Goodbye, Mom

Two things happened every time I went to see my mom: as I walked in the door and our eyes met, her entire being would light up with a smile radiating pure love, and when we sat down I’d pull out a steel tongue drum and we’d start playing together.

My mom loved music and she loved me, and so being with each other and the world through this experience filled my body with warmth and my soul with love. When I visited her a couple of years ago during Christmas I sat down next to her, brought out the drum and handed her a mallet. But before we started to play she reached back, took my arm and pulled it around onto her shoulder, holding my hand and sinking into my side.

We looked at each other and smiled and then I started to count numbers. As I started rhythmically singing the tone for her to hit—chanting: one, one, one, one, one as she hit the middle c tone—she started to chant with me. I accompanied her by hitting the major third.

As we got to the number seven, the last tone in the major scale, my mom started to chant eight and looked around for the number eight for a few moments, until she looked at me and exclaimed: oh there is no eight! We both laughed and leaned into each other.

I last saw my mom on April 7th of this year, when I rode with her in a medical transport that took her from the place I grew up to the place my brother now lives. On that ride I saw glimpses of her joyful soul—huge smiles as she took sips of a sweetened beverage, gentle caressing of my hand as we rode. But the intensity that had always radiated from her, in moments good and bad, was tamped down. When she tried to free herself from the medical restraints, she weakly shifted her legs, lifted her voice in protest, but only to a barely audible whisper. Nine months before, while delirious in the hospital, it took all of my strength to keep her from pushing her way out of her hospital room and onto the nurses’ floor. I didn’t see it at the time, or rather I pushed away the feeling part of me that knew, but my mom was almost gone.

Five weeks after moving her I got a call at 7 am from my brother. I was staying at an Airbnb in California with friends. I stepped outside to take the call. As my eyes focused on the shoreline my brother said simply, Mom just died. I told my brother that I loved him and then I collapsed on an outdoor couch and cried. For an hour my self dissolved and I was but a body in a state of being tears.

In the summer of 1993, my family woke up and started a normal Saturday morning. I didn’t know that would be the last normal moment of our lives. Sometime between A Pup Named Scooby Doo and Goof Troop, my mom had a grand mal seizure, collapsing to the floor in violent flails, foam pouring from her mouth, blood everywhere. My dad called 911. He thought my mom was dead. My mom was not dead, but for the next 33 years she would live in a body robbed of its frontal lobe.

Without most of her frontal lobe my mom couldn’t remember what happened hours, or even minutes, ago, and she couldn’t plan or carry out long term tasks. But the thing my mom could do—the thing in fact that she no longer had the ability to not do—was to display her full self in all moments. My mom had an extraordinary presence and unlike those of us with fully functioning brains, she didn’t have the luxury of turning it off. If she felt something she felt it deeply and expressed it, if she thought something she said it, if she saw a photo of cats on my phone, her hand would grab the screen, trying to feel their fur through the pixels. And she always gave the world her openhearted attention.

Last summer, my mom had another grand mal seizure—the first she’d had in about a decade. For two months she shuttled between hospital rooms and outpatient physical therapy rehab facilities.

During one of the transfers she was in utter pain and terror, screaming like a wounded animal— for she was an animal, as we all are, and she was wounded in a deep way. Her screams were so visceral that I resisted feeling them, hoping to brute force my way to some momentary state of peace. I tried to calm her with words, to distract her with pictures, to soothe her with touch; each attempt failing more than the last.

As I rubbed her arm she turned her head to look at me and she started screaming: don’t touch me! And this broke me. I could not resist feeling her pain and I finally let go of trying. I put my head down right next to her head on the bed and I started bawling. Full body sobs, my own pain making my whole body hot. And in that moment when I fully let go, she glimpsed that it was me, stopped screaming, reached out her hand, and wiped the tears from my eyes.

And then she went right back to screaming.

After breaking her hip and getting a partial replacement, she needed to do PT. But she had trouble following directions to take a certain number of steps. So every PT session, I’d stand next to my mom, ask the physical therapist where to stand, walk there, turn around, open my arms and say—sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish—mom, come here and give me a hug. And every time we would lock eyes as she walked over to give me a big hug and sink into my body.

The thing I will miss most about my mom is seeing her smile and her eyes light up when I walked into a room—but the thing is, she did that for so many people. Of course it was stronger for me, my brother, and my dad, but she would light up when anyone would open themselves up to her presence. When she saw someone new, she would examine every tiny feature of their face, complimenting each thing she saw. I remember visiting her once with a family friend, who is bald. My mom reached up, started rubbing his head, and said: you’re bald, I love it!

My mom came into this world screaming, as we all do. But her screams were more intense, born as she was in the back seat of the car after the bridge to the only nearby hospital had been destroyed by a bomb. I felt those screams as I lay next to her on the bed.

And yet, the thing that she released more powerfully than any scream was the deepest love from a soul who wanted everything for me and nothing from me.

One week ago I sat on a cushion on the second day of a five day silent meditation retreat. As I repeated the mantra—may I be well, happy, skillful, and peaceful—I felt my neck start to tingle. I stayed with my breath as my belly filled with warmth. And then my body let go, expanding into the space around me, a space held by my mom’s spirit. I felt her embrace my entire being and it felt like I was floating in the air. Tears streamed down my face. The meditation bell rang and I opened my eyes, feeling my mom’s presence flowing from my body back into the world that she refused to stop loving.

The world knew her as Kati. I knew her as Mom.

Mom, I love you.

I miss you.

And I know that as long as I’m alive I will feel your love in the sound of an octave, in the smile of a stranger, and in the intensity of the heart that we share.