Six Months Later

Sunday, September 25th passed in such an altogether inconspicuous way, it didn't dawn on me what day it was until several days after the fact.

When you're waiting for something amazing to happen, six months seems to drag on forever and ever. When you're just trying to focus on living again, six months passes in the blink of an eye.

It is strange to think that it's been six months since the last time I saw my mother, made even more strange by the fact that before this time, I hadn't seen her in five years. When I got the phone call (that I ignored, because I already knew what it said) that my mother was gone, it felt like a piece of me was sucked away.  For a long time, every breath I took felt forced and halfway. I was more deeply sad than I even knew I was capable of, and more profoundly angry and hurt. Now, breathing is easier. It feels more natural. I don't know if this is a healthy way of coping, but in a lot of ways the idea of my mother has become a distinctive part of the past. It's in a file folder at the very back of the cabinet that is my brain. I take it out sometimes when I can handle accessing those memories or analyzing those events, but it's not often. Six months later, I feel more removed from my mother than the day I left her house when I was fourteen.

The memories I have of her are slowly turning into lists of facts rather than emotions or experiences. I can tell you what brand of mascara she used as long as I can remember, what lotion she used, her favorite midnight snacks. But the memory of her voice and her laugh are starting to fade. I've saved her voicemails but have only listened to them once.

My birthday is in a little over two months, and I can't remember the last time she didn't call me to tell me happy birthday. When I thought about this earlier this week, I realized I couldn't remember the last birthday I spent WITH her. It falls around Thanksgiving, and given our strained relationship, I usually spent the holiday with my father. But I remember the phone calls on my 19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd, etc. Most memorably the phone call on my 25th, where she ousted herself in a lie that at the time, I found unforgivable, at least for a little while. That conversation had a huge part in why our relationship fell to pieces yet again, and why the last real conversation we had was on Christmas. I told her I would call her back because I was driving in a storm, and then I never did.

What a completely selfish asshole.

When she died, I had nightmares about her almost every night. I dreamed she was in purgatory (Thanks, Catholic upbringing). I dreamed she couldn't be laid to rest until her ashes were. In one particularly awful dream, she didn't know she was dead, and I had to drag her body around the funeral home where my great grandmother's funeral was. In another, my older sister and I were getting ready for prom (though in the middle of winter), and every new location we went to prepare, I saw my mother die again. The dreams were unbearable. I didn't get a good night's sleep for weeks unless I was drinking, and I was drinking a lot.

After her burial service the great weight of anticipation was lifted, and I started to sleep, and breathe, and feel like myself again. I started dreaming about things that remind me of her, like orcas. Now, before I fall asleep, I hope that I dream of her. I hope that in the craziness of my subconscious I can access memories of her singing or laughing her ridiculous laugh, or trying to get me to divest her of the burden of her overflowing closets when I came to visit. When I go to sleep, I hope for any memories that aren't of us fighting, or of my guilt, or of her yellowed and dying in a hospital bed. I knew that nothing could prepare me for watching my mother die, for hearing her cry out in pain or in panic, for that terrible feeling between wanting her to hold on longer and wanting her to let go (because again, selfish). What I didn't realize was nothing could prepare me for the void that's left after the intense grief is gone. The terrible feeling that I don't have a mother. She is part of my past. She is part of the saga of the Before Morgan. And I'm living in the after.

Where do the memories of her belong, here in the after?

I first found out my mother was ill when I was preparing for the Saint Patrick's Day parade in Chattanooga. I took a picture of the sheet music to Carrickfergus and posted it on my Instagram somewhere between the rehearsals and the drinking to cope. Now, when I look back at that photo, there is a distinct feeling, a weight, of the girl I was before she got sick. It turns my stomach. I look at the photos from the days preceding that one, and I want to go back. Not only because I hate myself for not being better for my mother, but because I want to feel the innocence I didn't even know I had until it was gone. Growing up the way I did, innocent wasn't really a word I would use to describe myself. Now I look at those pictures, and long for the Before Morgan. The After Morgan still isn't sure how to function.

I don't know what to do with my hands.

As easily as I push the Mom File to the back of the brain cabinet, to try and forget it exists at all, I sometimes catch myself forgetting it doesn't. My mother, flawed human though she was, understood my extreme anxiety and paranoia in a way that no one else has. When it gets bad, I want to call her. When I get in the car to take a long trip, my immediate instinct is to call her and let her know I am on the way, then call her halfway, then when I reach my destination. I want to tell her about the guy I'm seeing, or about comedy, or work, or how wonderful and terrible it is to be almost 26 and almost completely in a different place than I thought I would be.

But six months later, acknowledging that gaping hole in who I am is just too much. So back into the Mom File, back into the back of the brain cabinet, while I try to function and carry on like I don't need her.

I thought when I moved out at fourteen, when I stopped talking to her at 18, when I stopped talking to her at 22, at 25...I thought I didn't need her anymore.

Do we ever stop needing our parents? Now, I'm not so sure. I think about losing my father or stepmother and the thought paralyzes me. More recently, I think of my mother's upcoming anniversary with my stepdad, and how I never even tried to be a daughter to him. Is there anything more arrogant than thinking you don't need the people who helped to raise you? Is there any worse way to treat family?

It is six months later and while I don't feel nearly as angry with her, I feel profoundly guilty. I think of all of the times I didn't call, not just on birthdays or Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving, but when she would call just to say hello and I wouldn't call back...and I am overwhelmed with grief. Not for the woman I lost, but for the woman I hurt so deeply and profoundly for years because I wasn't a good enough person to forgive her. Worse still is the knowledge that for all of my guilt, for all of her flaws as a parent and as a person, I know in my heart of hearts she forgave every time I didn't call. And god, that makes it so much worse. I must have broke her heart every day and all I want to do is apologize and cry in her lap and beg her to forgive me, beg her to tell me I'm only human, hear her say that she loves me in spite of all of my flaws the way I only learned to love her after her death.

Six months later the details of her death are still in sharp focus if I don't push them down. In stark contrast is the memory of pieces of her all around the apartment, as if she would spring from the hospital bed in the living room and pick up right where she left off in her world. I can still see her handwriting on the notes held to the fridge with magnets, her signature, and I wonder how long ago it was she was still signing off on my permission slips and my daily planner, Nicole Rene Goodreau. I didn't realize it was possible to feel equal parts that child again and infinitely older. The Before Morgan and the After Morgan.

Six months later, I am no longer angry. Some of the time, I'm not anything. I'm throwing myself into work or into hobbies. But sometimes, when I bring the Mom File out from that dusty corner, I am deeply and profoundly sad in a way that passes my own comprehension. How does anyone know who they are without knowing where they came from? I'm not sure how to move forward knowing that she won't see me become an extraordinary person. I'm not sure if I can become anything more than this half empty version of me, the personification of aftermath, After Morgan.

Six months passed without consequence because I have focused on keeping my shoulder to the wheel to try and move forward. In another six months, I'm hoping I can slow down, let more memories in, and ultimately forgive myself the way I knew she forgave me. And wherever I am six six month spans from now, I hope I am a woman she would have been proud of, and that somehow, Before and After Morgan can bridge this gap.