A personal one today

January 7, 2025

On this day in 1979, my mother died. I was fourteen years old.

And all I felt was relief. I don’t know what that says about me, but I promised to always tell you the truth, and that’s the truth.

She’d died many years before, actually. The person that remained, especially in the last few years of her life, was not the exuberant, friendly, happy person that she was when she was in her teens and early 20s. Some of us are strong and can bear the vicissitudes of life and still emerge relatively intact, and some of us cannot. She could not. To be fair, though, she was the architect of much of her own misery.

My memories of her are mostly of fear. She was so emotionally labile that I could never know what to expect, and because she was so volatile, something that was perfectly fine one day would set her off the next day, and I guess that’s the nature of alcoholism, although I know enough now to know she drank in an attempt to self-medicate her depression. I understand her now, somewhat, but certainly much more than when I was a child.

I can’t say I miss her, because missing something means there’s something good there to miss. I don’t have any good memories of her, and I don’t miss her as a result and, again, I don’t know what that says about me. But it’s what I’ve got, and it’s the weight I’ve carried, and I guess I always will.

I do know that she’s at peace now. I wish I could have said goodbye to her, but my father would not allow it—his final revenge on her, making her die without seeing her child one last time—and my father’s still getting his final revenge on me, and it’s not fun, kittens. At least once this is settled, that will be it because he’s gone too and he can’t hurt me anymore.

There are some good things that I got from her, though: I got her dark sense of humor, and she was funny. She had a great singing voice, though she never had the courage to go onstage. I bet she would have been pretty good at it, though. I had to be able to read her in an instant and become whoever she wanted me to be, and I was many different people. That ability has served me well in life, so at least there’s that.

She was told, growing up, that if you just find a man and get married and join the Junior League and the country club and the women’s club and send your children to the right school district and live in the right zip code, life will be perfect. But you and I both know that isn’t true. She did all the things that her mother told her would make her happy, and yet, they didn’t. She always smiled but in her eyes her sorrow showed.

My parents met in high school and were very much in love. But my mother made my father get out of the Air Force, which is the biggest mistake she ever made. He loved the Air Force (flew C-141s; the big Starlifters) and he needed that discipline. I don’t know why she made him leave, although I suspect my grandmother had a hand in it, because certainly the military wasn’t an appropriate lifestyle for the upper crust in Dallas. He never forgave her for that, but he did accede to her demands, so it’s on him as well.

She went into the hospital the day after Thanksgiving, and I didn’t see her again. I’m told that she got better, and got out of the hospital, but then found some liquor at my grandmother’s house and started drinking again, and went back into the hospital. Family friends all offered to take me to see her in the hospital but my father wouldn’t let them. No one told me that she was going to die, either. Someone must have intervened, though, because someone (I can’t recall who; I think it was a friend’s mother) took me to see her on Saturday, and I was just not prepared at all for what I saw.

At that point, the day before her death, she was in a coma and, kittens, I’ll never forget her color. She was literally the color of a pumpkin, because her liver had long since given out. I was scared of this inert form in the bed, and she had no idea I was there. I remember her nails; long and manicured and polished. She bit her nails, so much later, it occurred to me that she must have been in a coma for a while for them to grow out like that. I don’t know who manicured them. My aunt (her sister) was there, and she’s the one that told me my mother was going to die. I wanted to be alone with my mother, but didn’t have the courage to ask everyone to leave. So I went and spent the night with a friend, and that morning, when her mother took me home, I saw my grandmother’s car outside my parents’ house and I knew my mother was dead.

I only shed a single tear when they told me. I just didn’t know how to process it, and I was left utterly alone to deal with my grief, then and in the following days. My grandmother asked me if I wanted anything special for the funeral, and I asked for yellow roses on the casket, because those were her favorite. However, that was shot down because they wouldn’t match the casket, which was this purply-blue monstrosity with pink flowers that she would have HATED.

There’s some comfort in knowing she’s at peace, and this I know for a fact because of something that happened years later at the cemetery. I believe she is happy, and I think she checks in on me from time to time, and I just hope she can see me doing all the things she wanted to do but never had the courage or self-esteem to do. A few weeks before she died, I walked out of the school building and walked home (a few miles). I let myself into the house and turned on my stereo and just pretended that she was gone running errands or something. But eventually I had to head back to my father’s house, where I slept on a mattress on the floor in an unheated side room, because there was no room in the house for me. That’s the lot of an unwanted child, isn’t it?

That’s all I have for you today, kittens.