I’ve been thinking about my mom a lot this week. I always miss her more acutely around Halloween and Thanksgiving, but this year, the grief has come on stronger than I expected, like taking a sip of orange juice and realizing it’s a screwdriver.
Have you heard of the metaphor about grief as a bouncing ball? I first heard about it in my friend Katie’s newsletter, My Sweet Dumb Brain. Life is a box with a pain button, and grief is a bouncing ball. When you first lose someone, the box is small, the button is huge, and everything hits it. As time passes, the box gets larger and the pain button gets hit less often, but it still hurts.
My aunt, my mom’s sister, died this past week. My grief button is getting pressed constantly. My aunt had been sick for several years, but that doesn’t make losing her easier. People keep trying to find ways to comfort my cousin and my uncle, saying, essentially, it could have been worse. When I was in Buffalo with them, I just kept saying, “It’s all terrible.” There’s no good way to lose your parent.
Whenever I’m with my mom’s family, I think of her constantly. Before she got sick, my Aunt Carol had a voice that sounded just like my mom’s. I avoided her calls for years after my mom died because I just couldn’t handle the sound of it, that identical Buffalo accent. When she left me a voicemail singing me happy birthday, I would put off listening to it until I could cry alone.
My mother had her dark brown hair cut very short, a pixie cut with a side bang. When I was growing up, the side-swept hair on her forehead looked like it was painted with a brush, with grays perfectly streaking across her face. When more and more of her hair began to turn gray, she colored it a pretty auburn that brought out the red and brown freckles that covered every inch of her skin. She never wore makeup, because, she said, it always looked odd if she covered her freckles. She had a tight, small smile and thin lips, but when she smiled, it always reached her eyes, and when she laughed, she threw her head back in delight.
She was an introvert, exhausted by other people, but somehow great at connecting with them, even strangers, when she wanted to. I remember once driving past a house with a beautiful stained glass window. She stopped the car suddenly and unbuckled her seatbelt. “Oh my god, Mom, what are you doing?” I covered my face with my hands. She knocked on the door. I sunk into my seat but I could see her animatedly talking to the homeowner.
“Lauren, did you see that glass? I just had to go tell them how beautiful it was!” she said when she got back to the car. “They were so nice! They said they had it put in when the house was being built, so I guess we can’t copy them.”
She could make friends anywhere. When she was in the hospital at the end of her life, getting radiation and chemotherapy, there was a tech who was often charged with wheeling her from her room to where she would receive radiation treatment or undergo a PET scan. He was quiet at first, but she took an interest in him, and they became friends. The first time I met him, she’d already pulled him out of his shell. He wheeled her to a long, empty hallway (you could tell we were going from the original hospital to a modern addition and this awkward design connected them) with a steeper than normal slope to it.
“You ready, Mrs. K?” he asked her.
“Ready!” she said, holding tightly to the armrests.
I could not figure out what was going on. Suddenly, he took off jogging, letting her fly down the hallway in her wheelchair. “Wheeee!” she said, her arms up, like my toddler on a playground slide. “That was a good one!”
When she arrived at the cancer wing, she was beaming. Because she’d had that brief moment of exhilaration and connection. Because she’d been treated as a person, not just as a cancer patient. And the tech was smiling, too, because he’d connected with her, brought some joy to her day.
When my mom died, I wanted to be angry. Angry that she’d gotten cancer that had taken her from us so quickly, angry that I was a motherless daughter. But I tried to do what she would have done, instead. I sat down and wrote thank-you notes. I thanked the techs who gave her radiation, the nurses who made her days in the hospital brighter. Days after her death, I delivered the notes to the hospital.
I don’t know where I got the idea for the notes, but it was like, somehow, they added some padding to the box. Like the ball of grief was still bouncing around, but it wasn’t able to get to the pain button because there was something lighter and softer in the way.
So, this week, I took my own advice and wrote a thank-you card to one of the hospice nurses who cared for my aunt. They took her pain seriously and helped her be more comfortable in her final hours.
My Aunt Carol was bubbly, giggly, and sensitive, like a lighter, less cynical version of my mom. She knew how she should be treated and didn’t hesitate to let you know if you’d slighted her. Last week, I went to Buffalo on a last-minute trip to say goodbye to her, and I barely made it. She was emaciated and struggling to breathe but still smiling. The last thing I told her was that my cousin, her daughter, loved her a lot. “Oh, I know,” she managed to squeak out.
My uncle found a thank-you note she had written to everyone for caring for her and making her feel special, and they read it aloud at her funeral service. She seemed to grasp that these years she underwent cancer treatment weren’t just the end of her life but part of her life. “This isn’t a dress rehearsal,” she wrote. “We only have one chance at this. Let’s do it right.”
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