Every Day My Mother Dies a Little in Front of Me

Nurses Make for Good Bullets

Due to lack of furniture, my mother’s bedroom is the center of operations. The TV is always on unless I turn it off. The fire alarm beeps for new batteries every few minutes, but we’ve gotten good at ignoring it for the most part. The blankets are psychedelic shades of pink with a gold, glittering crust flowing down like lava lamp wax. Electric candles and pink champagne overlay decorate the dresser— my mother’s interior design for Valentine’s Day. The remote control is buried somewhere in the sheets. Around the TV are receipts, prescriptions, and old mail. The Blu-ray player has been broken for two years, but mom hasn’t gotten around to replacing it. A dusty calendar lays behind the dresser with a quote from Monty Williams. “Everything you want is on the other side of hard.” 

Shoes and boxes are crammed under the bed. The hamper leans to the side with clothes that can either be clean or dirty. Remnants of burnt incense seep through each vent around the house. The house is cluttered, but never filthy. Filth is what attracts vermin. My mother taught me that early in life. Sometimes when mom finds extra energy floating around, she cleans the living room, bathroom, and her bedroom.

At least once or twice a week the place smells like weed from the downstairs neighbors after they come in from work. Pitbulls from the house next door bark throughout the day from their backyard, though rarely does anyone answer them. It’s the same house where there was a driveby shooting last summer. When the sun is out, grandmas and aunties gather for gossip while kids play on the lawn and sidewalk. A few cars blast music so loud the bass vibrates through the streets up to our windows. Men in hoodies and baggy jeans hang around the corner store up the street. Early in the morning, a crackhead shows up to beg for money in front of Delta Sonic’s car wash. There’s a drug den behind my mother’s house right next to the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church’s parking lot. It’s safe in mom’s apartment, it’s clean in her bed, where no one usually sees me besides her. I sleep in her room, often ignorant of what’s happening in the street until after I’m gone. I visit only once or twice a year due to being short on time and money.

But then my grandmother, Nana, sends a message in the family group text asking us to keep my mother in prayer because she’s in the ER. She lists parts of my mom’s body that are under attack, places that dissect themselves before me as I read the message. Liver, thyroid, brain. Typically, my mother and I correspond every other day, usually sending goofy memes. When there are cracks I don’t know how to mend, I break down and tell her how I really am. Sometimes she speaks through the therapy she’s in, suggesting I forgive or learn from the breakup, isolation, my writing. Other times she speaks from a distance as if forgetting the toll a woman’s twenties takes on the body and mind. There is judgment when I come too close to making the same mistakes she once did, a mirror too ugly to look back into. In absence of kinder words, or the community I can’t seem to build, she texts me the solitary line: Finish your book. I ask every few weeks how she is doing. Her health, work, diet, friends. Her men. Her response never changes. Fine. Same old, same old.

After Nana messages our family, I go about my day. Exercise, church, request for my social circle to keep my mother in prayer. I sporadically reread the family texts, waiting for updates. Since I can’t force her body to be okay, I push my own to do what it can. If I don’t force myself to move in a normal way, I’ll do what comes naturally: wait in the dark, let the nightmare of ‘what ifs’ skin me alive.

In October 2020, my mother attempts suicide. The pandemic further infects her twenty-year old wounds. Depression, isolation, pushing people away, poverty. She’s never been good with money, or paying bills on time. She spends thousands on a car that keeps breaking down over the last year. She loses 75 lbs going to the gym for group fitness classes and training for a marathon, but once the shutdown happens, her support is limited. The pandemic takes away the applause, hugs, and smiles that keep her going and make her think her life’s brightening. She’s left at home with her demons, the biggest being depression. Amongst all of this, it also takes her two years to find stable housing.

She tells me I saved her without knowing it that summer. In August, I unknowingly talked to her for two hours on the first day that she decided to end her life. “I planned it all out, but you just wouldn’t let me go.” She tells me this after she wakes up from a coma in October. She OD’s on pills and is discovered by her landlord who called an ambulance.

“It’s a miracle she’s alive with the amount of medication she took,” the overnight nurse tells Nana.

She drives three hours from Albany to Rochester, searching for my mother, who has no ID and is admitted to the general hospital as a Jane Doe. When Nana locates her daughter, it’s discovered that she has no health insurance. Not because she can’t afford it, but because she never got around to getting it. Both my grandmother and mother are nurses. It never occurred to me that someone working in healthcare wouldn’t have such protections. Nana stays with my mother for eight months while she recovers and figures out what her new normal is.

