Imagining My Mother’s Death - Amelia Clare Wright

My mom went to a tarot card reader recently. We are the kind of people, my mom and I, who believe in spirit and universe and a limited understanding of quantum physics as proof of mystical acts. So when the tarot card reader tells her that she has at least ten more years, I want to believe it. Of course I want to believe it. But there are too many factors involved.

Science breathing down my neck.

On average, only half of the people with ovarian cancer live to see five years later. My mom told me not to look that up. That means that my mom might not (likely won’t) live to see me have the child that her tarot reader predicted for me. She’s knitting baby hats for my sibling’s and my imaginary children now, “just in case.”

Just in case; it rings like an echo in a hollowed-out pit.

On the phone, her voice rings clear as if she were sitting right next to me. My mom’s superpower: always making herself heard. She can’t have always had this super power, but when I rummage through my memories of her, I will always find a sort of authoritative fluency: persuasive and unflinching. As I mature, I encounter more and more moments in which I cling to her words, devouring their magic. Sometimes enchanting and sometimes formidable, and sometimes and often both, and never were they fleeting; the gravity of them. They anchor in your gut; they provoke emotions of strength or of guilt or of power or the lack thereof.

Last night, she texted me, “I feel like we don’t talk enough.”

I said, “Let’s talk more!”

She reacted with a heart emoji and didn’t further respond.

But then this morning, as I stepped off the train 30 minutes early for class, she texted asking if we could chat for a few: the leak in the roof that needed to get fixed before my parents can put their house on the market; how my dad was getting excited to move, too; my classes and my thesis, both going better than I could have imagined; my boyfriend, Jon. She was surprised the other day when I mentioned we are in an open relationship while he lives in Los Angeles and I finish my studies out in New York City. She wants to talk about it more in depth. I don’t know what she wants to know, so I mention that we tried an open relationship five years ago, our origin story.

“But I fucked that one right up.”

“What’s the story there?” she laughs.

I hesitate. Since the diagnosis, our relationship has been woven together, a vast and yawning cavern now brimming with vulnerabilities and truth. She leaned into the option of smoking weed once she realized the benefits of it for her illness (and for other illnesses, like our quietly shared anxiety, which has also entered the conversation much more frequently). So, there it was: this previously (and, I thought, permanently) condemned point suddenly on the table, suddenly open for discussion, suddenly a shared experience.

And then the floodgates opened, and I found the most honest version of myself: sharing details about other drugs I’ve used and discussing my relationship wins and woes in authentic detail.

Despite all of it: “I don’t know if it’s really a mom-appropriate story.” There are still some secrets between us. She responds in a way that makes me feel that she both understands and is eager to listen anyway. I don’t know if it was her words (which I have forgotten) or her timbre (which still sits in my gut).

“One day you’ll read about it in one of my books, don’t worry,” I say, only half joking.

My nose is tingling suddenly, my eyes stinging as tears balloon behind my lower eyelids.

I know this is a story that I will tell one day, when I figure out why it’s important and learn a language that can properly describe it. How far in the future is that day? I know too much, and I understand all of the implications.

She used to sing to me when I was young. She wrote me songs while she fed me breakfast (“Haaaave some eggs Miss Amelia. Haaave some eggs!”) and kissed me on my forehead after humming lullabies to put me to sleep. Her hands, the piano: the house trembled with her vibrato. When I was old enough, she printed sheet music and let me sing with her. Often it was For Good from Wicked. Entranced by her fingertips stumbling gently across the keys, I was always wishing mine could do the same. I was captivated by her voice: rich and raw, it enveloped me and held me tight. The inside of a cocoon.

When I was born, she quit theater in favor of family.

When I was very young, she was a doula. She sat with soon-to-be mothers in their most vulnerable state, guided their breath and bodies through agony and into bliss.

When I was five, she went back to school to become a midwife. She graduated from Johns Hopkins, then from Georgetown.

On my tenth birthday, she was working at the hospital. She called my dad, and I sat on the stairs listening. My dad handed me the phone, finally. She asked if I was all ready for bed. Hair wet, teeth brushed, pajamas on. She told me that she was so sorry she wasn’t there for my birthday. The ache was audible, heavy in her lungs. But I could hear her smile: “I delivered my first baby today.” I beamed with her, a city between us, ecstatic that a new life shared my birthday, that she had curated magic in the shape of mother, this time entirely on her own. She knew I wasn’t upset, that I understood the work she had put in for this moment. At least I hope she knew.

