I was lying in bed in the dark. Sleepy but not sleeping. Listening. From the living room beneath me I could hear the voice of my father, two of my aunts, my uncle. My father was talking about my mother, what the doctor said, how she looked. As he described her, I tried to imagine her face, the loss of weight, the shaved portion of her hair, the circles under her eyes, but couldn’t quite make the pieces come together. My aunt peppered my father with questions: “But what did the doctor say? What about the surgery? What about the radiation treatments?” There was silence for a moment, then I heard my father quietly start to sob. I had never seen him cry, but I imagined him bent over in the gray vinyl chair, his left hand covering his eyes, his elbow on his thigh, his right hand wrapped around his stomach. Then I heard the crying of my two aunts and then finally my uncle clearing his throat. I realized with utter certainty that my mother was going to die.
I was 13 at the time. My mother was 38 and had been ill for four months. The illness seems to accentuate her natural quietness. As time passed she looked more and more fatigued, drawn, pale, but when she laughed her hazel eyes still sparkled. She never asked, “Why me?” but rather “When can I go home?” And she did for several weeks at a time before some new tumor or new pain would take her back to the hospital some 40 miles away. My father would often go and stay with her for several days at a time. An only child, I stayed home alone, sometimes having dinner with a neighbor next door. I often didn’t see my mother for weeks at a time, and when I did I was always shocked by how different she looked even though her smile and voice were the same. When she died four months later in June I was not surprised; I didn’t cry.
While my father fell apart, I stayed together. He went through the motions of working, came home and spent most evenings sitting upright in the same gray chair, a glass of scotch in one hand, a small cigar in the other. He watched TV but never changed the channels, never got up, never spoke. He just sat, staring. I learned to cook. I cleaned the house, the yard. If anyone asked how my mother was I did an automatic shrug and said she was okay. Because school was already out when she died, most of friends didn’t know of her death until almost a year later, after one of them directly asked me why he never saw her at home.
Every Sunday my father and I would go to the cemetery where he would put flowers around the grave, squat down and stoke the grass with the palm of his hand and talk to my mother while I wandered between graves and leaned against a tree, bored. Before we left he always kissed the headstone. I felt embarrassed by his maudlin display, irritated that he was dragging me into this.
By the end of the year my father stopped drinking scotch, had given up the cigars. He bought himself a gold Chrysler 300 convertible, and got a new wife, a woman he had met through a friend. She was from Greece on a visa, was divorced, and spoke little English. Mostly she cleaned the house, made Greek dishes heavy with lots of olive oil and gave me wide-eyed uncomprehending smiles when I told her I was going over to a friend’s house. Within a year or so the marriage was over.
For most of the rest of my adolescence I had two selves: The Honor Society member, football team offensive right tackle, VP of the Ski Club that my father expected of me, and then the shoplifter, cigarette smoker, six-pack drinker when my father was at work or out on a date. My father married again the year I graduated from high school to an older woman — energetic, sophisticated, so different from my mother. By the time I had settled down and given my heavy drinking and shoplifting I was relieved to be getting out of the house and going to college. A year later my girlfriend, whom had dated since I was 16, and I eloped to Huron, Michigan to get married by the justice of the peace. It seemed just a coincidence that my father had done the same 25 years earlier by means of a quick bus trip down to South Carolina. By the time I was 20 I was a father myself.
During my adolescence I had never heard of “unresolved grief” or any of those other terms that I would eventually learn in graduate school. It never occurred to me that my bad-boy behavior had anything to do with my mother’s death. I had just hung out with an older, faster high school crowd, I got attention from my friends for being something of a wild man -- the guy who'd show up drunk for a band concert and blow fart-like noises out my tuba from the back row, who'd steal shot puts from the other teams at track meets for the challenge of it. The anniversaries of my mother’s death came and went with not much more than an emotional shrug from me — “Oh, yeah — this is the day that happened.” I didn’t consciously miss my mother, I never talked about her, I didn’t even think about her.
And yet, I had the uneasy idea — not really a feeling — that this odd absence of sadness, of grief, of remembrance, was not quite normal. I certainly didn’t think I had an emotional problems, but it did seem that I too easily dissolved into tears at any sad movie or TV show, and I reacted very badly to even minor separations. If my wife was late coming home, to numb my obsessive worry about her I purposely imagined the worst in full-blown detail — her terrible car accident, her injuries, her death, the funeral; running through the entire scenario complete with eulogy would calm me down. But about my mother I had a puzzling sense of a vacuum inside myself, a troubled feeling of not feeling, a dry, echoing canyon where some deep, palpable river of sorrow should flow.
By now I was 24 and had picked up the pop psychological nostrums about pent-up emotions and catharsis, and I imagined that one day, when I least expected it, a psychic dam would collapse, a huge reservoir of unexpressed grief would burst out in a great torrent, and that would be that. One explosive emotional sneeze and I would finally be finished and done with whatever clearly unfinished psychic business still lingered in the shadowy areas of my mind and soul. I waited for a long time and nothing happened.
