Til It Happens to You

Unlike most people, I wasn't there when my mom took her last breathe. In fact, I don't even know when it exactly was. Because I didn't find her until 3 days later. Her death certificate says December 13. But it is actually 4 years ago today (December 10), that at some point, she wasn't here anymore. I wonder what I was doing. Where I was. What I was thinking. Whatever I was doing, I hoped it was that fucking important. That I wasn't there. For all the love that woman had in her heart for her family, it is disgusting she died alone. Not only alone, but that she actually thought she was better off gone.

I am still ashamed by this fact. I am ashamed that her death did absolutely NO JUSTICE to the love and the family we were, and shared. No, we were not perfect, but we LOVED each other. And the way she died, was a tragedy. Not just to us, but mainly, to her.

For the first time in my life with my mom, the two weeks before her suicide, I wasn't speaking to her. I was trying to set a boundary, or so I thought. I thought isolating and shaming a sick person, making them apologize for being sick, was the right thing to do. Man... was I wrong. The absolute LAST thing she needed in that moment, was to be alone.

My only defense for myself, my only explanation, was that I was so involved in her illness, that I too had become tired. My sister had somewhat checked out, and I was the one (along with my stepdad who lived with her) who was there day in and day out, minute by minute, through every up n down. And it was weighing on me. She had called me frantic about a flight she was supposed to get on a few days later, and I could hear her slipping and cracking, and I got scared. So I tried that whole tough love thing, and it got out of control, and the last thing I remember saying to my beautiful mother was, "You're fucked."

Yeah. Gonna let that sink in for a second there for you. And a second for myself, because I have never actually admitted this in writing, to the public. The last words I had ever said to my mom, were THE MOST incorrect words I could have ever used to illustrate our love and bond. That's the kind of shit you hear bratty teenagers use when they're 16 and think they hate their parents. Not how Ashley at 30 years old spoke.

In the following two weeks, after that awful phone call, my mom texted me a bunch of awful things right after. And by awful, I mean a person who was grasping at threads, knowing she was losing the fight of her life, and of her family. I ignored them. I think one of the last things she said to me was, "If I lose you, I have lost everyone."

And I say "think," because we had been down this road before. So, I forgot. The cycle of back n forth. I didn't think this was going to be the last time. Then there was radio silence. Nothing. No word from her. She was speaking to my sister. Barely. But not to me. And then all of a sudden, no one heard from her. We honestly just thought it was her being dramatic. My god...

That's the problem with suicide, you just don't know when that fateful last time will be.

Mental health isn't about being positive. I can't believe I talked to her like it was her lack of positivity. Her lack of effort. Like this was her personality, or a character flaw she had. Elizabeth Gilbert quoted someone on her Instagram, "Life is a mystery." And she pointed out the period. Because there was no more ways to elaborate on life. It will never cease to break my heart how we went from that kind of family, to one that completely fell apart. To one where the root, the matriarch, the "Master Chicken" (and we were her chicklets) disintegrated before our eyes.

When she died, we put everything in a storage locker. About a year later, we sorted through some of it. A few years before mom died, I bought her this beautiful glass chicken figurine, to remind her, no matter what, she was STILL our momma, our home. I found the chicken figurine. And what I am about to share with you, broke my heart. She had taken blue nail polish, and painted tears coming out of its eyes. And with red nail polish, had put a broken heart. Even as I write this, I am crying. Remembering her greatest strength - that beautiful beautiful delicate strong heart she had. I inherited it lol.

It kinda used to bother me when people would say, "You're just like her." Now, when people tell me that. I think of a woman who kept that beautiful heart almost all her life, when the world gave her every reason to not have it. Gave her every reason to turn it to stone. She never did. She felt life. Right to her last breathe, she was ALIVE.