Five years.

 I know that this time five years ago, I was in California, waiting for my mother to die. I can still picture exactly  - the golden light as it filtered through the blinds across the hospice bed in her living room. The two bedroom apartment in Morro Bay, California. The last meal of corned beef hash still in the Tupperware container in the refrigerator, as if we were saving it for her, for later. Notes in her handwriting stuck to the door with magnets. I opened her purse to look for something for the hospice nurse, and I can still remember the way it smelled like it always had. Blistex lip ointment and Listerine breath strips. I can still hear the sea lions barking from the bay, and my mother’s breath rattling in her chest as the television muttered words we half-listened to, desperately focused on the sound of her inhales, her exhales. The dryness of her hands that I held while she was unaware, the lump in my throat as I sang to her, I remember all of it. And this year, five years later, I can’t feel it.  

I can remember the winding road into Morro Bay, the terror I felt gripping the wheel of my rental car on the California interstate, and the mix of grief and gratitude to be in the place I’d wanted to see since childhood. But I can’t feel those feelings now. Five years later. It’s such a milestone. You’d think I’d be able to feel something. 

Years previous to this, I’ve been angry. She was so young, and I hadn’t seen her in five years. We hadn’t resolved our issues. We hadn’t resolved the anger between us. She was an addict. I didn’t understand that her death wasn’t about me, and the rest of her children, not being enough to live for. Years previous to this, I celebrated her life with friends. I grieved with them. I showed up to my own party late, drank, and ate ice cream cake. Another year, I drove to Florida by myself to see the ocean and feel closer to her. This year, I’ll go out with my partner and attempt to celebrate her life. It feels foreign to me, though. I feel like I’m grieving someone I do not know. I feel that my connection to her has vanished, and with it comes a feeling of guilt and loss much deeper than losing her ever felt. 

Maybe it’s that it’s hard to grieve someone you don’t really know. She and I were never close, and I still know so little about her. The interactions we had were so often abusive, and I wanted her love and approval the way that all kids want their mother’s love and approval. When I left for my own safety, it was the emotional equivalent of cutting off an arm because you’re trapped beneath a boulder, desperate for escape. Did it save my life? Yes. Was there lasting damage in spite of my survival? Yes. For a long time, I felt that this was a catalyst to my mom’s drinking. I felt that my leaving was the reason for her downward spiral and subsequent death. Sometimes I still do. 

Maybe it’s the pandemic. Maybe it’s that so many of us have spent over a year trying to survive in a world that doesn’t look like our own, that I’ve forgotten most things that aren’t necessary for self-preservation. Maybe not feeling this grief is necessary for self preservation. Does this feeling exist outside of the personal world I had created when it occurred? The world is unrecognizable since then. I’m unrecognizable. When she died, I thought I was straight. I thought I was cisgender. I recognize now that I am non-binary. I recognize now that I am queer. I know myself now more than I ever did then. Did grief provide a clearer lens through which to see myself? Am I not honoring myself by not being able to experience this feeling now? 

More than anything, I’m afraid that this is what people mean when they say “it gets easier”. I know I couldn’t have survived the way I felt in the first year after she died. That underwater, buried, gasping for air feeling. But I didn’t want to turn it off completely– any feeling of her, of the experience, of our relationship. We were complicated both in life and in death. There were many things we never resolved or discussed. I wish she would have known me as I am, fully. I want to believe she would have loved me as I was completely, though her terrible husband makes me pause. Recalling the memories in perfect detail isn’t enough if they are just pictures on a screen. She meant more to me than a movie.  And movies at least evoke something.

When I was in Florida on the third anniversary of her death, I drank gas station bottles of wine and sobbed until the sun came up over the orange pebble beach. I  kept HGTV on the hotel room television so I wouldn’t feel alone, just like I did when I lived with my mother and stepdad and my room was in the basement with one bare lightbulb and an old tube television. I cried until my chest ached, my eyes swelled, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. The unfinished business, the pain, the addiction, and ultimately, me at 27, desperately wanting to hear my mother’s voice tell me that it would all be okay. 

I expected something like that at the five year mark. Or something a little more calm. Maybe the dull ache of loss. I don’t want to feel the pain of losing her. I think I want to feel her. And maybe this is my brain and body protecting me, in a way. 

I think when it comes, it’s going to level me.