My mom loves hydrangeas and her job. She rolls her eyes at people who walk slowly, who take up the whole sidewalk, who get off an escalator and then stand still directly in front of it. Basically: my mom values spatial awareness. She’s a New Yorker at heart. Despite growing up in Baltimore, so am I. My mom is allergic to onions and has a box of artisan soaps in her bathroom that never seem to get used, just collected, but I imagine her smelling them every day as an act of self-care. She has short, dark hair with gray streaks in it, but she used to dye it red. My mom’s name is Erin, and her family is from Ireland. One time she did one of those 23 and me things and sent me the results saying, “Well, guess I’m just white.” She sometimes yells when she gets upset, and she’s not great at apologies. Which is all the more infuriating when I have to admit that she’s usually right anyway.

The fights are all a blur of emotion; a temporarily unconscious mind, all body with my burning cheeks and clenched fists and strained voice.

We are at a swim meet, and I’m on the roster for a butterfly race. I have to do some detective work to pry this story out of the grip of a fragmented memory. I must have been eleven or so because I hadn’t yet realized that I hated swimming and subsequently (and immediately) quit. She said something about my “tone” or my “attitude” and I wanted to literally punch her in the face, which manifested as tears, so I walked away with her yelling after me. This meet was at the other team’s pool; I didn’t know where to go to effectively hide myself and my rage and my tears. Wandering, avoiding her irritated gaze. The scraps of memory that I could have ever used to piece together context or language disappeared within a day or two.

Another memory, really an amalgam of a dozen memories in one: I am standing on a step leading down to the basement; she is across the counter from me in the kitchen so that the effect is that she is almost my height. I was taller than my mom by the time I was eleven, but now the playing field felt equal, and I felt small. She is yelling at me for something and I am screaming at her for something else. I remember my voice breaking as the hot tears came involuntarily. Angry tears. Misunderstood tears. Lonely tears.

I don’t know when the fighting started, and I don’t know when it stopped. I’m just glad it did—that is, I’m glad it stopped, but I’m glad it happened, too. We learned: more understanding and more ways to tell each other about what we needed and what we hated. More opportunities to become what we are now.

I was never a child to imagine her wedding. I played with dolls and mothered dozens of them at once, but the wedding part and the marriage part for me was always glossed over. My best friend and an imaginary rescue mission were all I needed.

I started thinking about my wedding when I dated my first serious boyfriend in college. We were convinced we were going to get married and be together until the end of time, which is just another way of saying that I was eighteen and in a messy bind of love and obsession, seeking safety. But so, once in a while, the thought would cross my mind, “What would our wedding look like?”

It turns out, I just love weddings. I don’t even want one. But I cry every time someone gets engaged or married, in real life or on screen. I love scrolling through Pinterest boards of wedding dresses, picturing how they might look on my body, where the fabric falls and where it would cling. I love flower bouquets and artful cakes and diamond rings. I love the little things that people think to do at weddings like framing your vows with pressed flowers from the bouquet, lighters with the couple’s names on them, disposable cameras for guests to capture the night, too. All these things that I never would have admitted to looking at a few years ago, so obsessed with appearing hardened.

In my inner world, the dresses are interchangeable and the bouquet has different flowers upon each new imagining. There are some things that are set in stone for me; I already know who our photographer would be. Nonnegotiable: my mom bound to one arm, my dad to the other. I’d prefer not to walk down the aisle at all ever under any circumstances, but when fantasy calls, I am compelled to answer.

It’s been years since the diagnosis, years of remission. Still, my visions pause, always at the same moment:

I look down;

my right arm is empty;

my mom isn’t here.

It creeps up on me like this often. Abruptly, unexpectedly, and startlingly. Like a police car pulling up to a great party and commanding us to disperse. I don’t intend to picture her gone; she disappears out from under me.

I wanted my kids to know their grandmother because I never really did; or, if I’m being honest, because I never really wanted to. Did you catch that involuntary past tense? Let me revise: I want my kids to know their grandmother, and I want them to enjoy and recognize the privilege of treasuring her.

