Laura Passin’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
There is a difference between normal memory and traumatic memory. Trauma sears images and sensations into your brain: they are as vivid a year later as 10 minutes later, involuntary so. But normal memory is reconstructed each time you access it: soon it is not the memory you recall, but the story of the memory, and then the story of the story of the memory (as I know that I used to remember my first time on a plane, but now I only remember that I once remembered it). We recollect in an almost literal sense: we take the strands of memory and collect them, compose them, again and again. It’s why Proust writes epics that start with the flavor of madeleines: memories become tall tales that we knew were true. Christopher Robin Milne is said to have hated Winnie the Pooh stories: they made him forever confused about which parts of his memory were real and which were fictional, belonging to the public. But the rest of us get to read The House at Pooh Corner and remember our childhoods, because it was always a story to us: our memory becomes the story of being told someone else’s story.
My mom’s days in the DHARMA Initiative, apparently
My mother was 37 years older than me: she had half a lifetime of stories that intrigued me, of her younger self winning judo championships, climbing Mt. Fuji in Japan, going on dates with boys with cars while her father (whom I never knew) glowered from the front porch. The person I knew as my mother had long since converted these memories into stories, the folklore of our family. She was middle-aged, not at her physical peak, which I now understand chiefly by contrast with a picture of her in judo practice calmly hurling a large person over her back.
But that picture belonged to a different era, an era of JFK and cigarettes and trains with sleeper cars. She was just my mom: a slightly off, slightly crazy, mostly normal woman with a heap of kids and a master’s degree she didn’t use. I loved her, I resented her, I liked her: she was my mom.
I now have a very hard time accessing the “just my mom” character in my mind. In some ways, her folklore is more present to me, because it’s made of stories I was told, not things I didn’t know I was supposed to remember. None of us truly goes through life thinking “what if this is the last time we rake leaves together” or “this is the last full conversation we will ever have,” no matter how much we acknowledge that death’s motto is et in Arcadia ego. My mother is dead. She has been for four years now. But the worst part is not that she is gone now: it is that she was gone before she died.
I am guessing that the last normal conversation I had with my mother was when I was about 22, in grad school across the country. We must have talked on the phone, as we did once or twice a week. I probably asked her how my brother was doing, and she probably wanted to know what book we were reading in my poetry seminar. We probably talked for no more than 20 minutes; since we spoke often, we didn’t stretch our conversations out for hours (the way my father always does, bless his heart.) I probably hung up and got back to reading or perhaps to drinking, the chief occupations of all creative writing students. I probably had a very pleasant, normal conversation with the person who had been the keystone of my life across divorces, difficult moves, and desperate adolescent anger. We hung up and I went back to my newly grownup life.
And there must have been other conversations, later, that felt much less normal: conversations made of repeated phrases or strange questions, conversations that abruptly ended without saying goodbye. I don’t remember. What I do remember is confusion and fear: what I remember is the envelope with the birthday card in April (my birthday is really in August), signed “Barbara” instead of “Mom.” I remember calling her and finally asking the question: what was wrong? She couldn’t answer. She didn’t know.
It was, we know now, the onset of dementia. My mom had a bad hand dealt by her neurological systems, and she disappeared rapidly: first memory, then language (she had aphasia), then physical ability. She was so sick for so long that I could not stop the inevitable superposition of Sick Mom onto my memories of Just Mom. Her illness was traumatic: it involved brain surgery, terrifying falls, a stroke, months of hospice care. It wasn’t trauma like a car crash, all life-shaking terror and cataclysmic sensations. It was trauma the way poverty is trauma: it changed everything in our lives so absolutely we could not be the same people afterward. It was the worst thing that could happen, and it kept happening, and it kept getting worse. I remember so much of it so vividly: it is written behind my eyes, so that every December for the last three years I have nightmares and flashbacks about her deathbed. I want to remember her for who she was to me my whole life, but trauma speaks its own language: it tells memories that don’t make a neat story, and it tells them when you don’t want to listen.
