The First Christmas Without My Mother

It goes without saying: to love is to lose; to live is to die. Life is just that – love and loss.  If we dare to love, we will feel like dying when we lose our beloved. The only question about love and death is: Who will go first? I joke with my husband: If you go first I’ll kill you!

When my mother died a few weeks ago I didn’t seem to feel much. I’m catching up now! But it’s a confusion of feelings: sadness as intense as anger. Yesterday I learned how to scream. I have read about scream therapy and been advised about anger work. I have been encouraged to hit or throw or pummel something other than myself. But I have never managed to do any of this with much energy, so it felt pointless. And my attempts to scream, while driving my car and thus insulated from the hearing world, were always throaty, soprano screeches. Not so yesterday. Yesterday I tensed my chest and my throat and made an ugly, forceful, deep grrr sound. It felt good so I did it again…louder and throatier. And then I cried the rest of the way home. A barrier had been breached.

I am not sure which is worse –  having sweet, loving, memories of affection and tenderness, concern and affirmation, and being overcome with grief at her passing, or having no such memories.  I tell myself that my good memories are being held hostage by the bad ones I cannot recall; that perhaps as I face the bad memories the good ones will surface, too. That’s what I tell myself.

I do know that my mother cared for me in the ways in which she was capable. My mother taught herself to cook and parent as best she could. The child of upper-middle class parents, she was raised in a private boarding school from the age of about 4, and parented by nannies during vacations at home. Entering nursing school at 18, she was completely unprepared for independent living, but she could dress with taste, recite all the Catholic prayers, crochet and sew, and – of course – play tennis. She could also play piano well enough to have possibly pursued a career in music. But a high school trauma she would never explain caused her to refuse to ever touch the keys again. My mother was a woman of private pain.

My mother loved her children through her coffee cakes, butterfly scones, horseshoe biscuits. She loved them through her hand-washed laundry, not owning a washing machine until she was in her 70’s. She loved her children through her scrubbed carpets and wallpapered rooms – doing all the decorating herself. My mother loved her children by remaining faithful and committed to her husband, a loyalty that cost her the support of her own large family of 8 siblings, none of whom were represented at her funeral. None.

Now I am wondering, did I ever tell her thank you? Or did I just spend my life waiting for the signs of love that 50’s TV shows and James Stewart Christmas movies held out as tantalizing fantasy?  Did she know that I noticed her care and was grateful, even though I wished there had been hugs and soft words?  I have lost the opportunity to get over my childish, self-centered resentments and be an adult in relation to her. I left home at 18, too.  Maybe if I had learned to be angry and to scream 38 years ago I could have had an emotional confrontation and begun an adult relationship with my mother.

Victims of the Storm

“Think about PTSD like the water level in a river,” said University of Mississippi Medical Center researcher Dr. Scott Coffey, who was part of a two-year study published in 2008 on Katrina-related PTSD in lower Mississippi. “If the river is running high and there is a rainstorm,” he said, “the river may flood because there is very little room for error. That’s kind of how it is with PTSD. Your stress is high, then when a little rain comes along, it goes over its bank. With PTSD the river is constantly running high.”’
http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/2010/08/26/1243746/gulf-grapples-with-mental-health.html#ixzz0y3GTiHYW

People who struggled with depression before Katrina were less able to weather the psychological effects of the storm. Suicide rates tripled in areas along the coast, and that is only an estimate. Many suicides go unreported as such.

Was Malcolm a victim of Katrina? Not in a direct sense, maybe, but I am sure Katrina was one of the currents in his “river” of stress and anxiety. After the storm he worked for contractors gutting houses; he walked in the debris of people’s lives every day. In January, 2006, when the University of New Orleans opened up again, he drove to his on-campus job, and to class, through the devastation of Lakeview. Day after day he saw evidence of the precariousness of life and the elusiveness of safety in a community at the mercy of the weather. As he came to the end of his course-work for his M.Ed, he had to face the fact that he was moving into adulthood and independence. However much we tried to assure him of our constant support, however much we slowly walked him through the minutiae of adult financial responsibilities, however often we tried to convince him he was already a really good tutor and youth mentor and would make a great teacher, I think he was slowly drowning in his fears and insecurities.

 So, perhaps Malcolm was a storm victim, and Katrina was a part of that storm. 

His last moments alive were at the lakefront, a place where, before Katrina, he had always found comfort and calm, and that is where he chose to end his life. I only hope that in his last breaths he found that elusive calm he had so desperately sought for so long.

 

I love you, Malc.