All the Good Words Have Left My Mouth
“All the good words have left my mouth / I’m completely out of things to say about it now.”
When the song “Halloween” by Novo Amor popped up on a Spotify playlist several weeks ago and those two lines opened the song, I turned the volume up. It’s not a song about having writer’s block after losing a parent, but it might as well have been. “That’s it,” I thought. “All the good words have left my mouth. I’m completely out of things to say about it now.” And I am. I don’t know where my good words have gone, but they’re certainly not here. I wish that I could write something achingly beautiful, a graceful, poignant tribute to my mother, but I can’t. I so very much want to give her something beautiful, but all of my good words are scattered and what’s left just sounds like tin rattling around in my mouth.
A perceptive friend once observed, “You process trauma through writing, don’t you?” Until he recognized and identified this aspect of my writing, I’d honestly not realized how deeply sadness, grief, trauma, and loss affected the things I’ve written over the past few years. I used to write things that were humorous, lighthearted - everyone loves a funny story. I felt I had to be “on” and entertain people because no one likes a downer; the world is sodden with enough troubles and tragedies - I like to bring lightness into situations. But after I became a mother and started to share my struggles and insecurities, I discovered that people are drawn to real, raw stories just as much as, if not more than, the witty musings of a novice comedienne. So I began to write things that were not so shiny and funny and happy, things that were heavier, things I wasn’t even sure how to verbalize. Maybe this will be one of those posts. Maybe I’ll just write and write, and the emotion will pour out of me and create something beautiful on the page. Or maybe I’ll just spit out the sharp tin words lacerating my mouth and be left with a bloody mess. But I have to do it. The burgeoning thoughts must be born onto the page, or I will go mad.
___________
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, you know. We’d planned to have such a good summer. The summer of 2022 was filled with the stress of separation and moving and transitions; this summer would be filled with day trips, porch nights, sticky little handprints on the storm door, quality time. She needed it as much as I did.
But it wasn’t meant to be. There’s no happy ending here no matter how desperately I want to write one.
After she died, I was surprised by how many people asked me, “Had she been sick?” I feel that this question is on the same level with the well-meaning, “At least you have one healthy child” with which multiple people tried to comfort me after my miscarriage several years ago. I realize that people meant well by asking the former, but it still bothers me. “Had she been sick,” carries implications. There’s a subtext there, sitting just beneath the surface, that says, “If she was sick, then you were in some way prepared for this. If she was sick, this wasn’t a surprise. If she was sick, then maybe this isn’t so tragic.” The implication is that sick people die, so what’s the big deal? Well, my mother is fifty-nine and dead. In our last text conversation, she said to me, “I’m so ready to be better. I want to spend time with you and the kids.” So you tell me if her being sick somehow makes this easier.
_________
When someone you love dies, you’re met with a seemingly endless string of “How are you doings,” at least for a while; then the parade of “How are yous” stops and no one talks to you about it anymore. It’s such a bizarre dichotomy. People fixate on it for a brief period of time, and then it’s like it never happened. Every now and then, someone will ask me how I am some three months after her death, and I’ll give some version of, “I’m doing okay,” but what I really want to say is this: I feel untethered. I feel like the moment that she died, my center of gravity shifted and all of the atoms that compose me began vibrating at wildly different speeds, on different frequencies, in completely different directions. I’m neither scattered nor composed; I’m something in between, something unnatural, something uncomfortable. I am me, but I am not. What grounds me to the Earth if she is gone? She brought me to this place. I exist because of her. I can’t feel her anymore, and gravity is suddenly no longer enough. There is nowhere for the parts of me to coalesce. I am unbound in the most burdensome way.
But you can’t say that to other people, can you?
_________
What are you supposed to do, really, when your mother dies? I don’t know the answer. I have mourned my mother for most of my life; sometimes I mourned her while I was in the same room with her, but now I mourn her from an entirely different reality, a different dimension. Where is she? I know what my faith teaches me, but…where is she? I don’t know any of the answers in a form that makes any sense. I feel like a small, panicked child lost in the aisles of a grocery store.
Where is she? She was just here. I only looked away for a moment, and then she was gone. Where did she go? Please help me find her.
I used to lose her in the grocery store all the time. Winn-Dixie, Bi-Lo, it didn’t matter. I would stop to look at something, or she would send me on an errand to the next aisle over to retrieve something she overlooked, and when I came back to where she’d been, she was always gone. She was never simply on the next aisle. I wandered around panicked for what seemed like an eternity until I found her halfway across the store reaching for a carton of ice cream in the freezer section or squeezing loaves of bread along the far wall. I’m sure it was only a matter of minutes, but in my small mind, it was too long. She did it all the time; she always knew I’d find her. Even I always knew I’d find her, but the panic never ceased to come.
Where are you, Mother? I’ve looked for you everywhere. I think you really left me this time.