Sick Mom, and trying-too-hard me
Just Mom is so close to being gone from my consciousness that I have to work to find her. The stories I used to have about her have been almost entirely replaced by the chaotic swirl of the most obvious story: My Mom Died Horribly. But before she did that, she also did these things:
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She permed her hair in the 80s and the first time I saw it, it was so frizzy I got scared.
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She made delicious cookies, including peanut butter cookies made with white cake mix that were somehow better than cookies made totally from scratch.
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She went along with all the stories I made up for my stuffed animals and helped me work out their family trees.
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She showed me how to use carbon paper in her electric typewriter, so that I could write stories about my stuffed animals and send them to my grandparents.
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She made me laugh all the time.
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She broke her wrist on one of her earliest dates with the man who would become my stepfather. She was going back to school at the time, and she had to write all her notes left-handed.
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She read me poetry when I was way too young to understand it, thus unknowingly launching me into a (penniless) writing career.
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She was overprotective. She wouldn’t let me pierce my ears or get contacts. She wouldn’t let me go to boy’s houses (she didn’t know I liked girls too, then.)
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She didn’t like it at all when I came out to her as bi: she wasn’t against it, per se, but we had never talked about sex or even dating in her household and it was clear that she didn’t want to start. Something that felt like it should be life-changing was almost frighteningly anticlimactic: she just didn’t want to know. She didn’t want anyone to know anything about each other’s hearts.
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She had a vocal tic: she would mutter “okay” to herself while going about her daily life. It drove me up the walls.
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She never swore in my presence, except when OJ was acquitted and she exclaimed, “But he’s guilty as hell!”
There’s more. There’s got to be more. But it is always like this now: these shards, no stories. I didn’t know that she would be gone by the time I was 30, and that my college graduation was the last family event that would make any sense to her. I didn’t know that our life as mother and daughter wouldn’t keep happening, that I would have to learn to mother her. I didn’t know that the past had already announced its leaving. Now I have intrusive memories of her corpse and so few memories of her body. I no longer dream that she is coming back to life, to me: I dream that I am going back, in time, to her.
Tags: family, grief, laura passin, loss, moms
<3 <3 <3
I believe your mom is glad you have all of those memories of her.
Mom Stories are so very important; the pre-Mom Stories are, too.
I really want to thank Nicole for letting me use my two fave photos of 1960s Mom in this essay. LOOK AT MY BADASS MOM.
Book proposal:
Pictures of our badass moms before they were Moms.
Misandry: The First Wave
Maybe they’d go for a Toast user-submitted gallery? My mom was in the circus in college and I have an awesome picture of her tightrope walking.
That’s a great idea- I’d have to dig out a photo of my mom hanging out with a pre-fame Moby
I love the badass judo mom photo so much!
I keep it framed next to my desk so I can marvel at it frequently.
. Now I have intrusive memories of her corpse and so few memories of her body
This is so terrible and so true to my own history of loss: especially in the first few years, one word or gesture or image can bring it all clanging back with alarms and anxieties as fresh as they were when the grief was new.
I don’t know what your future holds, of course, or how your memories will bend and shift over time. But maybe you’ll find it encouraging to hear that for me, as the years pass, the memories of the people, not the illnesses, get stronger and brighter.
I no longer have dreams of my rail-thin friend struggling in the bed he would never leave, clamoring for me to help him without knowing who I am; I dream instead of the days when he was strong and sharp-witted and smiling, when he made trouble and made jokes.
I no longer see my father in my mind’s eye as a frail and wasted curve of bone and skin; I remember him laughing over a glass of wine and sitting in the sun and puttering around the house, singing his nonsense songs. Not always, but more often all the time.
It took years, and it will take years more, but it is happening. And it is the closest thing in this mortal life of mine to a benediction.
This is so beautiful. Thank you.
My mom was diagnosed with cancer and died less than 60 days later. She also died around Christmas and I’ve learned that I have to keep a very close eye on my mental state between Halloween and New Year’s. I also have a hard time remembering things before those last 60 days.
I need to make a list like you have. It also makes me feel…more normal to hear stories like yours. Thank you.
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This is beautiful.
