As Only a Mother Could

It happened on a Sunday. On a rainy Sunday evening, it was then she got the phone call. At the other end was her older brother Daniel, his voice heavy and trembling.

"Olive, it's Mom."

That was all he had to say, she knew right away. She knew already if she would have admitted it to herself. She had been pushing away a feeling all day, a feeling pressing on the edge of her mind, tingling on the surface of her skin. Something she couldn't quite put her finger on until she answered that phone.

Their mother had died.

She had died alone, in her home, laid out on her kitchen floor.

Daniel found her like that when he came up to check in on and stay with her for the evening.

They all took turns checking on Mom. Today, Sunday, was supposed to be Olive's day. She had asked Daniel to switch her Sunday for his Wednesday. She had a big project she was working on with a rapidly upcoming deadline. She was notoriously awful with deadlines and knew ultimately she could have no distractions.

But she had been distracted all day, she had hardly got anything done.

And now her mother was dead.

Olive screamed and sobbed on the phone with her brother.

Their mother had always been a brutal tyrant. Increasingly so in recent years, as her mind was starting to wander further and further out of her reach.

Just weeks ago there were preliminary talks of making assisted living arrangements. Olive, Daniel, the twins Elise and Marcus, had all agreed that they would do everything in their power to assure that mother could stay in her own home as long as she was still able.

At the moment, it meant that the siblings rotated, taking turns staying the night at her house near the harbour.

They had all moved their families closer to town to facilitate.

Except Olive. Olive didn't have to move, she had never left their sleepy, gray-skied coastal town. She didn't have a family of her own, she didn't even have a boyfriend. Or a cat for that matter.

But she did have her mother. She worked hard for her. Tirelessly it would seem.

Olive, the ever devoted daughter, had made a habit of putting her career to the side to help mother out with her own business, handwritten calligraphy messages. Unfortunately, in her own field, Olive had gained a reputation for being somewhat unreliable because she so often dropped things she was doing, even with deadlines coming up. All for her mother dear.

It was like that well before the old woman got sick, if mother wanted something from Olive, she got it.

Her mother had so often said to her "My little martini Olive, you're the only one who didn't leave me. I'm so proud of you!"

So Olive never left.

It made her sick and unhappy but still she never could, abandoning her mother was unthinkable after all. No matter how demanding or increasingly cruel she became. No matter how manipulative or controlling she remained.

Olive felt helpless to refuse her.

After she finally hung up with her brother, her face swollen, red and smeared with anguish, Olive began to feel an unknown sensation. A strange feeling she had no words for.

It was as if something that had always been pressing on her mind had now suddenly removed itself, stepped off. She now felt as if it stood just behind her, still watching, still lurking, but no longer standing on her subconscious.

She tried to shake it off. Disturbed how it had interrupted her in her grief. She knew she would have to eventually get some sleep. The idea of trying to sleep seemed petty. Her mother was gone. She would never see her again, she owed her a full night of tears at least. What's a little sleep deprivation to a grieving daughter anyway.

Olive volunteered to retrieve her mother's ashes from the funeral home later that week.

She showed up at the crematorium Thursday afternoon.

They had divided her mother's ashes into four little boxes, Daniel had paid extra to do this, each box had a corresponding letter provided by her mother's lawyer with each of their names in her mother's silver handwritten calligraphy.

Olive open the letter with her name on it, It read,

"My little martini Olive! I'm so proud of you and how you use your gifts! I'll always be with you no matter what! I love you as only a mother could.

Your Mother."

A sour taste filled her mouth. She knew that she should take comfort in her mother's final words to her, but that was not the effect they had. She swallowed her bitterness and pushed the feeling away. She folded the letter and put it in her pocket, gathered up the remaining boxes along with their corresponding letters, and went to deliver them to each of her siblings. They held a private memorial for her the following weekend, family only.

Over the course of the following months, Olive experienced an unprecedented surge in inspiration and creativity unlike anything she'd ever known before. She felt as if her mind was ablaze with ideas, as if everything she couldn't manage to get done in the last 20 years came spilling out of her in full force. Exposing talents she never knew she possessed. Like something within her finally broke free. She started to go out, she was enjoying time with friends. She even went on dates. Something she has never had the time to do when her mother was alive. She was finally starting to gain respect in the workplace. And as time progressed, she thought less and less of the mother she lost, and instead became increasingly mindful of her own heart's desires.

That is, until the nightmares came.

