Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(36)

    Shana and my mom had a special bond, and in that moment, I felt my sister’s pain way worse than any pain I had myself. I knew I’d be fine. I wondered how long it would take her to be fine. She’s got children; she’ll get better faster because of them. I reminded myself that a parent dying is more commonplace than a child dying; therefore, Shana would have to pull herself together at some point. People’s parents die all the time. This wouldn’t be like last time.



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I remember every finger on my mother’s hand and her inveterately chipped nail polish. She would never have gotten a proper manicure or pedicure. My mom had a low tolerance for that kind of frilly stuff. She liked to grow her nails long and paint them herself, but it was always a crapshoot. Her fingers were chubby but somehow elegant. She was chubby and elegant too. I could pick her hands out of a lineup of a thousand.

She was gracious and dignified, two qualities I am in short supply of. My grace is grit, and my dignity is outrage. She would cover her mouth when she laughed, and she hated being photographed—she was from that era. I always wanted my mom to smile big. I wanted that for her. She probably didn’t care about it, but I wanted her to be freer. I wanted her to throw caution to the wind, not be so ladylike, to be a little bit bawdy and crass—I wanted her to be more like me.

    She was nothing like me. My mother would have probably hated me, had I not been her daughter. She was warm and fuzzy and chunky with lots of side pockets of meat to grab onto, which always made me feel like I was home. It’s why I love meaty pets and meaty babies and meaty people. My mom wanted the best for her kids, but she and I both knew that she was probably not the person who would be providing it. She never wanted you to be sad—or to cry. She had a ton of compassion. And empathy in spades. She always wanted everyone to be happy, to feel better. She was soft with her touch, and always had her arms open for anyone who needed comfort.

She worried about Shana and Roy. She always told me she never worried about me. She never held any of my past behavior against me; she never passed judgment—she was always ready with new unconditional love. She was my mother—the person who would love me more perfectly than anyone else ever would and never asked for much in return. When my dad and I went through our rough years, she did whatever she could to make the situation better for me. She knew my father was an asshole. She knew I was one too, and with two assholes in such close proximity, I’m sure she wondered what it was about her personality that drew those types of people to her.



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“It takes an asshole to make an asshole. You got it from your father,” she told me after I told her I was pregnant at sixteen and planning to move to Niagara Falls, where I could raise my baby in peace. When my mom yelled at you it was hard to take her seriously—it was almost like she had peanut butter in her mouth. Hearing my mother curse always put a smile on my face, even when things were bad. She didn’t do it often, but when she did it, you looked up.

“You’re not having a baby. You’ll ruin your life. I’ll let you do almost anything else, but I will not let you bring a child into this world—not while you’re still acting like one. You have no idea what that responsibility is like.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem that hard,” I told her. “You can just sleep all the time and never show up to anything.”

I was terrible as a teenager. I always had a knee-jerk reaction to things I didn’t like hearing. I put my mother through hell, but she never gave up on me, and she never stopped loving me. She always told me she knew I would turn out okay, and that I just needed my independence, and that once I was an adult, I would shake myself out. Maybe that was another thing she made true, simply by saying it.

When my father and I used to go to war, he would yell at me and throw his hands up and say, “She’s not right! Something is wrong with her!”

My mom would tell him not to talk about me like that—that I was in pain and I needed to get it out of my system. I overheard her say that to him once while they were arguing about me. I thought then about how out of focus that seemed. It has nothing to do with pain—I just want a different family. I know now that it had everything to do with pain, and that what I wanted was my family back in one piece. If I took control of making my family dysfunctional, then I would never have to mourn anyone again.



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My best friend from high school told me many years later that my mom was the first person to tell her she loved her. I couldn’t believe that. I could believe my mom did something like that, but I also couldn’t believe her own parents had never told her they loved her. Another broad reminder that your experience isn’t like everyone else’s. I never felt unloved. I felt disappointed, and abandoned, but I never felt like I wasn’t loved.

“No one had ever told me that before,” my friend said. “Your mom told me she loved me and that I was lovable. She just somehow knew I needed to hear that.”



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The day of the funeral, I headed upstairs to my mom’s medicine cabinet. Roy was already standing there looking through the options. “What do we got?” I asked.

“Valium, Norco?” he said.