Happy 70th Birthday Mama.
It’s taken me days to put my thoughts to paper. I’ve wanted to write to you and yet I’ve stopped myself many times, feeling foolish for thinking this message would ever reach you. I move between imagining you see and know everything, to wondering if you’re just gone. I don’t want to believe the latter, that the love that held us together has been severed or extinguished. I don’t want to believe it all just goes dark and that I’ll never see you again.
And so, to feed my hope, I write.
I think I will ask God ‘why’ for the rest of my life, though I’m quite certain I will never come to understand it. I have searched for meaning in the loss of your life for over two decades. The futility of separating children from their loving parent, of ending an existence which barely had a chance to know itself, never mind realize itself.
Twenty-five and a half years. It’s terrible how time moves forward, and yet it’s also a gift. Thank goodness that we can not, despite our best efforts, remain frozen in any one moment. The temptation to remain as we are would see many of us chose never to discover what comes next. Myself included. That said, losing you stopped a part of me from seeing the future. Inside my adult shell there lives a child, a child who still wonders if and when her Mama will come home.
I know this is trauma. I have read dozens of books which explain why I haven’t been able to let go. Letting go, whatever that means for each person, requires some measure of safety. Since you’ve been gone, I don’t know that the world has ever felt safe.
Seventy. Wow, they say seventy is the new sixty, or something like that. I’m not sure if you know or care. Not sure if it matters anymore. Whenever I think of you, you are forever 44 and when I think of us, I am forever 16. As we were when we were last together, that is how we will always remain, or so I imagine.
Except that’s not entirely true. I rarely think of the last few months of your life. I deliberately try not to. Evoking memories of your suffering is unbearable for me. All too vividly I can remember feeling helpless, the sound of your fading voice, the scent of that last room. It’s all locked inside me.
So instead, I keep alive memories of an earlier time, when you were healthy, smiling, moving through the house, doing ten thousand things at once. It surprises me how easily, when I close my eyes, I can see us laughing in the kitchen, preparing a meal, glancing over at each other in a way that required no words. Scenes of our life are strung together like scenes in a movie trailer. You get a sense of the story without revealing the end.
A few days ago, I brought out the album you made for me. Not long after you were gone, aunty gave me pictures of us standing beside you in the hospital, our last birthdays with you, pictures of your body in a casket, pictures of your funeral procession, and the moment when we lowered you into the ground. I obediently put them into the album, not knowing what else to do with them. They became the last pictures to go into there.
They became the pictures I would destroy twenty years later.
It took me a long time, but eventually I made the decision about how your life, as documented in my album, would end. What I chose to keep didn’t include the last months of your life. My album stops not long after your 43rd birthday.
On that occasion, you smiled, we celebrated you, you had beaten cancer, recovered from the surgery, regrown your majestic hair after chemotherapy, and brought back the soft pink of your skin lost to radiation.
In that moment, it was all behind us and we were free to just go on with life. My baby brother clung to you, far too young to have known how fortunate we were that you were with us. We made plans for the summer, you returned to work, it was all going to be okay.
Except that wasn’t true, was it. Within six months the doctors would find new tumours, many new tumours, and by your 44th birthday, on the same day as the blizzard of the century, you’d be laying in bed, stitched closed collarbone to navel, your stomach and much of your intestines removed. By that final spring, your hair was gone again, your skin nearly transparent.
Although we, the kids, didn’t know it yet, you knew you were dying. You said as much in your letter to your closest friend, letters she would return to me over a decade after you were gone. Letters I would painstakingly translate for my siblings because without you we had lost most of our mother tongue. Letters I would examine line by line, trying to understand the woman that was my mother, listening to your voice in those written words, seeking your guidance for how you expected me to live onward when half my heart was gone. Live onward when most days I had to fight just to rise against the weight of your loss.
My album doesn’t have many images of you. I sometimes fear if my memory fails, I will lose the pictures of us that live only inside of me. You lived and died in a time when camera film was expensive, when only the most special occasions were documented. Documenting the end of your life and your death was done for your mother, I think. She couldn’t come across the ocean to say goodbye. She got a short international phone call followed by a letter with those pictures. I understand now, as a mother, why she would have wanted them, maybe needed them.
I also understand as a daughter, why I didn’t want them.
Why I destroyed them.
You see, in the last year of your life, as you slowly died, the woman and mother I knew began to disappear. Cancer ate you from the inside out, it stole your joy and left behind suffering. It’s hard to say this, but close to the end, you became someone I didn’t know and I became someone you didn’t recognize.
You became a frail body that lay on a bed, at first at home, then in the hospital. A body whose dressings I helped to changed, a body I fed with a tiny spoon, gave sips of water to, or held ice cubes against its lips. In the last months of life, the light went out in your eyes, the tumours in your brain stopped you from knowing me. And something inside me, perhaps to protect my childish spirit, stopped me from knowing you as you had become. We lost each other before we lost each other.
And I’m sorry, but I didn’t want to remember that awful time. I didn’t want to open the album of my childhood and our life together, only to arrive at images of illness and death. I didn’t want to risk my kids seeing their grandmother that way, and not because illness and death aren’t part of life and living, but because I know all too well that some images, once in our minds, are impossible to forget.
And maybe because, most importantly, you were so much more than that sickness, you were not the cancer, you were not your death.
A few years ago, having struggled with this, knowing those pictures had followed me over two decades, I found a way to let them go. I found a way to give myself permission to remember you most brightly until a certain time in your life, and far less after. I found a way to both honour your death and to let it go.
Marie Kondo.
It may sound absurd, but I read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, and I finally had my answer.
It wasn’t as much about whether looking at those pictures ‘sparked joy’, but about how to thank them for our time together, how to tell them I was letting them go, expressing gratitude for every second we had, until the last day, without needing to keep the visual proof of it all.
I removed the pictures of the last few months of your life and those of your open casket.
I started a fire.
I held them in my arms, kissed them, wept over them, and then I laid them onto the flames.
Ashes to ashes.
You had taught me that in our culture and our traditions burning sacred items honoured them. In burning those images I wasn’t disrespecting your memory or pretending it didn’t happen. I was giving them over to the world, asking the universe to hold those memories for me.
My kids know you. They know your stories. They’ve seen pictures of your life. You are with us every single day, radiant, smiling, preparing my birthday cakes as I now prepared theirs. Not for a moment are you forgotten.
This last week, on your seventieth birthday, I looked back at your forty-third. I remembered the safety of your world, the love of your arms, the beauty of your smile. I remembered your courage and strength, knowing you had never surrendered. I remembered the dreams you had for your own future, the things you were planning to do, and places you were going to go.
As best as I can, I will carry you with me in life, in happier memories.
