Closure

I stood there and looked at my mother's face as she lay in the open casket. 

How could she look so calm and peaceful while in my heart it felt like a thunderous volcano was erupting? And was it really her? Who had actually fronted in the last moments of her life? I found myself wishing it was her. I hoped she had gotten to be actively present in her life one last time. 

Living with Dissociative Identity Disorder had been a hell of a life for her. And for us who had to watch her cope with it. She apologised often for any trouble her condition caused us. It wasn't her fault. And it hurt me when she did. 

She was sixty seven. It was only two weeks before that we had gotten to actually talk. Her mind had been getting worse and worse. One minute she was there and the next she wasn't. When she would remember me, we would talk about her life, my children and her mother. 

It was nice to talk to her. The real her. The host of her system. I had been finding it hard to talk to her alters who had seemed to take over. After all, her mind had created them in childhood to help her deal with difficult situations. Her impending death had been the most difficult one it seemed as she rarely fronted. And being in a nursing home made things worse. When she didn't front for weeks, it felt like I had already lost her for good. 

Only some of her alters would tell me what she was saying to them in their inner world. They seemed stronger than her even though they shared the same body. A few times, the youngest, Jenni, an eight-year-old would video call me from the nursing home. She would often say that she hadn't reached my mother in a while. She said she was scared and hoped that the body would live longer as she was too young to die. My heart would break. It felt like a part of my mother, the child in her was reaching out to me and being vulnerable. 

I knew that losing my mother would also mean losing all the eight different people that lived in her head. I couldn't find the strength to say goodbye to them all in my heart. It was hard. 

Sometimes the alters would communicate through the app diary on her phone. Reading these conversations always gave me closure whenever I would visit them because I could read my mother's voice in them. 

Don't get me wrong. It's not that I didn't like her alters. All of them had been core aspects of our lives standing in for my mother whenever I needed her growing up. I liked to play with Jess, curse with Sam and talk wisdom with Meth when each of them fronted. But sometimes I felt like the people sharing my mother's brain were stealing our moments. I wanted it to be just my mother in there. A thing I would never get. 

The system rules were that the phone's password would never be changed. And that every time an alter fronted, they would record what they had been up to in the diary. This method worked for years. 

When my mother's health started to decline, as the system's caretaker I read through all the diary entries each day to help organise the needs of everyone. As some alters had no means of communicating with others clashes were common with some of them proving to be chaos and health hazards even. 

The younger alters would wear heels and go clubbing when they fronted and my mother would front and find herself, a 56-year-old scantly dressed woman grinding on a young man in a loud club at 3 am. She would call me and I would drive to the club and take them to bed.

Some of the younger alters had begun to resent me when I took more control of their life. They felt trapped in my mother's body they said. Sometimes they wouldn't cooperate and would not update their diary entries which proved to be a task trying to piece what exactly happened when something went wrong. That's why I had to take my mother to the nursing home years earlier than expected. The system needed to be monitored twenty-four hours to ensure their safety. 

Some of the alters resented me even more for this. Sam claimed he was not my mother and so I couldn't decide where he should go. He felt betrayed after the wonderful relationship we had had for years. He was angry that I didn't listen to his needs. The needs of everyone who shared the body and not just those of my mother. 

I understood them, and I felt trapped. I wanted all of them to be free but most importantly for them to be safe. I had to make the tough call. 

I had been finding it hard to read through their diary, especially in the preparations for the funeral.

I had taken my mother's belongings from the nursing home. Her phone had been on my nightstand. I would read through everything once I found the strength I told myself. I wanted to understand their state of mind in the last few hours. I hoped they had written them down. 

A few days after the funeral, I sat on my bed and got my mother's phone. I tried to unlock it. It said the password I entered was incorrect. I tried several times. The error message was the same. 

'Reset your password', the phone prompted me. 

Without knowing the previous password I would never unlock the phone. It seemed an alter had gotten the last say on the matter. 

Or had it been my mother? Did she want to protect me from all this one final time? That I will never know. 

So much for closure.