Mamo,

I don’t know where to begin.

Twenty-four years have gone by and still this day brings a sadness I struggle to carry.

There’s so much I wanted to tell you before you were gone, but even more so, there was so much I wanted to ask you. I know it was part of the faith to believe in miracles, that’s why everyone around us kids kept saying to ‘just keep praying, there could be a miracle‘. But they should have explained that ending your suffering would be a miracle too.

That sometimes death is the miracle, even if we can’t understand how.

Maybe that way, had anyone told us you’d soon be gone, we could have said our goodbyes.

It wasn’t fair, none of it was fair, but even until in the last few days before you were gone, they built up our hope. That wasn’t okay. The adults knew you were going to die, they knew months before. But no one sat down with your five children, no one faced us, no one even said that it was a possibility.

No one explained the permanence of death.

I didn’t understand that once you were gone, you’d never come home again. This time wasn’t going to be like the others, all those months you had spent in hospital before, but then returned home feeling better. No one said that I would never touch you again, or hear your voice, and that once I lost you, no one would ever love me as you did.

I don’t know if you knew I was there, but two days before you died, I sat at your bedside. I watched your laboured, heavy breathing. Some part of me knew you no longer recognized me. I had overheard the adults say that you had tumors in your brain, throughout your entire body, and that all they could do was minimize your pain. Some part of me understood the cancer had eaten away at you so much it had swallowed your spirit, and that what was left beside me was the slowly dying shell of my mother. Your eyes were empty, your skin drained of colour. You looked through me, I don’t think you saw me. But I was there Mama, I was there putting bits of ice into your mouth, warming your cold hands. And as you fell asleep I covered your shoulders because I knew you didn’t like the drafty air under the sheets. And I fell asleep beside you, in the chair, with my head resting on the edge of your bed, your fingers grazing my hair. I was there Mama.

And then I wasn’t allowed to see you the next day. They didn’t explain why, I just couldn’t go back to the hospital. I played cards with the boys, vacuumed the basement, and pulled the dry laundry off the lines. The day passed and no one said anything.

Then came the morning of the eleventh. Ciocia Ninia woke me. “Mama died”. She could barely get the words out. I heard crying coming from the other rooms, minutes later crying from the boys.

That was how it ended.

Mama, I so deeply regret not knowing you.

You were a constant in our lives, an invisible hand that mended every sock, served warm meals, occasionally lay beside me as I drifted off. You lived with such grace; you were kind without measure to every person you knew. And you loved each of us, so completely, we were all convinced we were your favourite. That was you as our mother.

But what of you the woman? What were your dreams, if you had had the chance to fulfill them? I’ve always wanted to know what your hobbies were, your talents? If you could have done anything with your life, without worry for money or struggling with language, if you could have built an existence around your heart’s greatest desires, what would it have been like?

I know there was a lot happening, I mean, I know now, I didn’t know then. I know the shift work was exhausting, two jobs was too much, I know there was never enough money, never mind for any small pleasures, there wasn’t enough for food at the grocery store. I know it didn’t matter that you didn’t want to leave home, that you put us on that train to Germany against every fiber in your body. That although occupied Poland felt futureless, you would have stayed just to be amongst your own. And I know from your letters that you often thought about how to get back home, how to reverse it all, because life here was so hard and you were so terribly lonely. I read what you wrote about not being able to make any friends, that you couldn’t grasp this damn language and that no one had the patience to try to understand your meaning when you asked them if they might like to be your friend.

Those bits and pieces are all that I have left. Sixteen letters you wrote to your best friend, a box of your clothes I’ve bagged to try to keep the smell and which I only open once a year so I can bury myself in the memory of curling up on your lap. I have some pictures, but we’re together in maybe a dozen of them. That’s it. That and my memories, which I try to keep alive by telling your grandchildren about you. You have eight grandchildren thus far. The youngest, born to your baby boy, looks so much like you. She has strawberry blond hair and piercing eyes. Hers are blue, yours were green, but you come through in her smile.