_________
I knew she was dying. I always know things that I don’t want to know. Sometimes I think that I’d rather be like everyone else and be surprised by life’s abruptness. She called it a discerning spirit - not completely unlike the spiritual gift of the same name, but different nonetheless. She had it. Her mother had it. Somehow, we always know. And I knew. I looked at my father a few weeks before she died and verbalized it. “I don’t think she’s coming back from this.” She tried. God knows she tried. But it wasn’t enough. She’d defied the odds so many times. The sheer volume of flabbergasted medical professionals I’d seen upon her miraculous recoveries over the years was staggering. When she was in the hospital, and the situation seemed serious, my sister held out hope.
“She’s been sick like this before, and she’s pulled through. I have to hope she’ll do it again. I keep thinking she will.”
“No, Morgan. I don’t think she will. I think this is it.”
She always told me that it would be up to me not to let her die; sometimes this was said jokingly, and sometimes it was said with stone-faced seriousness. “Your dad and your sister, they’ll let me die.” (That was usually said jokingly.) “I know you won’t. I know you’ll be my advocate. Promise me you’ll fight for me the times I can’t fight for myself.”
Sometimes…no, most of the time…the fighting was with her. She would tell you that herself if she could. A consummate nightmare patient, she foiled and/or hindered her own recovery most times she was sick enough to end up hospitalized. Sometimes I could talk her into listening to the doctors, and sometimes I couldn’t.
On her last trip to the hospital, she was in her usual fighting form. She refused to consent to any resuscitative measures despite the fact that multiple seasoned medical professionals urged her to do so. When a rep from Hospice & Palliative Care came into her room to discuss palliative care options, she was immediately alarmed and said, “Does this mean I’m dying?” The rep attempted to explain the difference between hospice care and palliative care, but my mother threw her out before she could finish. “I don’t want it. I’m not dying.”
When her condition and breathing worsened, she was scared. We’d been trying to convince her that the more aggressive care she kept refusing or asking to be put off indefinitely might be her only option. On her final coherent, conscious day, she eventually relented. She asked for a piece of paper. Morgan pulled a scrap of paper out of her work bag.
“Write this down,” she said to me through her oxygen mask. “Use any means necessary. Remove the DNR order.” I wrote it down in my script that looks uncannily like her own as I told her a verbal order would be fine. “No. I want it in writing. Any means necessary.” She signed and dated it. I told her nurse who ultimately notified the doctor, but I still showed the signed paper to the nurse just to ease Mom’s mind.
After she died a few days later, I took it from a table in the room as I left her for the final time. It was the last time she’d ever sign her name to anything. How could I live with myself knowing I let some nameless face in scrubs throw it away? The very thought of it would have tortured me more than the sum of all the regrets I’ve amassed up to this point. I have it buried in a drawer - a place where I’ll have to go looking for it deliberately. I don’t want it surprising me on a random Tuesday afternoon as I rifle around for a good pen or the checkbook, sucking every breath of oxygen out of my lungs and reducing me to a sniveling mess when I’m suddenly face to face with it. Oh no. I’m far more clever than that.
I’m so sorry that I couldn’t save you; that the doctors couldn’t save you; that you couldn’t save yourself.
Mother, I tried. I promise, I tried.
_________
I feel entirely selfish when I tearfully fixate on wanting her back. She was so sick the last few weeks of her life; frankly, her quality of life had diminished rapidly for the preceding eight months. Her universe kept shrinking: from the surrounding towns, to the city itself, to a few choice places (grocery stores, doctor’s offices), to the house, to her bedroom, and, finally, to her bed. She loathed it all - every new or worsening problem, every dwindling of her universe, every pill, every limitation. So we made plans that never came to fruition. She set goals she never met. But it made her feel better - to imagine a future where her reality wasn’t so claustrophobic, so sickly yellow, so stale.
About two months before she died, I took her to a new store I knew she’d love. She finally agreed to let me take her somewhere in her wheelchair, and my gamble paid off. She was euphoric, shopping in this glorified dollar store. She was “normal” again. We were “us” once more. She piled her basket high with little dishes and glasses and decorative objects. Of course she bought little things for the kids - her favorite pastime. She urged me to get anything and everything that would look cute in my classroom. As we checked out, she made conversation with the friendly cashier. “This is our first time in here, and I love it! We’ll be back. The next time you see me, I’ll be walking again!”
She never made it back.
And now I can’t even bear to look in her cabinets and see the delicate glasses she bought for herself that day - the ones with the gold cherry branches that remind her of the dishes her grandmother had when she was little.
But she was happy.
For an hour, she was happy.
It was our last good day, just the two of us. We used to have them all the time. We’d go to our favorite places, or we’d find new venues to frequent. It didn’t matter. We were together laughing, spending money, spending time, complaining about other people’s driving.
One of the things I hate most is how strangely silent my phone is now.
No one texts me a funny Buzzfeed article in the middle of the day anymore.
No one calls me at the end of every day to ask me how my day was.
God, I crave it now. It seemed like such a small thing even though I knew it wasn’t. I knew that no one would ever love me the way she did. I always knew the moment that she left the world would be the moment that I’d lose the biggest part of myself.
I will never receive such love again. What a blessing to have had it, but what a gaping void it’s left. What else can I say about such a loss?
Nothing. There is nothing.
_________
Those are my words.
All the poets are wrong.
There is nothing beautiful here.
Not right now.
Maybe someday.
But not right now.
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