I think about moments when my mother dies a little in front of me. When mom finds out she has to leave her home of the last decade, or when we sit on the bus after she’s been sued for a car accident the other driver caused. I suggest outlets at her old church and at the YMCA where she can search  for housing, and encourage her to use the police report written in her favor in court for the car insurance company. She’s overwhelmed and I don’t hear any future in her voice. I feel bad that all I have to offer are words, and yet as I watch her spiral in despair, too dizzy for answers, I realize my words are the most she has. In moments like this, my mother is unpredictable, wounded and bleeding on me. Sometimes I see the weapons formed against her; other times I only see the carnage. So many of her wounds are mine, and yet so much of her mind is still a stranger. But this time, eighteen months after that October, it is her body that’s the traitor, not her mind.

Within a few days of Nana’s message, I apply for emergency funding for a plane ticket to return home. My mom stabilizes within that time and only answers a few of my questions. When did this start? What’s causing it? Why didn’t you tell me? What can I do? Her answers are fragmented and incomplete, as they always are. Whether information gets lost through text or avoidance, I don’t know. What I do know is that I have to see her in order to get clear, tangible answers.

A week later in May, mom picks me up from the airport. After her suicide attempt, she cares more about touch and closeness. Side hugs are no longer enough, though that has been most of our relationship. If I touched her outside of hello and goodbye, she’d become suspicious. Now, if my chest doesn’t press into hers, she doesn’t consider it a real hug, and I have to embrace her until I get it right.

When I sit down in the car and cross my legs, mom gasps at the sight of my calves. “When’s the last time you shaved?”

“I don’t know. A few weeks or months ago.”

She runs her hand along my calf as if inspecting for dust on a coffee table. “It’s giving Wolverine vibes. Have you gone on strike or something?”

I laugh. “I haven’t had time to perform for the patriarchy in a while. I have writing deadlines. Bathing is productive enough.”

In dealing with my own depression, basic hygiene tasks—bathing, brushing my teeth, doing the dishes—are a struggle to keep up with. So many mornings I am already heavy when I wake up. There are phases of trying to jump start my day and mindset with exercise, forcing myself to go outside after sitting on the couch all day watching cooking videos. Being in the presence of others usually compels me to clean myself and my house. That and experiences with skin and vaginal issues force me to deal with hygiene. It doesn’t matter that shame is often my motivation if it gets the job done.

Mom gives me her updates—appointments, meds, the duration, etc. “I only found out about my health issues shortly before you did. I went into the ER because I was getting terrible migraines. I couldn’t sleep at all that day because it felt like there was a vice grip around my head.”

For years I suggested putting a timer on the TV or using a soundscape machine when she sleeps. And to avoid looking at her phone when going in and out of consciousness. Sometimes melatonin and other meds work, other times they don’t. The doctor says one of her antidepressants is attacking her liver and that she needs to lose weight.

For every answer, I have another question, about the causes and time frame, another area of her body that’s known pain.

When I get to her teeth, she stops me. “I don’t want to talk about all the ways I’m falling apart. Can we just spend time together?”

She’ll be fine if the subject dissolves here and now, but I’ll be as broken up as her if I don’t know everything I need to know in order to put her back together. Mom has a habit of staying away from truths that threaten her peace, even if she has to pay for it later. But haven’t we put things off too long as it is?

She puts in a Chipotle order for us and we run into the grocery store to get a few snacks for the week. I notice how rushed she is while we’re in the store. 

“You struggle to bathe. I struggle to go grocery shopping,” she says.

Though we both deal with depression, baths are a therapeutic ritual for women in my family. Christmas is just an exchange of candles, bath bombs, essential oils, and Epsom salts for the year. Cooking is my therapeutic ritual.

Mom has never been domestic. My childhood consisted mainly of TV dinners or whatever could be thrown together from the fridge or cupboards. The only consistent cleaning that happened was the bathtub.

When we arrive at her apartment, it’s cluttered with clothes on unused furniture and shoeboxes under her bed. When I go to the guest bedroom, I can’t close the door because of the sneakers flooding the floor. In an effort not to get overwhelmed, I focus on creating a clear path to walk through.

“Have you thought of retiring your worn shoes and donating the salvageable ones?” I ask.

“I just need to get a few more totes to organize them,” mom reasons, “I already got rid of stuff before I moved here.”

“It looks like you’ve bought back what you gave away.”

“Now why would you come here of all places saying things that make sense?” she jokes.

“I didn’t realize I was speaking to Alice in Wonderland.”

I’ve gained weight over the last month from lack of activity and eating out. There are several writing deadlines coming up that I’ve avoided until the last two weeks. The first several days of my visit, I’m glued to the dining room seat trying to outline and write, massaging language in some areas and trying to just get the story down in others. I go to 2-3 gym classes a week with mom, but other than that I don’t move, except to places I think my focus will sharpen such as the library, a park, places without wifi so I can stay off social media.

