013: Happy birthday, Mama
How is it that time moves only in one direction?
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[Originally published on November 20, 2024 on Substack]
It’s my mom’s birthday today. She would be 66 today, which she would love. Partly because it would mean she was still alive. And also because she loved number patterns: age 44, age 55, November 11th, 2011: 11/11/11. She would have loved angel numbers if she’d ever learned what those were. She would have loved to turn 77, 88, 99. I would have loved it, too.
My aunt sent me a photo of me and my mother that I’d never seen before. She’s 34 and I’m just a few months old. I think I look like a wax doll, but my mom looks radiant and full-faced. I went into my camera roll this morning and all the last photos of her show her thin. I can see pain in her forehead and the edges of her eyes. It came on so slowly — over 12 years of cancer diagnoses, treatments, and scans, both clear and ominous.
All of it came on slowly. By the time she died, I had been writing dead-mom short stories and poems and essays for over a decade, exploring through words what it might mean to be in the world without her. After her.
She died in the right order for me — parents before children — and the wrong order for my grandparents: child before parents. As a result, her death took much of them with her. My grandfather suddenly became more fragile. My grandmother’s dementia abruptly accelerated and she lost much of the language she still had access to. She called me int he middle of the night and told me that something was wrong, but she couldn’t find the words. I sang to her through the phone until she fell asleep, and then I listened to her breathe until my phone grew hot and I had to hang up.
Before, during, and after the end of my mom’s life, I’ve written about her. I’ve written formal things that have gotten published, and I’ve written journal entries, texts, Instagram captions, and phone notes that encompass everything from abject grief to rage.
I don’t know why I feel compelled to write about her all the time. I don’t know why I feel compelled to write about everything all the time. Maybe it’s a way to make sense of things. Maybe it’s a way to prove to myself that my ideas exist, instead of letting them echo in my head until the details are lost to the din.
I think a lot about what makes someone want to express themselves, and what makes other people content to keep their inner worlds to themselves. Why do I want to write songs and put things down on paper? Why do I want other people to read and listen to the things I make?
Sometimes I imagine myself as a hollow space instead of a solid human being. Instead of being a person in the world, I think of my outline as being formed by the perceptions of other people. I want to be seen as so undeniably myself that the only thing you can see when you look at me is me. I want to be known, I want to be seen — and this is different from being known.
After my mom died, I received a lot of love from many people. The generosity was astounding. I also received some of the most callous, thoughtless, selfish messages and behavior from people I had once considered close.
Not to sound obsessed with myself, but whenever I share my thoughts on grief, or missing my mom, or what it’s like to try to live after someone dies, someone reaches out to me and thanks me. Really, I should be thanking anyone who reads what I write, because it’s proof that my thoughts exist, that they mean something, that other people might be moving through the world feeling the same way. When something as all-encompassing as grief shapes your most foundational years (for me, this all began when I was sixteen, and it’s baked into my bone marrow), it can be hard to tell what’s up and what’s down. What’s real. What it all means, and how to move forward.
I have this necklace I bought about 6 months after my mom died. It has a pendant with her birth month flower on one side, and her fingerprint and “xoxo, Mama” on the other side. Next to the pendant is a tiny glass dome in a gold setting. Inside of the glass dome is a minuscule photo of me and my mom. To see it, I have to hold the charm very close to my eye — about a centimeter away. Sometimes I grab it upside-down and the image I see doesn’t make sense. You can “look around” in the prism, and sometimes I can’t tell if I’m seeing her eye or mine. Her smile or mine. It’s impossible to see the entire picture at once. You have to tilt the charm in order to see the whole thing, in parts.
Maybe this is the shape of grief: impossible to see at once. Ephemeral as looking around in a prism. Secret and constant as a tiny glass charm. Present as the necklace I wear nearly every day. Both the reality of, and a mere representation of the past and the present colliding.
I’ve had so many presents without her. This moment. This moment. This moment. Four jobs and two albums and a hundred shows and two dogs and 17 tattoos and haircuts and injuries and stitches and tears, so many tears, and realizations and miles and miles and miles driven in the minivan that was once hers, and visits to my sisters and grandmother and a new house and a new life and a new year and a new year and a new year and soon, a new year.
Happy 66th birthday, Mama.