Mother, Mother
It’s been fifteen years since my mother succumbed to lung cancer. Cigarettes were her vice. Two and a half packs a day for thirty years. When she died she was just 47 lbs.
Everyone loved my mother. She was a perfect angel to all who knew her. Kind, benevolent, trustworthy - she was a girl scout. Funny, silly, a middle-aged child.
Why then do I have so many nightmares about her? Why was I so shy when she was alive, and only came out of my shell when she was gone? Sure, I fucked up a lot of my life after her death, and my father’s a few years later. But I can’t help but wonder if I would be as strong, interesting and successful as I am today had she given up her habit and lived to see me into my twenties. Or would I be doing as all my friends are beginning to do, and turning into my mother?
The dynamic of a mother-daughter relationship is a strange one. Every one is different. Some mothers and daughters are remarkably alike in looks, interest and temperament. Others are like night and day. My mother and I weren’t at each other’s throats, but we were quite opposite. I was my father’s child - smart and sharp and acerbic. I was dramatic, a diva at a young age. My mother was a tomboy in jeans who would entertain the kids (my friends and I) by building a campfire or teaching us to climb trees. She could shoot. I could walk in heels. She was a backwoods girl who said “eh” a lot. I read my first Tolstoy at 11. When she died, I felt like I could breathe.
My father, on the other hand, was lost without her. Within five years, he drank himself to death. Saying it that way makes it sound so ugly - and it was, don’t get me wrong. But time and distance have a way of letting you blur the edges, and now I prefer to say that he died of a broken heart. Because he did. The day we buried my mother, we left him behind in her grave.
Over and over he would play Honey, and cry silently, empty bottle on the table and tears streaming down his cheeks from his glassy bloodshot eyes. I’ve never seen any man of any age so in love with a woman that he willed his heart to stop beating for her. Terrifying as it was, it was also beautiful. Fifteen years ago today, he lost Honey.
