Motherless

A club for motherless daughters / A membership I’d rather neglect

My mother, Helen Anderson, died from a rare form of cancer (of the gallbladder) seven years ago. I still can’t quite believe it, but “it” is real: she is gone.

Over the years, I have come to different types of terms about her death. I think of grief as a changing, yearly, renewable contract. Some years are heavy, with frequent moments dipped in pain. Others are less heavy in sadness; instead, you feel white-hot anger. Angry at yourself for not capturing more of our time together; angry at not having you to turn to; angry at the random unfairness of it all. The first year’s contract was — as they say 1 — about denial and immense sadness. The next few years are…less clear. Hazy. I can’t remember the years 2017-2019 because I was very much on autopilot. As I wrote in a previous post:

Everything feels kind of hazy and grey; I am living, but I feel like as though my soul has gone and my body is empty. It feels like I am a Sim. Someone is playing me in the game — I’m eating and drinking and have autonomy, but it is not a real existence.

I get through most days okay.

On the surface I seem fine. I am coping — but it is the quiet, unassuming and random moments when I remember, and then I fall apart. I had just eaten for example, when I suddenly remembered your last week in the hospital. Suddenly, it feels like I am being strangled. It is difficult to breathe; I’m transfixed while being tortured by my brain. Images of you during that last week flash by, my vision becoming a kaleidoscope of painful memories.

I am never sure what the contractual obligations of grief have in store for me until the end of the year. At this time, I reflect on the months that passed and find I can quickly pinpoint what I signed up for.

This year was loss. I am, and have been at a loss this year. As I move closer to my mid-thirties, I feel overwhelmed with transition and choices. Who am I? Who do I want to be? How can I move closer to this in the next decade? Big questions, for sure. Ones that are squarely in my lap and no one else’s. I wish I could speak to you about it all. And so, I am at a loss. I feel less. Less secure. You were how I grounded myself.

One way I distil what grief feels like is through writing. Here is a poem I wrote and performed this summer about being mother-less.

motherless

seven trips ’round the sun since you were here

unquantifiable restlessness

still, i don’t know where to run

without your voice guiding my next steps

instead, i drag the outline of embodied absence

tethered to my chest

a club for motherless daughters,

a membership i’d rather neglect

home has never been a place

of four walls, an address

and cosy quotidian mess

instead it was

sunday morning, cleaning Whitney and Tina in the walls,

occasional texts of “i got you this dress”

home was always you

a place of safety in duress

so nothing prepared me for the privilege of being a child

until i was mother-less

the natural order they say

for the young to bury their dead

fifty-seven, a second act cut short by death

i call on you mother

but i’m mother-less

you spilled blood to birth me

now tear-stained screams fill my bed

unfathomable loss and suffocating grief

the bitter pill to swallow,

of being mother-less

i see you in my dreams

i feel you there too, i guess

i will meet you at the end of my world

at last, no longer mother-less.