And it also hits me right where I live. My dad died from complications of cancer right after my 24th birthday; he’d been sick for six years at that point. So at 34, most of my Dad memories are of a frail, shrunken man struggling to get by on a walker, not of the big grizzly of a guy who taught me to drive and used to throw six-year-old me so high I thought I could touch clouds. My brother and Mom and I mostly have the same kind of stories you do: how he’d dump blizzards of salt on food before he even tasted it, the ways he’d crawl on all fours and wrestle the dog, the tiny salmon-pink nylon running shorts that he inexplicably favored for most of the 90’s (always managed to be wearing them when he’d walk outside to see why I’d been talking to my cute neighbor boy for such a long time).
But if you say “Dad” to me, the first thing that comes to mind is the old-looking sick guy. Makes me sad, but it is how it is :/
Thanks again for the great piece. And for letting me remember for a bit.
I hate looking at pictures of my dad when he was sick. It’s not him. The guy in those pictures is broken and dying and can’t feel joy and he’s not my dad.
So I look at the older pictures, the real pictures. It’s hard to see them when your eyes sting, but they help me remember the actual, real him. They help me paint the image I want instead of the ugly one fate tried to force on me.
Thanks 🙂 I keep nicer, healthy pictures of my dad around, too; it’s mostly because I want that to be the impression my kids have of the grandpa they’ve never met. Maybe after seeing those every day for a few more years, “healthy happy dad” will become my default memory. I hope so! My father was a good guy overall, and he deserves to remembered as more than his cancer.
Oh, the mystery of dads and their short shorts.
Beautifully written, Laura. Thank you.
This was really great. I recently went through this with a parent, and I have been struggling with a lot of the things you mention (why can’t I remember him as a healthy dad, how is it that my memory can be so muddy). The whole paragraph about the onset of dementia in particular is… so true. I never thought of it like trauma at the time but it makes a lot of sense.
Thanks for writing this. Your mom sounds like she was a really awesome and interesting lady. Also pretty badass, going by the Judo picture.
Teary. I need to go call my mom.
trying-too-hard me
That phrase under your smiling face just punched me in the gut. Try too hard. That’s what we all did while my dad slowly died for a year. It’s that chipper mask of denial. None of us wanted him to die, least of all him. But this was a song none of us knew the words to, so we just pretended it would eventually all get better.
My mom lives with my family and I and is slowly leaving us due to early-onset dementia (Alzheimer’s, probably). She plateaus for a while and then slides downward a few feet or a hundred feet or or or. She has started sundowning lately, and in the evenings asks me over and over again, “When do I have to leave to go home? Will you walk with me? I can’t remember how to get there from here. Are you sure I didn’t leave anything at John’s house?” John is my dad, and they’ve been divorced since 1980. She mostly calls me Carol (my name is Kris) and is pretty happy, but she’s not my mom anymore, and I’m not her daughter anymore, really, except that I am trying to do the things I Should Do to make her life okay, even though it’s not and it sucks and it’s terrible. This last slide has led me into grief again, all the fucking stages of it, and it’s so hard and tiring and awful sometimes.
I guess all that to say, this piece rang very true for me, and thank you for writing it so well and also for letting me bleed all over the comment section here. It sucks but it’s so banal, you know? Crazy.
“It sucks but it’s so banal”–there you go, exactly. I wish anyone had better comfort for you, and I hope you have support and ears as you go through this.
Thank you! This means things, and I am lucky, I do have good support – notably Mr Pi, who occasionally lets me curl up on him and be whiny or sad or mad or whatever. And of course opened our home without a second thought to my somewhat crazy mom. 🙂 So, yes. Thanks, that is kinda why it all works, despite the crazy everydayness of it all – as a friend of mine says, And Yet I Am Willing. So. Thanks.
I am so sorry that you are going through this. I’m glad this piece resonated; when I was in a similar stage as you are, I was completely overwhelmed by the feeling that no one I knew had been through it. I hope the conversation going on here allows you to escape that feeling, for a little while.
thank you for this. my dad died when I was 19 after also being horribly ill for about three years, with memory-related symptoms as well. there are two fathers in my life: the magical one from when i was a little girl, and the frail, confused one of those last six months, and it’s hard to distill anything concrete from the time in between those eras. I dream about him all the time, but it’s the about-to-die version, and the whole dream is full of panic and helplessness. It’s really cathartic to read about a similar experience with similar feelings; i also really appreciate all the other comments sharing similar stories. love you, toasties.