We used to travel from Baltimore to upstate New York every Christmas day to see my mom’s grandfather. He and his deceased wife basically raised my mom. Pop died when I was eight. I have some memories of him, like the way his house smelled like old books, and how he bought me a new coat every Christmas, and his raspy, gentle tone of voice. I can imagine him saying anything, and sometimes it enters my head as his voice and sometimes it enters as my mom imitating his voice. She’s always telling me how Pop used to turn his hearing aid off when my grandmother “got going.” After he died, we didn’t drive to New York anymore.

My dad’s side lives in Texas. I have one memory of ever visiting: I was younger than five, I slept on a water bed, and I cried all night because it was so hot. I think my cousin came to Baltimore once, though I don’t remember (or, possibly, never knew) which one.

My family has always, in my perspective, consisted only of my mom, my dad, my sibling, and whatever four to seven pets we had at any given moment. Plus, of course, my godmother and godfather, but even they lived far enough away that I didn’t get to see them as often as I would have liked.

This is all to say that my mom is my everything. When she is gone, there is no motherly figure to take her place. My mom is my everything.

Journal Entries or Things I Could Only Admit to Myself:

April 13, 2021

this sentence keeps looping through my head: “I was 23 when my mom died of cancer.”

I really do not want my mom to die of cancer.

I am scared. I am scared to admit I’m scared.

April 21, 2021

Tomorrow is mom’s surgery.

I’m scared she’s gonna die.

I’m scared if she does die, I’ll have manifested it.

April 22, 2021

My mom is alive.

(My mom has cancer.)

~

In March, she had to go into surgery to have a tumor removed. They said that the chances it was cancer were low based on the tests, but the size of the tumor meant they needed to remove it. My lungs all bunched up. I thought she was going to die because I had approached the end of my journal and I felt that was a metaphor for the end of her life, the end of our relationship. (My brain is most imaginative when it is offered the opportunity to use fear as fuel.)

My mom received special treatment because of her job. A practicing midwife and a teacher at Johns Hopkins, where she was treated, meant that she was, essentially, a VIP. The doctors opened her up for the biopsy and found cancer everywhere, her uterus and ovaries, her colon and intestines.

Tears in my gut, swelling my organs, dripping down my throat and taking my voice. The doctors stood in the operating room for hours longer than planned, raising my blood pressure every minute there was no news. “No news is good news,” said one of my best friends over text as I walked home from the gym approaching hour four of the surgery.

They scraped her clean, every inch. I have suspicions that the doctors would not have stood there for seven hours if they didn’t know the woman these insides belonged to. It was only supposed to have been a two-hour surgery.

My mom kept trying to show everyone her scar. I’ll admit, it was pretty cool. Red and swollen all the way from the bottom of her ribcage down to below where she pulled the top of her pants down. Recently, she mentioned that she wanted to get her scar tattooed over gold in replication of the Japanese art of Kintsugi—when something breaks, they use gold lacquer to repair it, making the object’s brokenness into an even more beautiful piece of art instead of something to disguise.

After the surgery, the standard cancer things happened where she went to chemo and lost all her hair and fainted a lot and couldn’t walk up or down the stairs of our four-floor rowhouse in Baltimore City.

I wasn’t there. I was in school in New York City, and so I didn’t see these things happen. But I heard about them two to twenty-four hours later. Or maybe I didn’t hear about some at all. Maybe the pain became so ordinary that it didn’t seem worth relaying each and every heartbreaking, jaw-clenching tale. Guilt all on my insides; why didn’t I go home?

I think it might have broken me.

What I do know is that she was admitted, alone, four times for chemo-related complications. She told me that a resident who she thought didn’t care for her was treating her one day, and, as he went to leave the room, he said, “Erin, I hope you know what an honor and a privilege it is for all of us to take care of you.” I can imagine her blush, the shake of her head, the widening of her eyes. Maybe a wet welling up as she tells him to leave the room “immediately” before she starts “bawling.” (That last part is true. That last part she told me.)

“The residents always did their best to make sure I didn’t feel lonely.”

(Thank you isn’t enough.)

But she survived it. September 15, 2021 was her last day of chemo.

