I’m not very big on going to cemeteries. They do nothing for me. They don’t comfort me or console me or make me feel connected in any way to the people I’m supposedly “visiting”.
Some might find that odd or perhaps even disrespectful. I get that. I even told my mother I likely wouldn’t visit her grave which was probably a huge disappointment to her since she had been planning for her death for so long.
Even before her quintuple bypass in 2005 she would make comments around the holidays about this possibly being her “last Christmas” and would drill me (again) on where all the important papers and documents are and what I need to take care of when the time comes, etc.
The two of us were close but it was a difficult relationship.
She suffered a terrible childhood. Abandoned at thirteen by her mother, left to care for younger siblings, alcoholic father…you name it.
She married my father at the age of nineteen and when my older sister and I came into this world we lived in a rowhouse in Baltimore’s Canton neighborhood, two blocks from our father’s parents.
An eventual move to a single home outside of the city was short-lived as my mother began to exhibit signs of mental illness that required hospitalization. My parents divorced when I was three and the shuffle began.
A long and complicated story short, I lived with my mother until I was ten, then with my father for two years.
There were times when us kids were young and with our mother, she’d leave us to fend for ourselves. Usually at home but occasionally we’d be left at a local park. All day.
In the summer of 1976, having not seen my mother in nearly a year, she basically kidnapped me off an East Baltimore street corner and whisked me away to Tennessee. (A post for a later time.)
I spent six lonely, isolated years there. My mother’s new husband was a chronic alcoholic. They owned a bar. There was a lot of turmoil, violence, and fear. On one particularly horrible night in 1981, she sat at our kitchen table with a cocked and loaded gun to her head. We spent the whole night talking her down, not knowing if she’d pull the trigger on herself…or us.
It was a lot.
She was a lot.
Her choices, her actions, cost me dearly…in ways that are still being played out today.
But she could be loving. She could be generous and giving. She loved her kids despite some of her actions and always worked hard. But she definitely had issues.
By 1999, I was back in Tennessee as an adult working on my radio career. I was experiencing issues of my own with rising anger. I sought counseling (which she resented) and it wound up flipping our relationship. Gradually, I became the parent to her childlike ways. She started to listen to me and take me seriously. She was always a handful, never easy, even right up to the end…but the dynamic changed. It was like I was in charge now.
I again returned to Maryland in 2014 while she was in her 70s. I’d visit Tennessee often, even surprised her on her birthday once.
In 2021, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died at home eleven days later.
Yes, I knew where the papers were and what to do. She prepared me well.
But my feelings about her passing have been so complicated. There’s the obvious sadness and grief. But while I miss her…I don’t miss the stress of it all. There was almost a guilty sense of relief and I am back in counseling to deal with all of this.
I tried to be a good son. I think I was.
She tried to be a good mother but she was hindered. Hindered from the start at childhood. Hindered by mental illness, psychiatric hospitalizations, and suicide attempts.
When I look back at her life I see someone who never really had a chance.
And I think perhaps that’s what I grieve the most.
I love you, Mom.