Is that what it means to say that we ‘live on’ in others? Are you alive in all of them? I’d like to think you are. I’d like to imagine that your spirit took up home in each of them, in some small way, and that you surround us, your own children as we’re embraced by our little ones.

But still it is not enough, and it will never be the same. That is what I struggle to make peace with. That whatever comes after I leave this life, there is no certainty we’ll be together again. And yet my heart froze at sixteen; my childish heart waits and waits, hungers for a mother’s love without any hope of satisfying that emptiness.

I wish you had taught us how to grieve, I wish you had told us the end would come, I wish you had stopped with the miracles and helped us say goodbye. I wish I had known so I could have told you I was afraid, and so that you could have told me, even when I could no longer see you, you’d always be by my side. But we didn’t do that. We didn’t get closure. We had a massive wound ripped open inside us and were each left on our own to survive it. You died and we were scattered in the wind.

That’s what I’ve needed to tell you for all these years. Not that I’m upset or that I don’t understand why you, and father, and aunties, and every adult decided to deny what was happening, but that it was a mistake. One cannot heal a wound everyone pretends doesn’t exist, including the injured. Despite the fact that it stole the air from my lungs, and brought nightmares to my sleep, and tears to my eyes, we all had to pretend nothing was happening. Nothing had happened.

But something did happen.

Something awful. Something earth shattering, something that would change the course of our lives forever.

You died.

And we, your five children were not prepared for it.

Father broke. Aunty had to return to Poland. Everyone went back to work. The warm meals from friends and neighbours stopped coming. But still we were hungry, needed to be cared for, but no one was there.

I’ve needed to tell you this for twenty-four years. And maybe knowing you were going to die wouldn’t have changed much, but I was sixteen, I should have been told. I had already started losing my childhood years earlier when you first got sick, so I deserved to know. I should have been given a chance to say goodbye. They should not have let me walk away from you that evening, thinking I’d be back, thinking you’d find the strength to return to health, thinking God was going to answer the prayers of your children, thinking soon our home would be happy again.

I just wish I could have told you that I loved you, just one more time, and to have asked you to wait for me wherever you’d be, to wait so one day I could be with you again.

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I’m forty years old now Mama, forty. Can you imagine it?

If it is meant to be, in four years I will outlive you, and maybe I’ll get to see my kids grow up.

In the meantime, I’ve taught them that sometimes life ends sooner than we’d like it to, that it’s important we care for each other today, because the future does not exist. Today we laugh, today we love, today we live. I’ve also taught them that I really like writing; remember, the thing I wanted to do with my life, but you said it wouldn’t put “bread on the table”. Well, you might have been right, I’ve had no financial success with writing, but I do still love it, and I try to make it part of my life.

And I’ve told them that I love taking pictures, not just of sunrises (although they’ve been a source of healing this past year), but also the world, them, our ordinary existence. I like documenting our lives, in words and in images, because it reminds me to be present. To see it or to write about it, I have to pay attention to it. That’s what I’ve learned and it’s what I’ve taught them.

They know I like cooking, somewhat, ha ha, gardening, riding horses, riding my bike, and reading books. They know I’ve started collecting teaspoons, egg holders, and candle holders. I know what you’re thinking, ‘you’re still a packrat’, yes I am. I’d like to think I am a ‘situational minimalist’, meaning, in some situations I don’t have a need to keep things that might one day be useful. But in many situations, in particular with the items I named above, I keep them because they bring me joy.

Joy.

I’ve been trying to teach my kids how to live joyfully. That’s something you and I didn’t get enough time to do together. So now, I inject joy whenever I can. Sometimes we are silly, often I embarrass them terribly (which I delight in, 😊), but usually they get into it too. For example, we all dance in the aisles at the grocery store.

I live with an awareness of what it means to lose a mother, and so I think to myself, if they should ever lose me, I hope they remember that I danced between the pasta and the tomatoe sauce; that I sang aloud in public and twirled them – all without any regard for who was watching. Because we were living wholeheartedly.  

I hope they remember that although they sometimes saw me cry because I was missing you terribly, that my life had an abundance of joy because you had loved me for an entire lifetime, in a mere sixteen years.

Dorotka