After the chemo, she was put on a medication whose name I can never remember, and I probably couldn’t spell it anyway. Something with an L. The something with an L drug made her nearly as miserable as the chemo did. I went home for Christmas in 2022, a year after her chemo had ended. My mom was nauseous and light-headed. She couldn’t make Christmas dinner, and she cried, and my dad asked my sibling and I to come upstairs and tell her it was okay that she rest because she was beating herself up over it. And of course it was okay. Of course we didn’t mind eating Christmas dinner the next day when her best friend, Megan, was able to come over and cook the meal for us.

Of course it was okay, but it also made me cry.

Who was going to cook for us on Christmas when she’s gone?

~

My mom is the type of woman who kicks the palliative care team out of her hospital room. An attending, a resident, and a student came in (I promise this isn’t the start of a joke.) and said how sorry they were for the diagnosis, terrible shock, blah blah. Then they asked if she had her will all set. My mom replied, “I don’t even know my staging yet.” (It would be 3-C, one notch below stage 4.) What my mom says she said was this: “Look. I know it’s your job to see every patient, but I’m not in a place to talk about this. I’m not dying. You need to fucking leave.” Sounds like her: mostly respectful but with a little bit of spice.

One of her other friends is a lawyer, and as soon as my mom was home, he came by to help her write her and my dad’s wills. My mom will often say things off-hand about how this or that is mine when she’s gone. I have forgotten every item she’s ever said this about because I don’t really want to think about it. I’d rather have my mom than some ring, no matter how special.

~

When my mom was going through chemo I listened a lot to The Chain by Ingrid Michaelson. It’s a breakup song that starts like this:

The sky looks pissedThe wind talks backMy bones are shifting in my skinAnd you my love are gone

My room feels wrongThe bed won't fitI cannot seem to operateAnd you my love are gone

Then there’s a chorus, one more verse, and then the chorus repeats in a round formation, so that there are three parts singing at once, each starting after the person before the completes the first line of the chorus.

My mom and my sibling and I sing this song together in the car a lot. I like taking the second part of the round so that I can hear the echo in front of me and behind me as I trill along to the (admittingly depressing) words. The three of us sang it one night at Cougar Lounge, the karaoke community that my parents and their friends invented and which takes place every other month or so. I’ve asked my mom for the video of this so many times I’ve lost count, but she never sends it. Now she says it never existed.

Recently I’ve taken to singing this song alone in my room and imagining that my mom is the one who is gone. It’s some of the only intentional imagining that I do, though it isn’t even intentional all the time. And you my love are gone.

Sometimes, it’s like if I can only spread the grief out, maybe it’ll hurt less and not all at once. Like I can prepare for what it feels like, and maybe the fact that I was willing to feel it all beforehand means that it will be easier to feel it all after. I don’t think my grief will be lessened after her death, but practicing something makes it easier in the long run, no? Maybe I’m getting better at grief while living in this liminal state between life and death.

My favorite verse of the song goes like this:

I'll never say that I'll never loveBut I don't say a lot of thingsAnd you my love are gone

I sing this verse under my breath and try not to imagine how it would feel to lose a person who made me into myself.

~

It happened when I was fifteen, not even two weeks after I lost my virginity, and my mom took me to a new gynecologist. As mentioned, I know little to nothing about my extended family, so I handed her the forms when I got to the relatives’ medical history section. She filled it out for me; she kept going. She tilted the clipboard towards me, her pen pointing towards a question that read, “Are you sexually active?” For just a moment too long, I paused, trying to decide whether or not to lie. “You can fill out the rest,” she said, handing the clipboard back to me. I remember her tone being rigid, but I also have a feeling that when she turned away, she smirked.

In the car on the way home, she said that she was going to put a basket of condoms in the bathroom so that I would always be able to be safe. She never ended up doing this, thank god. Fifteen-year-old Amelia would have been mortified at her mother knowing how often (or not often) she was having sex. I was rattled in the moment, not knowing what to say, but now I look back and all I can think is “thank you.”

~

On the roof of my Brooklyn apartment building, a few months into my mom’s chemo treatments, I sat with my boyfriend and our friend, Riley, playing the card game We’re Not Really Strangers, which, if you don’t know, is the best way to make someone you love cry, especially when the night possesses the misty promises of city lights and shapes across the river. The game is less of a game and more a series of questions pulled from deck one by one with the intention of growing closer using a sort of uncomfortable vulnerability that always feels to me like a sort of cleansing, a clarity on who I am and what I value.

