Watercolor Memories of Mom

Dear Mom,

This summer marks an unfathomable thirty-six years since you died. Sometimes it’s difficult for me to even wrap my head around the idea that I’m old enough to have been alive for thirty-six years, yet next week will mark my 52nd birthday. I have spent more than two-thirds of my lifetime without you.

If these facts weren’t enough to turn my hair white, there’s this nugget that I have secreted away and am trying not to fixate on: the week after my birthday is yours, and this year you would have been turning 75.

That one just kills me.

I have a confession to make: every time I see friends post on social media about their parents’ significant birthdays, I feel a rush of anger and jealousy. I’m not proud of this. Nonetheless, I have to admit that my initial, trauma response is a scowl and flash of pain before I shake it off. I want to feel joy and happiness for my friends and their families, and eventually I do. But it’s not my first instinct. I can rationalize it, analyze it, understand it, and even forgive myself for it, but I have yet to figure out how to stop it from happening. Maybe I never will.

As long as I’m sharing uncomfortable truths, I should probably mention that I have a similar reaction when someone shares that their aged parent has passed away. My very first feeling is “how nice that you had so many years with them!” Then someone might comment “gone too soon” about someone in their 80s and a small, wounded part of me thinks “wow, that’s 40+ years more than my mom had, count yourself lucky.”

I actually took some time to consider this response. I talked to my husband, who, like me, is also an “adult orphan.” He admitted to having similar feelings. We advanced a theory that it’s possible that people who spent more of their lives with their parents have more memories, and therefore more to miss, more to trigger them, and perhaps a deeper sense of loss on some levels.

Hear me out on this one: I miss dad in a different way than I miss you. I miss the idea of you, the potential of you. I miss what should have been and what could have been if you hadn’t died when I was still a child. I wonder how my life and the lives of my younger brothers would have been different. Had you not died, my relationship with dad would likely have been quite different. As it was, we became very close, and he was my friend and a confidant in matters that I would have probably talked to my mom about, were you still living. I’ve been hearing about these women who say that their mom is their best friend. We never had that. Not as adults. I didn’t have you as an adult – I didn’t have dad for a long time either, honestly. He was in pretty bad shape after you passed. In fact, the stress and trauma of watching you waste away over four long years, your death, and being left alone with four kids may have contributed to the massive coronary that ended his life twenty years and eleven months after yours.

I had him longer. I miss him as an adult. I miss talking to him about politics, money, real estate, current events. I miss the dad jokes and quirky little habits. I miss him being there for my son. All of these truths cause me to feel pain that seems fresh, bright, and acute. Even though he’s been gone for nearly fifteen years, I have so many more memories with him than with you. My relationship with dad grew, evolved, changed. We had conflicts that we resolved and hopefully learned from. We had debates, laughs, tears. Mom, you and I never had that. When I think about missing dad, it’s like a gushing wound near the surface. Missing you is deep in my bones – my very marrow has felt your absence for most of my life. Like a break that didn’t quite heal right – I feel the ache of your loss at unexpected times, and it’s often confusing, complex, and difficult to find and identify. Like a cancer. Your absence and the lack of you is something that I have carried for so long, that it’s simply a part of the structure of me.

If we’re being really honest, I guess I have to add that it’s probable that I kept the pain of your absence buried so deep, and for so long, that it’s harder for me to connect with it. For a long time, I had to compartmentalize my feelings in order to survive. Let me tell you, it sucks pulling that stuff out and taking a look at it when you’re in your forties and fifties.

That’s another thing: I’m older than you. You didn’t see your forties and fifties, and most of your thirties were spent trying to stay alive. I often wonder who you would have become, given the opportunity. Would we even get along? My friends who complain about their mothers also drive me crazy – don’t they know how lucky they are? Again, that’s my base response. I understand that some relationships are toxic and unhealthy. I understand that some mothers can really be challenging to get along with. I wonder what we would be like. Would we be close? Would we fight?

My memories of you are like faded watercolors – bright and colorful, but fuzzy, unfocused, and sort of blurred together. The collection of memories is an abstract that holds remembrances from when I was twelve, three, fifteen, nine…all mixed. It’s almost as if you no longer exist in linear, chronological space – which I guess you don’t. I remember you as passionate, funny, and intensely attached to a moral and ethical code that originated with your religion and involvement with church.

I wonder what you would think of your tattooed, liberal, fat, heteroflexible, divorced, unchurched, loudmouth daughter. Would we be kindred spirits, or butt heads?

In many ways we are quite similar, and I have often imagined what our relationship would have been like at different stages of my life. If you had lived and we were actually celebrating your birthday in a few weeks – who would you be at 75? I know it’s not fair to imagine you static and unchanged since 1986. Would the AIDS crisis have broken your heart and made you a queer ally? You didn’t much care for 80s pop music – what about grunge? Would we align on social issues, or face each other on opposite sides? I can truly imagine both scenarios. In some matters, you were very forward-thinking and progressive, while in others you were inflexible, old-fashioned, and extremely rigid. Would you have held so tightly to religion had you not been dying? Was it important to you to have something to believe in as your life was ending? Had you not been sick, would you have fallen away from certain dogmas? Would you have worn a pink pussy hat?

I envision what a 75th birthday celebration would look like, but it’s also hard to picture. We moved back to Michigan because you were sick. Would we have stayed in Georgia? Would you and dad have stayed together? Would there be a lake house up north? Or maybe a farm with a barn, freshly mown grass wet with humidity, covered with picnic tables, cornhole boards, food, family, friends, maybe a pool? I can almost see it. Your children, grandchildren, grandson-in-law. What would they call you? Oma? Gran? Would your hair be white? Or maybe you would be one of those champagne blonde grandmas. Perhaps a funky purple for the big day?

Oh, how I have fantasized about a big gathering of family from many generations – past and present. It’s one of two recurring dreams I have. I know that someday all of our collective energies will converge again, and today, on this Memorial Day holiday, I think about what you said a few days before you died, when you sent one of my brothers off to camp: “if I don’t see you next week, I’ll see you in heaven.” Though it breaks my heart to know that you didn’t see us that following week, I have every confidence of a reunion in the future, and I’m really looking forward to getting reacquainted.

Love,

Allison

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In loving memory of my late mother, Linda Dickens (1947-1986)

Dedicated with love and appreciation to my kind, beautiful stepmother, Connie Dickens. I’m sorry that my broken pieces don’t do a better job of showing you how much we all love you.