Day 292: Mother’s Day
Stumbling into your first mother’s day after your mom has died is a strange thing. I was anticipating a tsunami of grief as my dear friend would say, but it’s more of a low, long, deep hum of waves and ripples crashing in and out. I last saw my mother alive a year ago, almost exactly a year ago today, at my brother’s law school graduation.
She did her normal things to annoy me, wandered off in a crowd so we had to send a sentry to look for her because she was too short to be spotted in a normal-sized crowd of people. She had to use the bathroom at an annoying time, delaying us leaving to go get lunch. She made us take 75,000 photos from different angles. But she also brought a bottle of scotch into the student center at Loyola, so after the ceremony we could immediately toast my brother’s accomplishment by drinking single malt out of stolen plastic cups. She was so quintessentially Evelyn that day, even as sick as she was. Though we didn’t know how sick that actually was at the time.
During brunch following the graduation, she just sat back and watched us all boisterously talking and throwing jabs at the newest JD in the family. When she had to go to the bathroom, I offered to help her since she was using a walker and toting an oxygen tank behind her. I helped her into the bathroom and held her things and situated her purse while she washed her hands and had a fit of not being able to breathe, which I assumed she was exaggerating (leave it to my mother to die just to prove a point of how sick she was). I looked at her and she was so small and weak, but still so fierce inside, still so much fire and light and determination. I was briefly in awe before the annoyance kicked in because she complained about something inconsequential.
After brunch she wanted us all to go back to her hotel room just to sit and talk and instead I flitted off to spend time with my brothers. Not the veteran brothers who I’d grown up with, but the rookie brothers that I’d met just two days prior. I figured I’d spent my whole life knowing my mother, that spending one night getting to know them would be fine. And it was fine, but me scurrying away from her on the street is my last memory of seeing my mother alive.
I did see her again, two months later, but this time in a basement at the University of Chicago hospital, peering through glass that was revealed by one of those deep, faded pastel patterned curtains that only exist at hospitals and dentist’s offices. Her body was small and covered in a bright white sheet. Only her face was visible. Her fine hair was whisked back, the gray hair she refused to dye brushing at her temples. She was still intubated and she looked like she had just given the fight of her life that ended in stillness. Which is the way we all go, I suppose, at least the part about ending in stillness.
The lines on her face were pronounced, and she looked like a topological map of her life was playing out on the body it left behind.
I waited to see her body for over an hour. The chaplain had to get an exception approved because you’re technically only able to view within 24 hours and it’d been 48, but I’d also made the excellent argument that I had one: flown in from London, and two: was her daughter. While I was waiting, Aaron brought us sandwiches and I sat in the lobby in a beam of sunlight. I looked up at one point to see a man I’d slept with in college strolling past, who was now a doctor at the hospital. Mercifully, we ignored each other. What are the odds you’d run into a past hookup while waiting to view your mom’s dead body?
By then I’d heard all the details of her death, of when it happened, how dramatic it was, of my brother racing down Lake Shore Drive at 100 miles per hour to get to her in time to say goodbye, of the words spoken by the resident physician just before he called time of death, of the silence, of my brother’s absolute shock and subsequent destruction as he took her hand for her very last moments on earth.
That was day 2. Someone dying is like one of those pandemic movies, where there is a day 1 and a patient zero. There’s an origin story to how it all started and the filmmakers make sure to let us know how far away we are from the last time things were normal. Day 2 felt different than day 30, and day 60, and day 292 which also happens to be Mother’s Day.
Today, I think of small things like how she woke up at the same time every morning, and when I woke up as a kid I would always smell fresh brewed coffee and, sometimes, the soft sound of her voice on the phone talking to her friends or one of my aunts because it was the only time she really had to catch up with them, before the world woke up. She kept her voice low so she wouldn’t wake me, but I loved waking up and hearing her on the phone. There was something so deeply normal about it that made me feel safe.
Or how when she laughed really really hard at something she tucked her face into her shirt collar as if it could stifle the sound as it rang out of her.
I’m not going to do that thing that people do when they talk about their dead mom where they tell you to hug your mothers and to appreciate them. It falls on deaf ears and also sometimes your mother might suck and that’s ok too. We don’t get to choose. But I will say that much of what is in you got there because she poured it into you, either through genetics or through acts of love (or fear, or sadness, or determination). So when you think of what you like about yourself (and I hope there is a long list), it’s helpful to identify where you get some of the beauty from and honoring it, even if it’s from afar.
Evelyn was a lot of things, but mostly she was my mom and I miss her presence on this earth.