I was about to give up on my big-sneeze theory when several years later I was in a small-group, three-day workshop on family therapy. The workshop leader asked us to use the others to sculpt a time of transition in our lives. I instinctively chose the time when my mother was ill. I cast my work supervisor as my mother looking sad and helpless, another colleague as my father across from me looking stern, almost angry. Before I even put myself in place, the sobs began and I cried and cried. I remember the leader saying something about unresolved grief, and I remember thinking way back behind my tears that yes, this is what I need, it had finally happened. I cried for about 10 minutes.
The next day I felt different, lighter. Later during that week, I became angry, then quickly teary, when my wife asked if we could give away my mother’s old chipped coffee cups. I remember telling her out of the blue that I missed not having my mother around to be proud of me. And then all the feelings, all the swells of emotion just seemed to recede again.
Like many in the therapy field, I believe, I’ve discovered that I was initially drawn to doing this work because it offered me a controlled entry into the world of emotions; at the time I started, I was more or less numb from the neck down. Sometimes when working with clients who were grieving I would find myself becoming too impatient; I wanted them, like me, to move on, get the grief-work done. But mostly I behaved, I listened.
And as I did, I also gradually learned through their stories the multiple faces of loss: the mother who drove around with pictures of her dead son in the trunk of her car for fear that the house would catch fire and they would be destroyed; the 6-year-old child who imagined over and over again angels flying overhead, carrying his father back home to him; the woman in prison who sat silent for six sessions, then at the seventh, with two hours of sobbing and screaming, reenacted her shooting of her drug-addicted boyfriend after he begged and begged her to end his misery and his life. It was against their pain, their ways of coping that I learned to measure my own.
As my son neared 13 years old, I became afraid. Not only was I that age when my mother died, my father had been 13 when his father had died. The coincidence of my elopement and my father’s had already spooked me; it didn't take much of the therapist in me to realize that my father’s path was intertwined with my own. I was afraid that unresolved grief would now infect my son’s life as well. I developed a fine case of preemptive dread. Sometime, and probably soon, I knew, something would happen — my wife or I or my son would die or become seriously ill; my wife and I would divorce; our house would burn to the ground. Somehow the loss of the past would recreate itself in a new form.
I braced myself, waited with held breath…but nothing happened. My son adopted the anti-Mom stance typical of most 13-year-olds, but not much else. My wife thought I seemed a bit removed, distracted at times, but nobody died or got sick, the house remained standing. We all continued to live uneventfully and even happily together. Had the intergenerational curse been finally broken?
What emerged over the next few years were parts of me that had been in deep freeze. Interests, activities that I had associated with my mother — primarily music and religion — began to drift back into my awareness. I rented a piano and started taking lessons after a 17-year break; I started attending church. As before I never directly associated these interests with any formal grief process, but I was occasionally aware that I thought of my mother when I was doing them.
And when I look back over my past I remember other pieces of healing bubbling up, catching me by surprise. Once when I was helping my daughter with her third-grade math homework, I suddenly remembered the times my mother brought me to work with her and I helped her add long columns of numbers on the green manual adding machine with a big handle that you had to pull down; her waving good-bye as I sat in the school bus on the first day of kindergarten, my nose pressed against the window, trying not to cry; the time I was sick and I could feel the roughness of her coat against my cheek as I leaned into her on the way home from the doctor's; memories so fragile, so ephemeral, so important. I was afraid that vivid, potent images of, say, photos in albums, old home-movies of holidays would too easily override and replace them in my mind. I found myself packing them all away, never looking at them again. Another time, yet later, in my forties, I sat in a workshop on spirituality and the leader asked us all to write a stream-of-consciousness letter to God. What came out, seemingly from nowhere, were a dozen letters from me to my mother, from my mother back to me. As the words came pouring out, I felt like a channeler, a conduit of conversations between the living and the dead. Questions, answers, anger, grief all shaped themselves on the page. I sat there stunned, exhausted when there was finally no more to say.
Fifteen years ago as my father was dying, and I found myself once again bracing myself as I had when my son was turning thirteen, fearful, not about my father and his imminent death, but about me. I worried that history would repeat itself, that when my father died, I would automatically, unconsciously fall once again back into that 13-year-old march-step, emotionally freeze-up and feel nothing, discover that the 13-year-old hadn't really ever grown up and healed after all. As my father lay in a coma, I sat by the side of his bed and told him I loved him, that I was sorry he had had such a difficult life, that I wanted to thank him for giving me life, my life, and the opportunity to live it. And as I said this, as quiet tears slowly rolled down my checks, I felt sad yet relieved. I realized how all losses are connected, how what I was now doing with him at that moment was what I never had the opportunity to do with my mother.
It’s been over 50 years since my mother’s death. The Do-It-and-Be-Done-With-It stance of my twenties is long gone. Like that onion simile that we all are so fond of, I suspect, even in my older age, that I may have a few more layers to peel through. But I’m in no hurry. All life, I’ve come to believe, moves us forward toward healing and growth at its own pace, according to the rhythm we cannot force. My past, my loss, my mother herself, perhaps, in spirit, in memory, in grief stays within me, helping me reinvent the past, teaching me that nothing is finished until it is finished. Perhaps someday it will be....
Or perhaps the ending will always recede, into the mysterious future, around a corner we never quite turn.
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