R.I.P. Mom
by Scott Hardie on May 28, 2023
You were so still in your bed when I could finally sit down beside you, a few hours after the facility notified me that you had died. I hadn't seen you be that peaceful in years, your eyes not scanning the room for clues, your hands not turning over each object in front of you for endlessly repeated examination.
I whispered to you the most urgent and most precious things I had to say, the secrets and atonements and wishes foremost on my mind. But I could not begin to say everything that I wanted to tell you. It's been half a decade since our last real connection in conversation, and so much has happened. I've had to make so many difficult choices for us both. I've been holding my breath for the last five years, never free of the worry that I was going to make a mistake that hurt you.
Even now, as I work on your final arrangements, I'm acutely aware of how much I'm guessing. You didn't talk to me about your religious beliefs or lack thereof. You didn't tell me your preferences for a funeral or burial, and you left blank the questionnaire that the estate attorney gave you about it. I'm lucky to have Kelly by my side to double-check my choices, and I'm not blind to the parallels.
So if those things that I whispered were the first private things that I wanted to say to you across the void, then here's the first that I'll say publicly.
My mom was the one who gave me giggle fits by chasing me around the house as soon as I could run, playfully sing-threatening that she was going to get me with her outstretched hands, pretending to chase but really preparing to catch me if I fell. My mom was the one who made sure that I had a little bit of every food in separate tiny piles on my nutritious dinner plate, even if I ate them in my own weird order and I didn't appreciate her effort until adulthood. She was the one who listened to my rambling stories no matter how tired she was or how much she just wanted a beer after that soul-sucking commute home every night from faraway downtown Chicago, suffered selflessly so that I could attend the great schools that she knew would make a difference in my life. She was the one who taught me to love board games and movies, to make room for other people's abandoned pets, to keep the front door fancy for special visitors and the side door unlocked for the guests who we treat like family. She was the one who forgave me for my expensive changes of mind in college when I got confused and lost, unsure what future I wanted or what present path to take to get there or even how to be a passable student. She was the one who taught me to give up my seat at the table to make room for someone who had been excluded, and she was the one who gave me the big table in my home where everyone is welcome. She was the one who always stylishly dressed her body and who impeccably decorated her home, even if those talents sadly turned out not to be hereditary, and who ceaselessly pursued the happiness and respect that she was due all of her life.
My mom was not the one whose memory faltered in fits of looping fixation, whose first signs of disease were repeating the same questions about whether I needed more to drink or eat with shortening intervals between them, even when I had a visibly full glass or plate in front of me. My mom was not the one who pretended not to get me as I tried to explain what worried me so much about her memory lapses and her bruises from drinking alone with them. She was not the one who never got to fulfill her retirement dream of auditing logic and music theory classes at the local college, because the brilliant mind that had once taken trigonometry and calculus classes after work for fun could no longer keep up with instruction, or instructions. She was not the one who stopped playing bridge when she couldn't remember the cards, and stopped watching movies when she couldn't follow the plot, and who eventually forgot the terms "elephant" and "cat" for the creatures she loved most. She wasn't the one who drove away friends and caregivers with her belligerent changes in mood, and who smiled that damned smile after she forgot that she'd ruined everyone's evening yet again with another angry outburst or tirade, forcing us to forgive unforgivable statements because it wasn't her fault. She wasn't the one who got lost driving across town and turned up in a hotel several hours away, who kept getting up from the table because of that relentless Alzheimer's impulse to wander, who eventually couldn't be taken out of her memory-care unit for a simple family dinner because the risk of a fight or a flight was too great. She wasn't the one who kept peeling off her bandages and sticking her fingers in her wounds to investigate them, re-infecting them until she needed two surgeries, or who refused to do any physical therapy afterwards until she was too weak to get out of the bed where she would die.
You were and weren't that woman. You were and weren't my mom. I choose to forget one of you and to cherish memories of the other.
I don't mourn the woman who you became. Having her in my life in these recent years has been like being handed responsibility for a stranger, a difficult old woman who lives in your town and has some of your missing mother's possessions in her apartment but who doesn't behave at all like your mother or recognize you as her son.
