9 years of goodbyes. or 10, if you count the first one. or 9 again if you notice the year i didn't say anything.

Eulogies for my Mother: 

August 30, 2011, the day before my mother died:

It is crazy how quickly something can feel normal, how quickly we can adjust. For now, my life is right here, in this quiet room, reading and listening to her breath.

September 1, 2011, the day after my mother died:

my momma died last night. surrounded by love and in the room where her grandson was born. it was a hard journey getting there but in the end, she had peace.

2012

One year ago my mom died. She liked Jerry Garcia, football, bad tv, warm coffee, jack, jack, jack and buying things for jack, ice cream bars, gin and tonics, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Eugene, vanilla and lavender, petting my hair, Anderson cooper, tasty snacks, making fun of my friends, loving my friends, loving her friends, being alone, calling me every day to tell me everything she thought of or saw or wanted to do. She loved me more than anyone and I miss her every single day.

2013

2 years ago today I said goodbye to my momma. I miss her so, so much.

2014

2015

4 years ago my mother died in the same room that my sons were born in. Her last meal was on my oldest son's fourth birthday. (Spaghetti and chocolate cake.) She's been gone for as much of his life as she was here for. He talks about her but he doesn't really remember her anymore. They were so close. She died just a few days before I found out that Milo was going to be a boy. 

Before she died she called her sister and said "I have good news and bad news. The good news is that Becky is having a baby! The bad news is that I'm dying."

She would be so happy here with us now, living in Eugene, tom working for the fair, Jack staying up too late reading, Milo the powerhouse charmer hulk smashing things. She was strange sometimes and wasn't perfect and we drove each other nuts but I sure do miss her. 

Today I ate donettes and watch bad TV in her honor.

2016

Five years ago my mom died from metastatic breast cancer that spread to her brain. 

Her last meal was spaghetti and chocolate cake for jack's 4th birthday. Now jack is nine and i have another 4-year-old that was only just a tiny thing in my belly then, not even kicking. She never got to meet him but she would have loved him.

My mom was weird. She loved strongly but she was picky in who she chose to love. She said and did weird shit and embarrassed the hell out of me for most of my life. Too hippie, too straight, too... crazy. 

She was young once. She and her friends had contests to see who could sew the shortest skirt the night before work and then compared them the next morning. Their boss loved that competition.

She went to Woodstock but wouldn't talk about it. 

She loved Jerry Garcia and Wayne Dyer and Blue-Green Algae. 

She went to England in a long green paisley dress to meet her guru. I still have that dress in a box somewhere along with her patched bellbottoms and her tie-dye Oregon ducks t-shirts.

She didn't wear a bra or shave her legs for as long as I could remember. She never wore make-up and couldn't cook anything except spaghetti. And tuna noodle casserole and potato corn chowder that I still crave and never get quite right.

She left me alone a lot. She was a working single mom who went to school at night, for a while when I was in middle school and she was at the community college we had the same math teacher. We studied together that semester.

I remember the day I realized she had an imagination. We were flying to new jersey to see her family and she looked out the window and told me she thought the clouds looked like a world of their own, cities and trees all floating and white in the sky. She never said things like that.

My mom's home was a mess. she was so embarrassed about it but couldn't do anything about it. I was compulsively tidy for years to make up for it but now I think I understand it a little better. Sometimes there is too much inside your head to be able to handle what is around you.

she would spend days without leaving her house, her friends were her shows.

But years before that she had good friends, she would leave me with a sitter, or babysitting other kids, and they would watch football games and drink Coors light. permed hair up high and white shirts tucked into high waisted jeans.

She loved her friends with everything in her.

And then she loved my baby with a love that I didn't know was possible. he is a better person for that love. Deep inside he knows he had that and we remind him. We talk about her and he talks about the things that he remembers so that hopefully he won't forget her completely. She wanted so badly to live long enough for him to remember her.

My mom loved me unconditionally. I was awful and good and awful again and she always let me curl up in her bed with her and she fed me cheese-its and watched hgtv and she would pet my head, her hands scratchy and dry from all of her medications.

My mother was always in pain. Even before the drunk driver hit her and pushed her car on 18th and across Chambers and into the gas station parking lot. The doctor gave her pain medication and she never stopped taking it until the days before she died, when the tumor took the pain away.

I understand her pain more now than I did then and I wish so often that I could have found her the help that I have. The help to escape the lies that her mind told her about herself.

But my mother taught me to love beyond that, to love no matter how much pain you are in, no matter how the other person's pain makes them seem unlovable.

I meant to have her obituary written by now, for the fifth anniversary of her death. I wanted it printed in the paper in the town that she loved. Maybe I'll have it done by next year but for now, this will have to do.

That was my mother. I miss her every goddamn day and I always will. Time doesn't take away the grief but it gets easier to live with. 

I'll spend this day thinking of her, in this town where she taught me to be who I am. I'll take my children to the places that she took me and I will tell them about her, just a little bit, and I'll probably sound just like her once in a while too and I won't be embarrassed about that.

2018

Momma died 7 years ago today. She was my home and I miss her every day.

2019

Eight years ago today my beautiful mother, 60 years old at the time, died from a brain tumor that had metastasized from the cancer in her breast. 
Her last meal was chocolate cake for Jack’s 4th birthday. I tend to celebrate her with photos of her youth, or at the very least with the more flattering photos before she got really sick. But the last days are a beautiful part of her story too. I sat with her for 6 days listening to her breath, waiting with the lights out for death to come and take her from the darkness. 
Today I got a new job. I’ll be working full time and raising my children alone just a few blocks from where my mother did the same thing. I have so many questions for her, so many things to tell her, but then I easily go back to that quiet room and the sound of her breathing.
This photo is not her youth, it’s not her the way many people saw her, but it is beautiful to me. It is my strong mother, holding onto life so that she could be there to celebrate her grandson’s fourth birthday. She made it to that day because love was her superpower.