The question that I pulled was something along the lines of, “Admit something you’re lying about?” And so I told them that I was lying about being “okay,” that I was acting brave, but that it was just that: acting. I admitted for the first time that I was fatally afraid she was going to die. I clutched their embracing bodies with my shaky palms and a stinging in my throat, and I listened to them in a blank sort of way as they told me that, ultimately, it was all going to work out.

I didn’t end up crying, but I didn’t believe them either.

~

I am the kind of person who is blessed with a solid support system. I know that at any point I could talk to my family about this, I could call one of a dozen friends, or I could simply tell my boyfriend how I’m feeling. However, I also have four Aquarius placements, which basically means I would rather implode than admit to having a feeling of any kind. Whether or not you believe that’s a product of the stars is your business, but know that my severe lack of skill in communicating my emotions is a written-in-stone kind of truth. It’s entirely on me that I never did reach out. I know this, but it doesn’t make it any easier to go through it alone.

Jon noted recently that my family is quite macabre about my mother’s prognosis. Myself and my parents and my sibling all make snide jokes about my mom’s death. We talk about it openly and with expectancy. There’s no use hiding it. I told him that we’re “macabre” because it’s the truth.

This was the first time I really let myself show him how scared I am. He held me while I cried, and I told him the statistics that I wasn’t supposed to know. I tried with everything I had to make him understand the severity of the situation, the intensity of my fear.

I sometimes wonder if it’s better to know that she’s going to die soon, or if I should never have Googled it. What’s easier: the knowing or the wondering?

~

Sometimes on a           Saturday morning my sibling and I had to whisper, to keep the volume of the television down, to turn the knob before closing the door just like our dad showed us so that not even the tiniest click would escape. Respecting a mom who worked the night shift meant these things.

It also meant that she would get home at 7:30 in the morning on a weekday and turn right around to drive my sibling and I to school. After working 12 hours overnight. I don’t think that even in my wildest dreams that's something I could accomplish.

~

Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things has been one of my favorite books since I read it in the middle of Covid lockdown in 2020. It reminded me that the lotus flower grows out of mud, that there is beauty and meaning behind every trauma you live through.

Recently, it was turned into a Hulu series, which I never could have dreamed up myself because Tiny Beautiful Things is a book of short but poignant responses to letters written to “Sugar” (an anonymous Cheryl Strayed) asking for advice. The show uses these real responses in each episode combined with two storylines: the life of Clare (a dramatized Cheryl Strayed) as an adult, mother, and wife who is falling apart alongside the life of Clare as a young woman whose own mother gets cancer and dies. It takes my breath away every episode, both because it is so beautifully written, acted, and filmed, but also because I feel like I am looking into my future at times.

Clare is put-together and serious before her mom dies, if a little ungrateful. She’s the first to go to college in the family and wants to be a writer. I see myself in some of these things, in some of her. I’ve been on the episode where her mother dies for three days now. Clare says she’s going to find her brother, and her mom asks her to stay, but she goes anyway. I know they’re going to kill her mother while she’s gone, and I find myself sobbing and yelling (I’m not exaggerating here) at the television, “Don’t go! Do not go!” It hurts me every time I leave my mother’s side. It hurts me knowing I wasn’t there enough. I paused the episode after the scene of Clare leaving and didn’t pick the remote back up for days.

When I finally finished the show, I saw parallels everywhere, drawn from my own dread and fear. What if I’m not with my mom when she dies because I’m stuck across the country in Los Angeles? How could I even think of moving there in the first place? There’s even a scene at the end where the mother version of Clare lays on a blanket with her daughter, and they each conjure up things that make the other person feel better about their situation. They end the scene with mom Clare saying, “I fuckin’ love you.” “I fucking love you too,” replies her daughter.

I’m not saying the exact same thing happened to me, I’m just saying that I had a Tiny Beautiful Things finale moment that was close enough to make me think maybe I should live my life catalyzed by fear. Of course, I couldn’t do that; I am writing this essay in my studio apartment in West Hollywood.