Thank you for this.
I find it really really hard to explain to people why my mother’s death upsets me so (I mean obviously it’s upsetting, but… like, keenly, badly upsetting), and this hit the nail on the head as to why. I have a bad memory, and I have such vivid, intense memories of her decline and I’m worried I’m forgetting the other memories.
Thank you for writing this.
Wow. This is incredible beautiful. Thank you.
This is so, so beautiful. Thank you for writing it and sharing it with us.
And, I feel you on the perm thing. When I see pictures of my mom’s 80s hair… it’s frizz that could kill a man!
I keep it framed next to my desk so I can marvel at it frequently.
This is very beautiful and moving, thank you.
“I loved her, I resented her, I liked her: she was my mom.”
“it changed everything in our lives so absolutely we could not be the same people afterward.”
My mom’s name was Barbara too, and cancer killed her suddenly, unexpectedly, and with hardly enough flair to reward her long and boisterous life. Eighteen months ago.
Thank you for this.
Oh god. I’m so sorry. I don’t know why the name connection gets me so much, but it’s a punch in the gut.
My mom’s middle name was Ann, and one time in her last months, when she was in home hospice care and very nearly non-interactive, the Beach Boys song “Barbara Ann” came on the radio we kept on for her. She was able to mouth the words and dance with her head a little. It was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen.
So, we’re going to spend the day quietly and unobtrusively weeping at our desks then?
What a sweet memory. This reminds me that, as much as I would sometimes prefer to remember only pre-cancer Mom, we shared moments in the hospital that were just as strong and funny and beautiful as those we shared before.
Repeating the sick memories might be how we cope with loss, how we process our grief, how we make sense of the senselessness of losing people we love?
I think that’s true–the repetition is part of the grief, as is the confusion and the bittersweet moments. I had some really nice times just hanging out with my mom when she was sick (but not quite dying), where we’d watch tv and I’d knit and she’d smile at me because she couldn’t say anything, and it felt almost like when I was younger and we’d watch Oprah together while I did homework and she folded laundry or what have you. It gave us some simple times in the midst of all the sadness and fear.
I wonder if that’s a common thing. When my mom was sick but before we knew she wasn’t going to make it, I would go to the cancer ward after work and read and read and read while she slept (thank you, George RR Martin, for writing 4000 pages of distraction). She’d wake up and be so happy to see me, try to throw me out, and then go back to sleep. It was so peaceful. We probably spent more time together those two months than we had since she moved to another town 10 years ago. That hospital time has come to sit with my favorite memories of her.
Thank you so much for this dialogue. Apparently, I’m going through an (unexpected) period of grief-processing again, and for some reason it’s more help to talk about it with strangers instead of with the other people who lived through it.
Oh god. I'm so sorry. I don't know why the name connection gets me so much, but it's a punch in the gut.
My mom's middle name was Ann, and one time in her last months, when she was in home hospice care and very nearly non-interactive, the Beach Boys song "Barbara Ann" came on the radio we kept on for her. She was able to mouth the words and dance with her head a little. It was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen.
I don’t know what to say, except that this moved me in a way few things have. I’m so, so sorry for your loss, and so grateful that you shared this with us.
I think that's true–the repetition is part of the grief, as is the confusion and the bittersweet moments. I had some really nice times just hanging out with my mom when she was sick (but not quite dying), where we'd watch tv and I'd knit and she'd smile at me because she couldn't say anything, and it felt almost like when I was younger and we'd watch Oprah together while I did homework and she folded laundry or what have you. It gave us some simple times in the midst of all the sadness and fear.
Thanks 🙂 I keep nicer, healthy pictures of my dad around, too; it's mostly because I want that to be the impression my kids have of the grandpa they've never met. Maybe after seeing those every day for a few more years, "healthy happy dad" will become my default memory. I hope so! My father was a good guy overall, and he deserves to remembered as more than his cancer.