On my trip to California

On Friday, March the 25th of 2016, my mother drew her last breath. She was exactly two months from her fiftieth birthday.

Nothing feels real right now except that I was not ready. I am not ready.

The last time my mother and I had a lucid conversation was Tuesday the 15th, when she told me that her prognosis was six months at best. I told her I loved her and promised I would call every day until I got to California. I had meant to call that evening, but found I couldn't force myself. I wasn't ready to talk.

She didn't have six months. She didn't even have a month. Funny, as she was so worried about turning 50 and being "old". I'd give anything to have her be old.

I would love to say her illness came as a shock to me. In some ways, news of that gravity is always shocking. I her case, I should say it wasn't surprising. My mother had been a drinker for a long time, and she had been sad for even longer. She was diagnosed with liver cirrhosis two years ago. Apparently, they had given her a prognosis at that time. She never told me how sick she really was, and me, without a medical degree. I thought I had more time to be her daughter, and I just wasn't ready to forgive her.

I would also love to say that my mother and I were close, but we weren't. My childhood...growing up with her for a mother...it was a challenge at best. Things were so bad I eventually moved in with my father at the age of fourteen. My mother and I hardly spoke until I was sixteen, when I would pay her the cursory visit which most often was a poorly disguised attempt to see my friends from my old school.  She would tell me to go have fun, and she would see me later. When I would leave to return to my life downstate, she would cry. She would apologize for everything, and she would cry. My mom cried at everything. I suppose I get that from her.

We had tried several times to mend what had been broken, most recently last spring. But then, again, some of her choices made it difficult to talk to her. And so this summer, I cut off communication again. I had every intention of reaching out to her again. When I was ready. I wasn't ready to forgive her yet. So we engaged in the compulsory conversations...my birthday, when she accidentally came clean on a lie...Christmas, when I promised I would call her back, and didn't.

I wasn't ready to talk.

When I walked into my mother's apartment last Saturday, my beautiful mother was sleeping in a hospital bed in her living room. Her thick, beautiful dark hair laid limp on her head. Her skin was a color yellow I can't even describe. Her breathing was ragged. My grandmother woke her up, and despite her morphine induced haze, her eyes locked with mine.

In that moment, I regretted every needing to be ready to have a conversation with her. In that moment, she was not my estranged mother. She was the mother who would burst into random song. She was the mother who encouraged me to sing, even when the kids in middle school told me I wasn't any good. She was the mother who was made of smiles and an infectious laugh. The brilliant woman who was so close to earning her doctorate. The woman who danced with her sisters at her youngest sister's wedding. The mother who reprimanded a boy for giving me an extremely visible hickey the day of my older sister's graduation. The woman who ended every phone call by telling me how proud she was of me.

I locked eyes with this woman and felt all of the air go out of my body. It was as if my heart stopped. Because as ready as I wasn't to speak to her, I was even less ready to never have that option. To never have my phone ring a million times after midnight because she never figured out time zones. To never call her when I had an anxiety attack I couldn't shake. I wasn't ready for her to go. I wanted her to see me get my graduate degree and eventually my doctorate. Maybe get married. And in that moment, as I acknowledged my fear of losing her, I realized I had been losing her for years.

Losing my mother is a two fold grief because I am not only grieving the woman, I am grieving my lost chance to have a relationship with her. The relationship that I could have had. I am filled with regret. Regret for leaving her, regret for not keeping in better touch, for not asking her about her life. For being so angry. My family keeps telling me that I did what anyone would do in my circumstance. I had to do what was best for me. I had to survive. But all of the logic in the world, all of the rationalization, cannot make me stop feeling this deep regret.

Watching a parent die is the ultimate reminder of their humanity. My mother was not superwoman. She was just a woman with two kids and a broken marriage at the age of 25 who tried to pick up the pieces. A woman with a mental disorder, a pain condition, and later, a serious addiction.

It could happen to any of us. It could happen to me. I wish I had realized this before it was too late to repair what I had been unwilling to repair.

I held my mother's hand and told her I loved her. She told me she loved me.

In the days that followed I had to help my beautiful, brilliant, strong mother drink water droplets from a straw as she looked up at me with miserable and yellowed eyes. I heard her cry out that she couldn't breathe. I helped give her medication to ease her pain and her anxiety. I watched her become less and less lucid until all she did was sleep. I sang to her, songs that we used to sing together to my baby sister. And I held her hand some more.

While I was not in the room with her when she left us, I watched part of her death.

Part of me feels at peace because I told her everything I needed to tell her. I feel at peace because she had everyone around her who loved her when she went. I feel at peace because my mother loved living in California, and I know she would have loved to see my eyes light up when I saw the Pacific for the first time. My stepfather and I have started to repair our relationship, which is something she always wanted. I feel at peace because she isn't haunted by her addiction or her feelings of inadequacy or her sadness anymore.

But I grieve, and I grieve deeply.

Several months ago, I was caught in a deep bout of depression myself. As I lay in bed crying the silent tears that fall without reason (my favorite symptom of the condition) I thought to myself, "I miss my mom." I hadn't felt that feeling in several years. I had convinced myself I didn't need a mother. And that day I convinced myself again that I didn't need her. So I didn't call.

I've saved all of her voicemails so that I don't lose the sound of her voice. I'm choosing to remember her in her happy times so I can see her smile in my mind's eye and hear her laughter.

I am grieving deeply, but it hasn't really hit me yet. My grandmother wants me to sing at her memorial this summer. I am just happy I got to sing to her before she died.

The point of this, I suppose, is for me to process. But also to say thank you to her. I had a hard life. My mother chose hard paths and they affected all of us.

But thank you, Mom. Thank you for making me strong and intelligent. Thank you for making me powerful. For always teaching me. And for teaching me forgiveness in your final moments.

I left my mother's house the evening before she died. Though she was asleep, I held her hand, kissed her forehead, and said I loved her.

I said I would see her again someday.

I haven't been religious for years, but when I said that, I know I spoke truth.

I will miss her forever.