame, dug holes for the steel posts, poured in concrete, covered the holes with plywood, four by four posts cut and fastened. Debilitated on some days by bad weather, rain, we grew lonely for the workers to return.
As the scaffolding for the new deck began to take hold, I got used to the banging, the buzzing of saws, the odd comfort of the drill. The floorboards laid, the roof built, the smell of fresh cedar in the air we breathed, as if it the deck had taken on its own life and miraculously had found harmony and equilibrium in its setting. Blue birds and red cardinals took a moment of sanctuary landing on its broad beam that held the railing. Bees and wasps joined the chorus. Spring turned to early summer and the lavender and hydrangeas bloomed slowly eking away the haunted ghosts of spring.
Months later I sit on the sturdy new deck three times bigger than the old and watch the trees berth swaying from side to side in an orchestration conducted by a summer wind. Through the brush a deer and her fawn nuzzling against her for sustenance, and out to the vast sky. Some days it is bigger than others. Some days the clouds hang low almost to the ground, clouds come together and then part. If I close my eyes, I can feel her spirit. The tear won’t mend. But from this new height, the light comes through.
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