Like my father's death, my mother's was a relief, though for different reasons. My mother had been slowly, and dramatically, as was her nature, killing herself for years. She'd always been a drinker, but she really committed to it after my dad died. His death either caused such a serious depression that she had to self-medicate to the point of oblivion, or it gave her the permission she'd been waiting for to throw everything away.
My father died while I was in the middle of high school, and by the end of my senior year, my mother was drinking hard. In college, she was calling me as I boarded the bus home for Thanksgiving to warn me that she was wasted, and after finding her slumped over a chair in our dark kitchen, I would have to rope my poor ex-boyfriend into helping me get her to the emergency room. Over the following years she only got worse, despite multiple trips to detox, five weeks at Betty Ford, and almost one year of sobriety. She was once visiting an old professor friend at Tufts, and she got so drunk and wild that he had to call the campus police to get rid of her — and to get back at him, she stripped naked so the police would "really have something to see." She showed up to visit me in California with a face so bruised from an accident she didn't remember having that multiple people asked if she'd just had brain surgery. She had me in a constant state of anxiety; I always worried that she was going to fall down the stairs, die helplessly, and not be found for weeks. My sister and I eventually hired home health-care workers to look after her a few days a week, which was good for all of us, but many of them quit because taking care of her was just too depressing.
After my mother died, people always wanted to know how I was doing, and I always said that I wasn't sad for myself, but that I was so, so sad for her. I was, and am, sad for her — sad that she went from being an intelligent, successful, and charismatic woman to someone who drank so much that she often shit on the floor. But was I sad that my mother, who drank so much that she often shit on the floor, was now gone? Not really. I was 16 years older, but I was right back to where I was when my father died. I felt the exact same way, and I didn't feel the exact same things.
In the weeks following my mother's death, my friends, some of whom had been around for my dad's death as well, came over to my Brooklyn apartment one by one to make me dinner on the nights my boyfriend was working late, I guess because I wasn't supposed to be able to feed myself. They would come and cook and look at me with probing eyes and open arms, ready for me to say or do whatever I needed — but all I could do was scarf down their sautéed cod and stare back and think, Why aren't I as sad as I'm supposed to be? (...)
I began my work in my mother's study, which had become a haphazard storage room for everything from mismatched shoes to years of unopened mail. I spent days bagging sweaters for Goodwill and organizing the incredible amount of clip-on earrings and pantyhose she'd purchased from Filene's Basement decades before and never worn. I'd anticipated this chore for years, and though it was surreal to finally be doing it, it was also calming.
Once I moved beyond her clothes and crappy jewelry, I got into her more personal belongings, her file cabinets, battered shoe boxes stuffed with papers, and trunks full of undated slides and photographs that my father, an accomplished photographer, left behind years ago. This was quiet, intimate territory, and I didn't know how to approach or navigate it. I certainly wasn't prepared for what I would soon discover: that in the bundles of faded telegrams, handwritten love letters, old faxes, and diaries abandoned after only a few pages, my mother had left me a window into both of my parents and their complicated marriage. Even a superficial scan of these artifacts revealed that my parents had an entirely different relationship than I'd assumed, and were, in many ways, profoundly different people than I'd long ago decided they were.
For days I sat in my mother's filthy study, surrounded by the relics of my parents' love, trying to take in their lives and thinking, I don't know these people at all. And for the first time, I wanted to.
by Anya Yurchyshyn, BuzzFeed | Read more:
Photo: uncredited
