Thoughts on the Anniversary of My Mother’s Passing 

There’s a lot of survival going on in the other room. Chris and Brautigan are playing Minecraft and simultaneously watching Alone, that show where people film themselves surviving in unsurvivable places to lots of money.

And here I am alone, thinking of surviving in my own way. Thinking about how it will be five years since my mother passed. A death that I’m understanding more and more wasn’t a death the way I once thought of a death, but an internalizing of a perspective, an integrating of stories. 

The day my mother could no longer speak for herself, I was left with a desperate yet painfully authentic need to understand who she was, what her life meant for herself and for me, and to memorialize my findings.

Such a stark experience: someone here/someone gone. 

I remember vividly the immediate aftermath of my mother’s passing—the soundtrack of Thomas the Train on a loop that dulled the conversations of disbelief, of death certificates and urns, of the sharp agony of my guilt and longing.

The missing her, at first, was too much to bear. I needed so desperately to find her, but she was gone. I poured through the voices of my heart and examined every flicker of every light, asking them all, just like that little bird in that old children’s book, “Are you my mother? Are you my mother? Are you my mother?”

Over time I realized the answer to this question: my mother is part of me. She’s part of my ingredients. 

My mother had a habit of interrupting my life. At the time I had no idea she had been downloading herself in those interruptions, in the form of stories and conversations. And though I had been collecting her, internalizing her, even transcribing these pieces of her, I had no idea that I’d been creating for myself a gift that years later, would be my anchor after she was gone.

It was as if some part of us knew I would need her ingredients to make sense of my own. That they were the tools I would use for my own growing understanding, to make sense of this collection of perspectives and memories I had accumulated, that literally shaped who I had become.

Things get so lost in metaphor. I think of all the eucharists meant to inspire understanding and reverence for how we internalize the anointed. How they become part of us, if only we remember and commit to carving enough time to let them in, to let them become part of us. 

It’s like an instruction manual for understanding death in our own lives that got lost in the mismanagement of the politics of how to last forever in eternity, told through a story too many times removed for us to recognize ourselves.

I am not eternal in and of myself. I am passing through. I have within me my mother’s best self, her mother’s best self, her mother’s best self, whittled down and extruded through my own best self.  

It makes sense why death had once been such a terrifying stranger to me when I think of how many times I had been taught that the value of my life was something I had to earn.

I spent so much time scrounging in the forests of scarcity, trying to earn the right to exist through validation from those constructs of success and beauty and morality that other people held the accolades for. And all the while I had zero understanding about what it might mean to belong to a larger context. 

Having felt no value, shame replaced any ideas I might have had of being a miraculous continuation of all that had come before me, and inadequacy replaced any pride I might have felt in recognizing that it was now my turn to be here and to share my best parts with my son and everyone else I cross paths with.

I think of the many friends I know who’ve lost loved ones recently. My Facebook feed sometimes looks like a long stream of tears. 

For those in pain, you are so not alone. And I hope that you will find comfort in the miraculous position of being who you are right now in the grand continuation of all things. I hope that you can excavate your memories, and cherish them, and give them away along with yourself as gifts to all you know. ❤️

—JLK