Anniversary Number Eighteen

Eighteen years ago on July twenty-first, my mother was found dead in her home by a friend who was scheduled to accompany her to chemotherapy. She was fifty-nine and terminally ill with cancer that began in her lungs and metastasized, eventually working its way into her brain and bones. I had just been told she had six months or less to live.

Having begun a job in my city two weeks prior to this, I came home from work on a rainy evening to an answering machine laden with bad news and was reeling from shock when her brother called to say he was on his way to me from another state and that I should pack a bag and await his arrival. The next few hours and days remain a blur, even now.

The complicated relationship my mother and I shared is one all too common amongst mothers and daughters though it often takes a bit of courage to untangle and write about. While I know she loved me, her need of control, security and to be right overshadowed whatever tenderness she felt and while she prized good behavior, obedience and good manners, her elegant public decorum, sarcastic sense of humor, beauty and charm were often lost to private anger or rage which I've touched on only briefly in other posts.

Years of searching for answers has lead to speculation as to why this was so. What I do know however is that she refused to see a mental health professional with me when the subject was broached, adamantly denied she was dying in the face of mounting evidence, brooked no conversation whatsoever of end of life care or personal matters and then demanded forgiveness for "a lot of mistakes."

Her end-of-life belligerence was based in fear, as had been many of her life's decisions, a situation over which I had no control. I remember pausing, taking a breath and thinking," I must take the high road here and accept this," something which though painful, I've never regretted doing. This was, after all, the woman who brought me into the world, fought tooth and nail to provide education and independence for us both, and who, along with her mother, modeled the life of a working woman which I was expected to follow.

A smoker since her earliest adolescence, this and other less than wonderful habits caught up with her in the last fifteen months of her life resulting in a devastating diagnosis. I hope she is finally at peace. Her name was Sarah.

Until Next Time...