Mom brings home fast food for breakfast and dinner, usually sandwiches and some form of potato. My stomach expands and sits in my lap. I’m constipated; I forget to drink water. I ask my mom once daily when we’ll go grocery shopping. She answers, then it never happens. But I notice she makes pit stops to the store after getting off work to pick up an item or two, lemons and limes, chips, trail mix. Periodically I see her lying in bed staring up at the wall, phone in hand, the NBA playoffs on the TV.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

She looks down at her toes. “I’m just disappointed in myself for regaining this weight.”

So am I, I think of my own body. I’m not obese and can still hide my gut under my clothes, but I see the way this has played out over time for most of my family. The gradual weight gain over the years, food treated like a lover in their loneliest moments, then the struggle to go upstairs or take a fifteen-minute walk, and the joint pain, more than just the aches of aging. Many of them sleep with CPAP machines. The choices they want to make get further away. By the weekend, I have asked my mom five times about going to the store.

“After the playoffs,” she says, rolling her eyes.

“What time is that?” I ask.

“Six.”

When it’s time, she reluctantly rolls out of bed. After twenty minutes in the store, she asks if I’m almost done. She leans on the cart lethargically, her eyes vacant. It’s my first time seeing her like this. We aren’t wandering aimlessly and I am the one gathering food. If she can go to the gym, why is the store so overbearing? I ask if it’s the people and she shrugs. “All I know is I’m ready to go.”

The clutter of the apartment is heavy and so are the mice it hides. One night as I watch TV in her room, I hear squeaking coming from her closet. At first, I think it’s just the creaks of an old house or my mind playing tricks, but then a brown lump skitters out the door. Laying on mom’s bed I shift over to peek in her closet. There are a few droppings and shreds of her shoeboxes I haven’t seen before. I write to her on Facebook messenger.

Mom: Oh yea I forgot to tell you about them.

Me: Why don’t you tell your landlord so he can get an exterminator?

Mom: Because I already know he’s gonna tell me to clean the house.

Me: Can we at least get some traps tomorrow? 

Mom: Sure. But there are already some around the house. Just sleep in my bed.

I look around the apartment and see a trap under the kitchen sink and one shoved in the crevice of the door. I put it outside her room and make sure all the zippers on my suitcase are closed. Later that morning I wake up to my mother using a snow shovel to scoop a trapped mouse into a trash bag. For the next several days I remind her of the traps, to no avail.

Mom: Just throw something at the wall. That usually scares them away.

Me: Aren’t mice your biggest fear?

Mom: No, it’s rats.

Me: I just need you to know this isn’t normal.

Mom: You don’t think other people get mice?

Since I’m already stressed about my writing deadlines and weight gain, I try to accept the things I can’t change around her apartment. The essay I’m working on has gone up to ten thousand words and still isn’t finished. I also start a short story and finish the first scene, but as I look online, I see breaking news. A mass shooting has taken place at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, where most of my family lives. My phone keeps lighting up from the family chat with questions of who checked in with who, who has confirmed their safety, and who has yet to. Eventually the perpetrator’s picture is released along with his motives. He targeted black people. Eighteen years old and already so filled with hate.

It happens on Jefferson Avenue, a street that I and many of my family members have traveled down. It scares me to see violence closer than I ever have before, in a place where people I love reside. To be in suspense about who is safe. How the very errands I beg my mother to run outside the house have become dangerous. The next time we go to Wegmans, my gut clenches as white men pass us by. What parts of their minds are hidden by their faces? Which are rejoicing or waiting for the next chance to hunt us? I feel ridiculous and ignorant for my fear, but can’t make it go away. All I can think about is which exits are closest, if mom and I will be close enough to grab each other and run. Are we enough to protect each other?

I try so hard to lose myself in my writing, the one thing I think I have control over, but find even that can’t consume me. I keep losing track of words and ideas between racing thoughts of the violence that happened, wondering if the stories I’m trying to tell matter if my safety doesn’t. I no longer find the words, I’ve run out of them, and don’t know how to make them pretty in the face of so much ugliness. Eventually I admit defeat, missing three deadlines in a row. There’s no guilt, just fatigue and relief, relief that I am okay with failing, with a break, with being defined by other parts of myself outside of writing. It’s okay to just exist for a while.

For the next few days I am a vegetable, drowning out thoughts with Disney movies. I get back to exercise, books, and walks. Lose a few pounds. My skin clears a bit. I avoid conversations that are the equivalent of doom scrolling. Yes, I hear updates on the shooting, but I can’t allow myself to remain close to the subject for too long, otherwise, I lose the will to get up, engage in conversation, or go anywhere at all. Since the goal of my trip is to see my mother and to enjoy as much of it as I can, I go back to planning things for us to do. It’s been years since we went to the Strong Museum of Play and the butterfly exhibit.