A deluge of haunting feelings spilled in and filled up the cracks in her mind that she had left unmended.

The devastation set in and she started to fall apart.

Her new found productivity all but ceased, her imaginative flow left halted by the flood of her unresolved emotions.

It grew worse over the coming weeks, the nightmares came every night. Suffocating, terror filled, dark and haunting.

In one nightmare, she was lying on the beach, as sands beneath her started to shift and she began to sink just as the tide was coming in. They started to cover her, the waves. Filling her nostrils and throat with their salty brine. She tried to scream and dig her way out, But this just pushed the water further into her lungs and her body deeper into the sand. She would awake, sputtering and coughing, with a constant ringing left in her ears.

The nightmares continued to intensify until one night, she awoke in panic and horror, and the ringing never stopped. The ringing instead turned to screaming. Starting is a slow whine, filling the air surrounding her. Until the screaming sounded like it was coming from somewhere inside of her house.

Olive in her exhaustion, assumed she must still be dreaming, so she shook herself fully awake. But the noise intensified, "Alone!"

It cried "abandoned!"

"I must be going crazy," she told herself. " going crazy... or."

She could make out her mother's voice from across the room.

No, it couldn't really be her, mother was dead. Dead and gone, her voice along with her.

She could hear her, the disembodied shrieking echoed in her head as the voice continued to scream.

"You all abandoned me! your own mother! your poor mother to die alone! cold! On her kitchen floor! How could you abandon your own mother to Die! Die! Die!"

The screaming continued growing louder still.

"Left to die! Abandoned! Alone!"

The sound was coming from her fireplace. No, not the fireplace, it was coming from the box on top of the fireplace, the one that contained her mother's ashes.

Olive slowly got up and started towards the empty hearth.

The box sat on her mantel shelf. She couldn't take her eyes off of it, she could feel her heart beating in her throat.

The voice grew to an unconstrained volume as she approached the fireplace.

"Ungrateful!" It spat. "Sinful! Hateful!"

Burn in hell! Burn in hell!" It screeched.

The sound burned her ears. Causing her to shake, every muscle in her body erupting with tremors so strong that she could barely keep hold of light she grasped in her hand.

Olive dropped her light as she threw her hands to her face and screamed back,

"I did everything for you! I did everything you ever asked me to do! I gave you everything you asked of me! You never stopped! It was never enough! You're dead! Leave me the hell alone!"

Suddenly the screaming stopped.

Olive stuffed the box of ashes in the back closet and went back to bed, but she couldn't sleep. She was too afraid of the nightmares that would inevitably come, and of the screaming she was so afraid would begin again.

She brought it back out the next morning.

The very same thing happened the following night.

Only this time the screaming didn't stop when she told it to.

"Abandoned and alone! Left to die! To die!

Sinful! Hateful! Burn in hell! Burn in hell!"

The shrieking continued for several hours before a hollow eyed Olive finally had no choice but to leave her house. She walked out in the middle of the night. There were not many places to go at 12:30 in the morning so she made her way to the only 24 hour diner in the area. She got herself a table overlooking the harbor. As she sat in with her coffee and watched the ocean swell, she was overcome. She knew all of the sudden what she had to do. She pulled the notepad she always had on her out of her jacket pocket.

Tears started streaming down her face as she wrote, she was inspired, words and emotions came once again flowing through her.

As she began, she didn't know if it would work. But she knew somehow, it was what she had to do anyway. It would mean the completion of something left unfinished.

By the time she had finished her face was red and puffy from crying, And the paper before her tear sodden, littered with salty pools of ink.

The server approached her tentatively, "ma'am are you okay?" She asked her. Olive set down her pen and looked up, smiling through her tear streaked face and replied, "Never better, can I get the check?"

She practically ran home, clutching her notebook in her hand.

As she opened her front door, she could still hear the anguished screams although they seemed quieter now, more distant.

She snatched the box off the mantelpiece, and headed back outside.

The voice coming from the box had faded to but a whisper, and almost entirely by the time she reached the docks.

She set it on the railing in front of her, and pulled her writing pad out of her pocket.

It all started with a note.

A note she started three weeks before her mother had passed, one she never finished, one she never intended to be read.

A note she now addressed to the box of ashes that sat on the railing before her, dark choppy waves in the harbour serving as her backdrop as she started aloud.

"Dear mother,

Now that you're gone, I finally find the courage to tell you all of the things that I kept inside my whole life.