I used to tell myself that if there was any silver lining to your dementia, it was that your death wouldn't be as difficult to process as it could have been, because my mother was in many ways already gone. But that's not how it feels right now. There can't be any preparation for an event that only happens once in life. The waves of tears keep coming.
Being your logical son, I tried to optimize my grief, pre-mourning you each time another part of my mom vanished over the years. But that process just left me feeling as if holes had been torn within me that couldn't close as long as you still lived. And now that you really are gone, those gaps have not filled in after all, but instead widened into chasms. You can't fill in a void with grief. Grief is the void.
So, of course, I mourn the woman who you were. We had forty-five years together, down to the day and almost the hour. You gave up more for me than I will ever get to do for anyone, and you taught me every value that makes me who I am. Our relationship has been the most profoundly influential of my life.
I don't want that relationship to end. Walking out of the room where you laid dead, severing our Earthly connection for the last time, required a prodigious amount of willpower. Even with all of this time to prepare, I'm still not ready to say goodbye.
You will always be my mom. And I will forever be your loving son.
Six Replies to R.I.P. Mom
Steve West | May 29, 2023
She is irreplaceable. Absolutely nothing can evoke the same emotions of love and devotion she provided. All well-intentioned attempts by others will only serve as pale comparisons and make you mourn her absence more strongly. Therefore, I will only say that I mourn with you. The passage of time does indeed help heal, but nearly a decade has passed since my mother's death, and I still cry because I miss her so much. Reminiscing on the good times you shared will make you laugh and cry. And the transition of tears of sadness to tears of joy will make your unbidden memories a welcoming experience. Treasure them.
Samir Mehta | May 30, 2023
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Scott Hardie | May 31, 2023
Thank you all! I appreciate the condolences and well wishes.
Steve, I like what you said about tears of sadness becoming tears of joy. I've been through two parental deaths before (my father and Kelly's mother), and both times, I was struck by how quickly my mental image of the deceased changed from the sicker, weaker person they were later in life to the younger, more vital person that they were in better times, as if that was always how I'd truly thought of them. It's a strange but comforting mental phenomenon.
Samir, likewise, I hope for peace and comfort for you. I'm sorry to hear about your father and his own struggles and his prognosis. Dementia is a damned evil thing, robbing us of dignity and human connection before it robs us of years. (In my mother's case, it feels weird to say that an 83-year-old woman passed away too young, but with her otherwise excellent health and family history, she could have had good years into her 90s.) I recall two photographs that you posted on Facebook, one a Fathers Day tribute depicting your dad as a younger man, and another as he recovered in a hospital room a few years ago, looking relatively frail. I don't know the specifics of that particular incident and whether it was related to his dementia, but the contrast between the images does remind me of the weird duality created by this disease, turning someone we love into someone we don't recognize, and presumably having the same effect from their perspective. "Bizarre" is definitely the right word for it. (If you'll forgive me for writing out an inconsiderate thought: Somewhere in Hollywood, there must be a decent unproduced script for a horror movie about a young woman who is forcibly locked into one floor of an apartment building with other young people who behave in frightening ways and pretend not to know her, who is terrorized by face-changing overseers in uniforms who force her to perform bizarre acts of self-care while speaking nonsense, whose body keeps failing her unexpectedly, whose apartment and clothes keep changing mysteriously, and who does not recognize the disheveled elderly woman staring back at her in the mirror.)
I'm trying to make a conscious choice to blame the Alzheimer's completely for everything that happened, not just my mother's death but the many years of frustration preceding it. It's not at all her fault that she acted like she did! But it's hard to have feelings at a disease, even if that's where blame belongs, so I worry about my grief morphing into anger directed at someone else; for instance, I don't want to rage at some aide for making a minor error. I'm reminded of all of the anger and blame that went around during the pandemic, from Dr. Fauci to anti-maskers to politicians to careless tourists, when the proper party to blame for everything was the virus itself. Being angry at a disease is unproductive (I don't see myself inventing a cure for Alzheimer's Lorenzo's oil-style), so it forces meditation on the futility of anger in general. I prefer to sit with my feelings of grief and let them wash over me.
Denise Sawicki | May 31, 2023
I'm so sorry to hear this, Scott.
Scott Hardie | June 7, 2023
Thank you, Denise!
An obituary is now online.
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<3 ::hugs::