Marking A Decade of Loss
A decade ago this week, as the outcome of the general election set in, I drove from Brooklyn to Washington, D.C. to meet with my mother’s care team. They had just raised the question of moving her to hospice, a path I did not yet understand.
My mom, Roberta, had been sick for a very long time. Decades on lithium for her bipolar disorder had destroyed her kidneys. She’d been on dialysis for nearly ten years, years longer than her doctors had predicted, and she had a litany of other ailments besides.
Our relationship had frayed early, hand in hand with her mental health. By college, we could barely spend an hour together. In my mid-twenties, when my parents’ marriage ended, my sister and I volleyed caregiving roles. Eventually her condition required full-time residential care. Through a nearly rhythmic cycle of hospitalizations, she persevered. We joked that she would outlive us all.
That summer, though, she mostly stopped eating and speaking. Her kidneys were giving out. Then the shunt that made her dialysis possible failed, and replacing it would have meant a risky surgery. When I explained the situation and asked whether she wanted it, she looked me directly in the eyes and barked her first word in weeks, maybe months: “NO.”
My mom died peacefully four weeks after election day. Miraculously, in the years leading up to her death, we were able to heal the prior decades of rupture – thanks to skilled guidance from therapists, meditation teachers, and spiritual mentors. I remember in particular once asking a teacher, now a dear friend, how Buddhism explained mental illness. He shared the belief that these are some of the highest beings, incarnated with these afflictions to teach the rest of us compassion. This teaching gave me access to a cache of compassion I had never been able to touch into. With the help of that teacher and so many others, the calcified layers of hurt and anger softened and re-integrated into my system.
But still, as is the way of trauma, the shadows of my relationship with my mom still loom: in the hurtful phrases that decades of work have largely pulled from the crevices of my mind, but which still rear up when I’m tired or stressed, and which I fear, more than anything passing down to my son; in the reactivity that can surge forward when I feel unfairly criticized or attacked, which hard work in my marriage and other relationships makes ever rarer; and in the deeply embodied tolerance for chaos and volatility, whose grip loosens a little more each year.
Then there is the mysterious yet predictable rhythm of grief, which keeps its own calendar. Every year, as the light and leaves announce autumn, a subtle sadness creeps in like a visitor making its way around the sun. It has softened with time, but this year the election hullabaloo reminded me that I was marking a decade of loss.
That November I would never have guessed that a decade later I would be a mom myself, raising a rambunctious toddler as I turned 50. I’ve shown my son pictures of Roberta - he knows that she is grandma, the one who died so he’ll never get to meet her. When he’s old enough to ask more, I’ll tell him the truth: that she was brilliant and wonderful, especially when I was young. That, like most of us, she was deeply troubled in many ways, and that she was very sick. That I struggled to show up for her, and that I worked hard to finally make peace - it’s one of the things I’m most proud of. I’ll explain the legacy of mental health challenges in our family, and how it shaped my desire to become a professional in the field after decades of twists and turns.
A decade after losing my mom I’m supporting clients navigating complex and traumatic family systems and end of life issues as a therapist. Now, when clients arrive struggling with complex grief and loss from deeply troubled relationships I can offer them one of the greatest gifts my mother could have given me: compassionate presence, grounded in the lived experience of that repair.