Only now that you are gone, am I able to confront the truth.

I still lose sleep. I lose sleep stressing out thinking about the cruel ways in which you treated us while we lived in your home.

The harsh and manipulative manner in which you controlled me for so many years.

I know it's my fault too I allowed this to happen, I am not proud that I did.

It hurts to hear that you're proud of me. It makes me sick to hear it. You have no right to be proud. I let myself become your prisoner.

I'm certainly not proud of myself. I've done nothing to be proud of. I abandoned myself. I abandoned myself because that was all I knew. I did just what was expected of me, what you demanded of me. Now I need to free myself so I can live. Something I never had the courage to do while you were alive. I AM proud to say that I no longer care about what you think. I’m done wasting my time becoming someone I don't even care about. I wasted my time just surviving because I never thought that yes, I too, deserve to thrive.

I used to fear you, I was afraid of the shit you say, the shit you put me through, because you put all of us through so much shit. Because you tore me down emotionally. Every single chance you had to tear your emotionally developing children down, you took it. And you ran with it.

And it ran me whole life. But that comes to an end tonight.

I am not proud of this life, it has never been what I want. Now that you're gone, I am finally starting to find out what I want. I never gave myself the chance to be true to myself before, you took that chance away from me. Took it away while I was still trying to figure out what it was in the first place. You were horrible, you were cruel, you were destructive, and if I had one wish in this life it would be that I never knew you.

I feel like my chances to love myself growing up were taken from me. Taken and turned into something someone like you could be proud of.

Everything that I can appreciate about myself,

I am in spite of being raised by you.

You demanded we abandon our true selves and follow blindly somewhere along the path of YOUR true north. A direction in which nobody else but YOU belonged.

You need to know that. I need to tell you that.

And I have no thanks to give you over your too-little-too-late pride regarding my "gifts". My gifts, my talent, a voice that you spend so many years desperately oppressing.

Thank you for keeping me alive. Thank you for giving me life, food, a roof and a bed for so many years. Although, You never gave me true love, you provided no real security, gave no comforting reassurance, or helpful encouragement. You never showed any appreciation for who we really are, our true selves, on our own, separate from your beliefs and ideals. Again beliefs and ideals that serve only YOU. You spent our formative years trying to turn each of us into something that YOU could appreciate. Instead of appreciating the value we came with in the first place. You couldn't appreciate it. You could only accept what worked for you. According to your limited beliefs about YOUR God, according to YOUR word, and that's all for YOU. None of it was ever for any of us, make no mistake.

I am grateful to no longer need or want any of those things from you.

You tortured us mentally, emotionally, but especially spiritually. You fed off of the empathy of other people. You gave us nothing to connect to. Just the echoes of our anguish, ringing out, bouncing off of the walls that made up the empty cavern inside of you.

The more you successfully filled our hearts and minds with fear, guilt and shame, the more you could control us, only then did you act like you could love us.

You injected darkness into our spirits, emburdening our souls. Darkness that was never ours to begin with, darkness that was never meant to be there, darkness that was yours and yours alone to burden only yourself with.

Instead, you chose to burden us with it, your children. You were supposed to protect us. You were supposed to shine light for us, not condemn us into darkness with your fear of the world.

You couldn't do that. You failed. You were weak. You gave birth to strong humans and you abused them. You were relentless. You were never satisfied, nothing we ever said or did was good enough to get you to back off.

You couldn't handle the burdens of being a human on your own. Even with your God on your side. Even with a God that is supposed to deliver you from those burdens, you had to lay them on us.

You taught us that our actions have consequences.

These are your consequences.

I cannot help but feel shame in relation to you.

I am still in pain as a result of some of your choices.

I forgive you.

I love you .

And I'm happier without you.

Goodbye Mother."

Olive found herself surprised at the fact she wasn't crying, as if she had already shed far too many tears over the course of far too many years. The time to mourn the lives that had escaped her, finally coming to an end.

She opened up the little gilded box and with a deep breath, emptied its contents into the hungry sea below. Watching in silence as the waves greedily lapped up each and every speck of dust.

Olive silently observed the surf, a wash of serenity as vast as the sea herself flooded over her as the ocean took the remaining pieces of her mother back, at last laying her to rest.

Olive stared into the dark horizon, the ocean bearing the promise of a future not yet illuminated. One she knew would be a journey, a whole new journey she was proud to finally be prepared to embark on.