A couple weeks ago, my stepmother died. I said nothing about it to anyone but a few people because I thought something would come out of me, I only had to wait. But nothing came, I never found myself with anything to say, and life went on.
Now I lie in bed, no laptop, no typewriter, no pad and pencil, just my phone and a swyping finger, and suddenly I remember ... and still ...
It was a long time ago. My dad's second marriage ended when I was eighteen. We all went on into our lives, the six of us kids who spent some of our formative years sharing every other weekend, we went on and, eventually, after several decades ...
The contention is distressing. The kids, all adults in or nearly in their fifties, do not get along and seem now to have no more to glue them together. Their mother had no estate, no desire for a memorial, nothing, she's just gone now, and the rest just keep breathing. I'm off to the side, nothing to do with it really, and ...
She lived near me, near enough I helped her move stuff in and out of storage, went up to flip her mattress, took her to lunch or dinner, meant to some more ... Near enough I felt a little guilty for not visiting more; but she wasn't my mother, never asked anything of me, was a sweet and elegant and intelligent woman, never mind the daughters' oblique mentions of alcohol abuse and the saying of terrible things, I knew she wasn't nearly as bad as a few other women of that generation I've known. But her children had their own perspective, and now it remains cloaked in the silence of a distance ever widening.
She had a series of strokes and I was told a visit at the care facility might be in order so I went of a Sunday morning only to learn she had gone on before sunrise; gone on with some family at her side, gone on knowing I was going to visit; gone on in peace, willing and oh so ready. She is at peace now, I know that. I wish I knew the same for her children, but that's their lookout, not mine. I did what I could.
4 comments:
I'm sorry. I remember you writing about her in the past, going to help her and so forth, and I always had the sense from it that you admired her. This seems like a tough situation where you can't really figure out the place of the loss in your life, or of yourself in the loss. I'm sure it would be easier if the kids were close and you could all share your grief with one another.
Good words for a good woman. Thanks for sharing them. They are comforting even to a stranger.
You are right in that I don't know where this loss fits or how I fit with it. Jan was a side trip of my father's as he exercised his need to rescue someone and to make up for how he perceived himself to have failed with my mother. She brought a lot of humanity, in addition to the part-time siblings, that might otherwise have been a void for me. I'm grateful for that yet now, post mortem, I feel as though nothing's really changed, only there's one less person to occasionally check in with; and maybe more meaningfully, I feel as though her survivors haven't really got any good way to process it. They always seemed, especially lately, to be in a sort of limbo, waiting for something that would help them get over their childhood. Now it feels as though they won't. Presumptuous of me to say that, though. I can only observe from a distance.
There will be more of this type of loss coming as we all age. You wrote about it well. We're sad because we think we should feel more.
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