Year Two - Musings on Life after death

After my mother’s untimely death, I spent the next couple of years wanting to become exactly like her. I wanted to replicate everything that brought a smile to people’s faces. I wanted to become the woman I heard described in story after story as people fondly remembered their time with her.

I recreated traditions and rituals she once filled her life with, hoping they might help me understand who she had been and why she lived the way she did. Somewhere in that process, I also hoped to finish all our unfinished conversations. I believed that if I followed the same path closely enough, I might eventually understand her better and, by extension, understand myself.

I wanted to know her truth. I wanted to be guided by her life, to learn from where she had already been, and somehow continue to be an extension of her.

Over the next two years, I met countless people who shared stories about the small, deeply human ways my mother had touched their lives. Some stories I recognized from our conversations together, but many revealed entirely new dimensions of who she had been.

I often left those conversations feeling as though I had uncovered another clue in an ongoing treasure hunt. I kept wondering what truth she had discovered about life that made her feel so fulfilled by the end. Before she died, she told my father that if her time had come, she was ready.

I was so desperate to stay connected to her that I slowly began arranging my life to mirror hers. I threw myself into the things she once loved with the same intensity and enthusiasm she carried into everything she did. In my quest to become “okay” again, and in my ongoing internal game of WWMD, every gathering became a production.

I agonized over details as though I were trying to become some impossible combination of Martha Stewart and my mother herself. I planned elaborate dinners, teas, baby showers, and celebrations. I filled every waking hour caring for everyone around me because somewhere deep down, I believed that if I loved people the way she did, maybe I would feel closer to her again.

People constantly remarked on how much I reminded them of my mother, and every time they did, I beamed with pride. I didn’t even know I was capable of being that gracious. If I’m honest, at first it felt exhilarating to disappear into being someone people already knew how to admire.

My determination to prove I was okay after my mother’s death slowly became its own form of denial. I was trying to survive grief, motherhood, work, teaching, marriage, and ambition simultaneously while pretending I was built to carry all of it effortlessly. The problem was that my mother was no longer here to notice when I was running myself into the ground. She had always been the person who reminded me to pause, to rest, to soften. Without her, I kept pushing forward long after I should have stopped.

Secretly, I was falling apart. The more out of control I felt internally, the more intensely I tried to perfect the external parts of my life. I have always been someone who goes all in, so I responded to grief the same way I responded to everything else: by over-functioning.

At some point, though, I paused long enough to reflect, and surprisingly, I didn’t hate what parts of me had emerged through all of this imitation.

I had become more patient.
I had become kinder.
I had become more empathetic, even toward the ordinary frustrations of daily life.

I kept wondering how my mother seemed to hold everything together so effortlessly. But for the first time, I also started asking a different question: maybe she didn’t. Maybe I had inherited not only her generosity, but also her tendency to carry too much silently.

I hushed my little voice and kept on adding more things. I taught two classes, worked full-time, raised a toddler in the full throws of the terrible twos, and planned a conference. I kept moving forward at this new and fantastic speed, and a year and a half passed.

I keep telling myself that I am/was invincible.

I am just that good. If they made a movie of my life, Meg Ryan would be fascinated by the character she was stepping into.

I kept deluding myself into thinking that I was doing just fine.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago.

I had returned from teaching my second class of the week, and I found myself hearing Thomas say something to the effect that, at an increasingly rapid rate, I seemed to be getting irate and flying off the handle if he wanted to do something that wasn’t just binge-watching Netflix. He asked if it was the most impossible task on the planet.

I stared at him for a long time.

At this point, I have started plotting nightly how I might rearrange my life to pull off an Eat, Pray, Love or a Walk the Pacific Trail. I wanted an escape so badly that I would come home and wedge out, and, with time, had started to ignore Thomas and not even see it become a habit.

So when he asked why I was always so agitated, I didn’t know what to say that night.

I couldn’t blame it on Lila, who now promptly goes to bed at 7:30 (although she is super high-energy, so maybe she can still have a little of the blame). I could blame it on work, needing to talk to Dad, or school, but the truth is, at that moment, I knew the voice was right: it was happening because I wasn’t taking care of myself. 

I love Thomas; I love that he is always so undemanding and that we could put our marriage on autopilot repeatedly without it being a big deal. We had done so for our grad school degrees, and when Lila was a wee little thing, but I didn’t want to wake up five years from now and find myself in a marriage I didn’t recognize.

Something had to change. 

The next morning, I took myself out to breakfast alone and began thinking about what it might look like to build a ritual that belonged only to me. I needed a way to reclaim space for reflection instead of constantly reacting to life.

Eventually, I began creating weekly flower compositions in honor of my mother. She loved flowers, and arranging them transformed my chaotic apartment into something softer and more alive. More importantly, it gave me forty-five uninterrupted minutes to sit quietly with my thoughts and begin reconnecting with myself.

Attached is a book with 10 arrangements. Each is paired with a haiku summarizing my thoughts for the week. I plan to turn these into a blog and share more detailed essays on being a mom without a mom and other such musings.

This has been the best gift I have given myself, but most of all, it has allowed me to celebrate my mom and the thing she cherished most - giving me my independence. It wasn’t always easy, but her love, support, and implicit trust helped me become who I am.

In slowing down and reclaiming some well-needed time, I discovered my current life was not where she was when she died. My life is at the beginning she had 35 or so years ago. If she were here, she would have reminded me of that herself.

She would have told me that she had their whole family around, helping to raise me, and that I wasn’t even 1/2 as energetic as Lila was. She would have reminded me that I didn’t have to be like her, but I could take the parts that fit and the other parts I have received from my dad and mix them up to find a perfect blend of me.

I hope that in meditating upon her life, my childhood, and the days of my own current entire life while creating my compositions, I get to continue to become someone who she would have been proud to know - a good wife, daughter, mother, friend, and colleague but most important of all a thoughtful human being.

I hope that some of you will come along for the journey and continue to be involved in all the ways you are. If I don't say this enough, I am thankful for every one of you. My most significant gift has always been hearing all of your stories.

Until next time, keep on keeping on.