When I was fifteen years old, my mother died of brain cancer.
She’d been sick and receiving treatment in France for the past eleven months. I had spent three to four of those months with her, watching as she went through radiation and chemo. I watched her learn how to walk again, relearn basic multiplication, grow hair again, saw her spirits rise and fall depending on what kind of day or week she was having.
I was also there for the end, the final six months where the doctors had her on steroids and morphine so that she could die in comfort.
Three months before she died, she told me she wouldn’t be around much longer. At first I was incredulous. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to believe that she could die, rather that I actually didn’t believe that she would die. “Those types of things don’t happen to people like me,” I thought. Not that I knew who they happened to. I cried when I learned that her illness was terminal. I think the idea of her dying made me sadder than any understanding of what it would actually mean to not have her around.
I tried so hard to imagine a life without her. She had been on tour a lot when I was younger so I knew what it was like to not see her for weeks, and she had been in France most of that year so I could also imagine months without her. What I didn’t know how to imagine was the way losing someone forever affects you, the way grief trickles into the recesses of your mind and impresses upon the way you feel and act. I had lost grandparents and an uncle, but never someone like her.
This loss was different.
When my mother had first gone to France to seek treatment we weren’t sure how long she would be away. “One or two months,” she assured me. I thought that was such a long time. My brother and I considered moving to France for the year but decided against it. It was my brother’s senior year and we figured the familiarity of school and friends would help us. As months passed and she didn’t come home, my mother grew frustrated.
In January of 2007 she told us that no matter what she would be home to see Gabriel graduate from high school. Even in hospice she would talk about coming home and the golden retriever she would get (she got the idea from a stuffed animal golden retriever named Cous Cous her best girl friend had brought her from the states). My brother and I played along because it was comforting to dream of a future together even if we knew there was none.
The flight from France to New York takes about seven hours, and on June 8th, the day of Gabriel’s graduation, seven hours before he graduated my mother passed away. It was too perfect to be a coincidence. She had kept her promise, even if doing so meant she would no longer exist the way we had known her to.
When my father gave us the news, I cried. But I didn’t feel sad. I was relieved that she wasn’t suffering anymore. The next day we flew to Paris. When we arrived at the hospice we were led to the basement to see her body. The room was small. There was a table in the left hand corner that held a radio playing classical music. Straight ahead was her open casket; she lay inside, surrounded by flowers, wearing her wedding dress, with her hands crossed across her stomach, her head wrapped in a scarf, and her face made up. Her mouth was turned down at the corners, and her hands looked fake.
The moment I saw her, tears streamed down my face. I walked up beside her, sat down in a chair and stared at her. I asked my father and brother to give us a moment. After they left, I began talking to her, but I couldn’t stop crying. It had been two months since I had been back to see her, so I had much to share. Although she could not reply, it did not bother me. I told her about school and my friends. After fifteen minutes, I said good-bye and went back upstairs.
That had been the first day people could see her and the next would be the last. Sunday afternoon I found myself in the hospice again. Peter, one of my mother’s best friends, was downstairs in her room, decorating her casket. I ran downstairs and walked into her room to find various family members, including her husband Patrick and his mother. Patrick was dressed entirely in black, he was not smiling, and he spoke in a hushed tone of voice. I didn’t understand whom he was speaking so quietly for, it wasn’t as if he was disturbing anyone’s peace.
The next day I was able to look at her and smile.
I understood that, for me, it wasn’t my mother who was lying that casket, it was just her body, the package I had always known her in. The things I missed and loved most about her: her humor, and the sound of her laugh were not gone; it was simply her body. After everyone left, Peter and I were the only ones left in the room. We looked at each other and suddenly we both began laughing. “I keep imagining what she would say if she could see herself like this,” he said between refrained laughter. Tears came to my eyes, and I could feel her laughing with me.
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