It’s been three months since my mother died of pancreatic cancer. She would have turned 59 last week.
I haven’t written much about her, yet—a brief memorial message for her social media accounts; a few heartfelt summations of some lessons and values she left me with on my own. It feels insufficient. Like a single quote etched into the space permitted by a headstone, the words barely scratch the surface of the full complexity of nearly six decades of a deeply meaningful human life.
My mother often struggled with the idea that allowing others to see the full range of her emotional experience would be too painful for them, and perhaps too painful for her as well. While she had a strong yearning to express herself and to be seen, she was rarely willing to discuss or even admit to some of her deepest and hardest feelings about the challenges and disappointments she had experienced in her life.
It is hard to conceal your pain from those who get to observe you across a lifetime of interactions, and yet the vulnerability of emotional intimacy never came easily to my mother. A physically and emotionally abusive marriage that began before she was 20 ended just a few years later with a painful divorce and two young children she had to find a way to care for. Despite later marrying a kind partner and grinding out a dizzying array of educational and professional accomplishments, this early, deeply painful relationship set the trajectory in her teens for the remainder of a life that was often shadowed by a sense of struggle, grief, and atonement.
My mother never wanted her children to feel responsible for her chafing pain at the personal sacrifices she made throughout her life, for us, out of necessity, love, and duty. Her way of protecting us from that pain was to hide it; to deny it or reframe it even in the face of evidence bubbling up through cracks in the façade.
Instead of expressing her feelings openly, she poured herself into her private journals when she was struggling, most of which she destroyed before she died. Only fragments remain: a small packet of sentimental writing about her children intended for us to read, and a few stray notebooks which escaped the purge amid the chaotic jumble of decades of boxes of personal files. It’s from these scraps that I’m forced to piece together a more complete picture of this deeply private woman I loved so dearly—all that’s left to resolve my own tangled confusion between what she allowed herself to express and the more sublimated, urgent emotions that radiated through her well-intentioned efforts to suppress and conceal them.
I never realized how fantastic of a writer my mother was. The passion and vibrance of her emotions crystallized in prose at the times they were most keenly felt—both the good and the bad—explode off of the pages with a raw and direct vulnerability in her written voice that I rarely saw from her in person. Recurrent themes emerge in her entries describing some of the more tragic and painful aspects of her experience with life that I had often sensed from her, but which were only confirmed directly in the stark black and white scrawl of her handwriting that I’m not sure if she ever intended for anyone to read.
Regardless of her intentions, I am grateful to have as much of it as I do. I wish I had more. It would be unfair (and hypocritical) of me to judge her decisions about how much of her interiority she could bear to share directly with her family or grapple with while she was alive. I am well-acquainted with the concept of truths that feel too painful to voice or which even if expressed have no self-acceptable resolution available at the time they are felt.
I’ve often wondered, over the last few months, what was in the pages she didn’t leave behind—what experiences, memories, and small observations were destroyed forever with the journals that were lost, and how many of the unique moments and perspectives of her life were never committed to a page at all.
When I was going through her accounts in the weeks after her passing, I noticed an unanswered email she had recently written to one of her favorite film directors. It was a short pitch for the story of her early life; a last-ditch attempt to immortalize a personally meaningful vignette from her existence. It pained me that she hadn’t received any reply, unlikely as it might have been. I ached for her apparent unfulfilled desire to be witnessed, a theme that came up often in her writing.
I feel great sadness at how alone and unseen my mother felt in the depth of her pain at times. Her writing reveals a deep sense of personal loss and struggle with her choice to consistently elevate the needs of others over the fulfillment of her own dreams and desires, as well as fear and despair that the enormity of that sacrifice might go unnoticed and unappreciated.
There was so much she hoped for from her life that was left undone; so much she yearned for that she felt unable to express or fulfill; so much weight from the mantle of responsibility thrust upon her at a very young age which limited the choices she felt were permitted to her, and then sealed in the finality of a stage IV cancer diagnosis that rapidly and suddenly robbed her of any of the possible futures in which she might finally realize some of those long-deferred dreams.
I know my mother, just as I have always known my mother even when her words sometimes contradicted the reality of the pain she attempted to hide. She would not want to be remembered as a tragic figure, and I have no wish to present her in this way. In one of the last recorded conversations I had with her, just months before she passed away, she had started crying in expressing some of her hopes and fears for her family after her death. I held her for a short while before she dried her tears and expressed emphatically:
“I am not a victim. I have always been a survivor. We are all strong, we are a family of survivors, and you will all be okay when I am gone.”
Her words were as much of a reminder for herself as for her family, and mom was right. It is incredibly painful to consider the lives she was never able to live, and the hopes and dreams that she left unfulfilled—more painful still to consider the victories and milestones that she won’t be here with us to witness and celebrate, much of which are the fruits of the enormous sacrifices she made for her family.
But to rob her of her agency in making those incredibly difficult choices, to say that she was forced by some unlucky turns of fate into a hard denial of those dreams, is to cheapen the price she willingly paid for the well-being of the people in this world that she loved the most.
It can be easy at times as her child to look back at her choices and wish that she would have sacrificed a little less; to question whether every self-denial and every bit of pain and disappointment she carried silently were really necessary, or to ask how honest she was in the consideration of the emotional impacts of those self-denials on those of us who loved her.
It can be much harder to look at the complex web of interpersonal needs and feelings, deeply-felt responsibility, and realistic options that were available to her at each stage of her life journey and conclude that any of those choices were easy for her to make, or even the wrong decisions to make given the information and skills she had at the time. As most parents do, she did the best that she could.
I will be forever grateful to have known Mom and to have been raised by her. I am saddened that it was only in the last few years of her life that I really began to appreciate the totality of her as another human, rather than as a parent-figure, and more than anything else I feel robbed of the opportunity to build and deepen that budding adult friendship with her. Perhaps this more mature and open version of our relationship, if not cut tragically short by cancer, might have been one of the ways that I could have eased her burden a bit more and helped her to feel more seen in the sacrifices that she made for us.
This is why I think it is so important to give voice to not only the joy, warmth, support, and positivity that I will always associate with my mother and miss for the rest of my life, but also to honor her memory by witnessing and holding space for her pain, grief, sadness, and disappointments. To see her as a whole human, with all of her raw, messy, and challenging emotions, even when they hurt to hold. To appreciate her for being not only the mother she was, but for the person she was, and for the ways in which that person experienced both joy and suffering in the twists and turns of the life she lived.
To anxiously paper over half of that experience, even if she had hoped to protect us from it, is to deny her in her humanity and to fail to appreciate the true extent of the gift she chose to give us.
I sat by my mother’s bedside for most of the night before she died, holding her hand and offering her a bit of water whenever she was capable of taking it. At one point, late in the evening, my chair creaked as I shifted in it. She grabbed my hand tightly and squeezed, whispering, “Please don’t leave.”
“I’m not leaving, mom… I’m right here. I’m staying with you. You’re not alone.”
It was only a few hours later, shortly after dawn, that it became apparent that she was nearing the end. My dad put on some soft music, and he and my grandma and I sat with her as fresh snow drifted down gently outside in the light of a cold Wisconsin morning. I held her hand as she died, softly repeating how much we loved her, how much we appreciated her, and how we would take care of each other once she was gone. I don’t know how lucid she was by then, but she seemed comforted by this.
Almost 38 years prior, she had ushered me into this world. It felt deeply meaningful to be there with her, holding her and loving her and witnessing her, as she departed from it.
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