Mother's Day Blues

"I keep thinking that: I didn’t think she would die."

Around Mother’s Day, my melancholy spikes. I still haven’t gotten over it — her death. My mother raised a strong, confident, powerful woman, but I don’t always feel that way.

A few times, I thought I had healed, but reminders would trigger emotions so violent and deep that I would pray for a lobotomy. I never thought she would die. I keep thinking that: I didn’t think she would die. The thought loops in my head endlessly. I couldn’t fathom death. It felt so distant, so impossible, that I convinced myself it could never happen to her.

My mother had always been strong — the strongest woman I had ever known. She had survived a physically and emotionally abusive father, weathered the deaths of several siblings, and endured working as a cop in one of the most racist precincts in the world. She was a superhero. A woman who could not be broken.

How could cancer, of all things, take her?

I was there when she passed. I have replayed that day countless times in my mind: her lying in the hospital bed while I sat beside her, alone. My family had gone home for the night, assuring me she still had at least a few weeks left to live.

Instead, I was left alone to sit with what felt like a shell of the woman who had once been my mother. I remember staring at her and thinking, How could this happen? What kind of God would do this?

That night, I decided to smoke weed and eat a loaded Texas potato piled high with meat, sour cream, cheese, barbecue sauce, and every possible topping. Ironically, both meat and drugs were things I had been trying to quit, but grief makes relapse feel ceremonial. It felt like the perfect occasion to destroy myself a little.

Eventually, I fell asleep in the hospital chair.

I woke to the sound of the death rattle — that terrible, haunting sound a body makes when cancer has ravaged it and it is taking its final breaths. The noise jolted me upright just as the nurse rushed into the room.

She looked at me softly and said, “It’s time.”

I remember feeling confused. What time? What was she suggesting? This couldn’t be the end. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. She was still young. I hadn’t said goodbye.

The nurse repeated herself gently: “It’s time.”

And then I watched my mother take her last breath. A tear rolled down her cheek.

Then she was gone.

And I was alone.

My mother’s death left a gaping wound in my soul that will never fully close.