Mom's Birthday, Five Months After Her Death

I wrote this essay last November - five months after mom died, one month before CJ died.

Today is my mother’s birthday. She would have been fifty-one. I spent the day taking her clothes out of the closets and drawers and putting them into plastic bags, to be taken next week to the women’s shelter. Mom had a lot of clothes, and she had a lot of nice clothes. She took great care of things, all her work clothes were dry-cleaned and hung up, all of them were good brands. Every once in a while I came across an item that had been worn and then hung up again. These things, usually suit jackets, smell strongly of her, of her perfume, and they fill me with a profound sense of loss and sadness. It is amazing to me how much there was. I have the habit of going through my wardrobe a few times per year to purge out items that I no longer want or wear, or that don’t fit. I find that very few objects retain emotional significance to me, I believe that things are inherently replaceable. Mom saved everything. There were pieces of clothing that I know she hadn’t worn in years, pieces that I recognize from pictures of us when I was eight, and many pieces that still had the tags. In one back closet I found the denim suit and turquoise shirt she wore on her wedding day.

I find that I can only work at packing this kind of stuff for very short periods of time. I spend a lot of time alternately crying or trying hard not to cry and I find the effort exhausting. Dad seems a bit saddened by the day’s significance as well, though we go to careful lengths to avoid mentioning it or our feelings to each other. At the end of the day Dad takes me to KFC for dinner. I don’t eat much, I’m not hungry; I feel plagued by an overriding sense of the surreal.

I feel trapped, and extremely depressed. I sincerely hope that I will regain my sense of balance, direction and purpose upon my return home. There are two ways to look at my current situation: profound hope or profound fear. I have always been afraid that if I don’t make every effort to fulfill and achieve my greatest potential and ability, that one day I will look back and deeply regret and resent my life. I look at my life and know that I could find great happiness and joy without ever going back to school and becoming someone of prolific success and importance. But there is a part of me that finds that appalling and sees such a life as lazy, selfish, failure. John once said to me that he was uncomfortable becoming a speech coach because it was the easy road. I know exactly what he means. If you don’t have to struggle and fight to achieve your life, can it still be said to be worth anything? On the other hand, my mother fought and struggled for her achievements and to secure my own… and look where she is.

In the end, this is the cowards way of life – always flitting back and forth between a discontent with where one is, but a profound fear of what the future may not hold as opposed to what it may. I’m twenty-five years old. In one sense my life could already be half over. Sometimes it seems that way to me. CJ told me once that he refused to believe that he as himself today could possibly have fewer options than he did at seventeen. I think I may have been going about my life all wrong. I always wanted recognition for achievement more than I wanted to achieve anything itself. I am terrified of waking up one morning to find that I failed to become something, but I have no clue what that something ought to be. Mostly, I’m tired of being afraid of what may not be, and I desire desperately to find hope in what may. I want to be able to be content with what I am and what I have right now, instead of being discontented because it should be better five years from now. I have lived a long time trying to prove something, and I’m tired of that. For once, I just want to live for today instead of striving to be something else tomorrow. I find that it is very, very difficult to change such perceptions.

There is a line in Julius Ceasar, in scene two of act two where Ceasar, when his wife bids him not to go to the senate because she has had dreams of him being killed, responds that “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.” This line seems to crystallize my fear of the future. I’m terribly afraid of growing older, of running out of time, of not being enough in the end. This fear is paralyzing to my ability to enjoy life in an average way, to be happy in the present. I will send my application to Denver and see what they say back, but it doesn’t feel like a priority anymore. Instead, I want a home. I want to be a family with CJ, to be his friend, and help us both find happiness. I don’t know what will become of me, but I’m going to try and find peace and happiness on a day to day as opposed to a year to year basis. It’s just too short, it’s all too short. In the end I think my mom achieved a lot. She was an incredibly professional, dedicated and successful woman. But I don’t think she was ever truly content or truly happy. There may come a day when I do go back to school, when I do manage to become someone of note. But for right now, I feel the need to step back and find out for once what it is that will make me happy, because, God help me, I don’t want to die at fifty without ever having been truly content with myself or my life. I hope that this won’t be too much of a disappointment to you, mom. It just seems terrible to think that I view your life as sadder than your death. That on some level I’m more depressed by how unhappy you were while alive than I am by your leaving us.