After walking for fifteen minutes to the museum my mom is already fatigued. We sit in different sections of the museum, watching kids run around, observing new sections they’ve added over the years, The Berenstain Bears, Mystery Alley, the sci-fi/fantasy room, and  superheroes’ corner. “I’ll need to eat soon,” she tells me. When we first visited the butterflies over a decade ago, I was jittery, jumping at the flash of any wing or color that brushed past. So I go in to prove that I’ve mellowed out over the years and can handle an insect landing on my shoulder.

We watch the quail nest near the stone bridge, try to find the chameleon crawling in its tree, and the toucan resting in its perch. It’s nice to have a moment of color and peace as mom and I identify the different butterflies by their patterns. She’s comforted, and gradually begins to chat, sharing news about my older brother and her health.

When we leave the museum, she tells me her doctor called. “He said there’s inflammation of my liver.”

We’re silent as we pass a happy, young family on their way into the museum before she tells me it’s not due to alcoholism. I believe her and yet I remember the vodka that her landlord found by her body along with empty pill bottles, how Nana got rid of the alcohol around the apartment when she arrived back in October 2020. Mom still has vodka in her closet. I’m grateful it’s full and collecting dust, but I also wonder why it’s there in the first place. I think about the meds mom had abused over the years. Just over the counter ones, she rationalizes. Her nickname was Pharmacy Queen, which was funny until she overdosed. Pills were like background noise that I never really paid attention to.

On several occasions mom speaks jokingly of her death. “Don’t go through any trouble for me. When I’m ready to go, we’ll have a goodbye barbeque, then I’ll load up on my meds and once it’s over, you can bury me in the backyard.” Though it is dark and unfair of her to say, it’s funny she thinks there’ll be a backyard to bury her in since she’s never owned a house. But now that she’s tried to put some of her plan into action, I wonder if her body is making her pay for it. If the meds that were meant to free her, are slowly doing what she’d hoped would be quick—killing her.

I ask if her current medication is the problem, but she doesn’t know and neither does her doctor. What is the point of expertise when there is never enough information? The wait is never over and there is no sure way to save a loved one. Both the answers and questions fail me when I need them most. Mom seems less interested in the results and I don’t have the willpower to ask why.

Once upon a time, I thought being a nurse meant being nurturing, responsible, and patient. As a child, I think these traits come naturally to women, that they can see as much into the dying as they can the living because they sense need all the same. Essentially, I thought that nurses made better mothers. But my mom shows me that warmth isn’t necessary for efficiency, and many days the latter isn’t even sustainable. Being a nurse isn’t synonymous with eliminating threats or creating safe domains. Sometimes it’s just the job that presents itself, vast enough to fall into and get lost in. Like motherhood. They are people who can add to pain as much as they can take it away. Maybe there are dreams of witnessing and caring for life, but it is never enough to build a new mind and body for my mother.

I sleep in her bed the rest of my visit, usually waking to see her on the other side of me, lightly snoring, a documentary on baby animals playing in the background. Every time I watch her sleep, I see myself in her: The years we spend apart as much as our years together, a part of me that I don’t want to lose hope in. We both still have futures with many directions to turn. I try to convince myself that fear is a choice, that our bodies are safe outside of our bed, our home, our dreams. There’s no point in letting white terrorists, the neighborhood, or health scares control me when I have no control over them. Still, it’s hard to get up and go about my day, for reasons that are as heavy in me as they are in the world. Isn’t that how depression works?

Each morning I pray for her to be the nurse or mother she’s never been to herself, or to me. That she’ll tell me everything so we can prepare for life, because death is unacceptable. I tell God what he already knows. I don’t have the community or energy to help fill the void that her loss would bring. Death would leave me somewhere between want and need, stuck and incomplete. Left with bits of her shrapnel in me. The responsible thing for her to do is wait, to grant more moments for me to be mad at her and heal, for me to become an adult with a steady income, married, and finish the book she says she won’t read, even though I know she will. She needs to wait until I have a life that will hold me when she’s gone.

I go back to sleep to the sound of her breathing. The mice are quiet in the morning. Daylight is the only thing that subdues them. I wonder if they sense she needs rest. Other mornings I get up and try to clean somewhere around the house, waiting to feel safe enough for words and sentences and stories to return to my head. The last day of my trip, mom tells me to wake her to say goodbye before I go to the airport. The playoffs are still going on in the background. I watch the game from the doorway, waiting longer than I should to wake her, wondering if she ever dreams of memories for us to make, like I do, ones where we’re soft and protected at the same time.