~

My junior year of college, I got a tattoo every month for a year. My mom said I had to stop getting so many tattoos so fast or I was going to “run out of space.” But she wasn’t complaining when I got tattooed for her. I have a black and grey apple on my right shoulder, cut in half so that you can see the pit, which is reminiscent of a vulva. She has a color tree on her calf, pink blossoms contrast with dark bark. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. (I stole this idea from a tattoo artist I had.)

I got my first tattoo when I was fifteen. It’s a stick and poke sun and moon done by a friend from high school. I got it along my bra line so that I could hide it easily from my parents, even in a swim suit. I remember going on college visits and sharing a hotel room with my mom and changing faced in a particular direction or else in the bathroom to avoid letting her see the ink.

My mom didn’t get her first tattoo until she was 49. It’s a canvas of flowers on her shoulder blade. That night in college when I visited home and showed my mom my first tattoo and told her how and when I got it trembled with significance; it felt like the first time I had been really honest with her; it felt like coming clean.

~

Whenever I ask my mom to borrow $50, she always sends me 100.

~

My mom and I like to adventure together. We don’t always have the money to go to exotic places, but she visits me in New York City and buys us tickets to shows I can’t afford and takes me out to dinner, or else we watch movies in my living room and order in. Everything feels like an adventure when I’m with her. She is an adventure herself.

When I was nineteen, we took a huge trip together to Puerto Rico, bonding over photography, fresh coconuts, bewitching jewelry at street fairs. She was impressed with my Spanish, and I fell in love with her determination. We hiked to a waterfall, and she pushed through the pain of her bad knees.

She told me the story recently of when we were in Puerto Rico on March 8th, and some guy catcalled us as we were walking down the street (Spanish words so vulgar I didn’t even recognize some of them), and, apparently, I yelled back at him, also in Spanish, “Happy International Women’s Day, motherfucker!” I have a very vague recollection of this, like an underdeveloped photograph. It was the day I wore my new, yellow jumpsuit, and I had a sort of rare confidence, just touched by the breeze, the sun darkening my shoulders and lightening my hair. I don’t remember yelling at him in Spanish, but my mom remembers having to ask me what it meant, and I believe her.

Every time we went to a bar in Puerto Rico, she let me order a drink, and she ordered one herself. In one bar that doubled as a club at night (blue and purple lights coloring the room), we ordered a drink that came in an actual pineapple and should have probably been shared by an entire group. We get drunk off the sweet nectar of family coming together. And tequila.

~

Before my mom lost her hair, she put teal on the ends. It was the color she wanted, but it also just so happened to be the color that represents ovarian cancer. I thought it was badass to have a mom with colored hair. I think everything she does is badass.

When her hair was teal, I came home to visit for a weekend. My dad had set up a surprise for my mom involving a friend who owned a horse farm: Lauren brought one of her Shetland ponies to our row house in Baltimore.

My mom is obsessed with Shetland ponies. When my family went for a trip to Asheville, we saw one in a large field grazing on some grass. “Little Stump!” my mother christened him. Henceforth, all Shetland ponies have been known as “Little Stump,” and this name has always been shouted only with absolute glee and reverence.

So when Lauren showed up with the pony, my mom could not have been more ecstatic even if she stood on the spot and jumped up and down. She came out the front door and clutched her fists up to her mouth saying, “Ohhhh my god.” We brought our dogs out to meet the pony. There’s a photo of my black pitbull mix nose to nose with the pony, looking surprised as all hell. Seeing my mother’s pure joy made that one of the best trips home I’ve ever taken.

My black pitbull mix died last month, and my parents packed up my childhood home and moved to the suburbs at the end of April. All the familiarity of home is gone. I always said home for me was not about the place but about the people. What do I do when my person is gone, too?

~

Though there was special treatment, my mom also must have had a very different relationship to her cancer prognosis than most other people because of the fact that she’s a doctor. There was no hiding how bad things were. She knew in the folds of her brain the importance of her finishing her chemo rounds, knew what all the numbers meant on her chart, knew the slang and the shorthand that doctors usually use to try to skirt around the patient’s comprehension. She would share things with me like “this number is high – that’s bad” or “this number should be below a 1, and I’m only a .3. That’s amazing!” I liked having someone who knew the facts of the illness tell me what was going on and what it meant. I wasn’t there to talk to the doctors ever, so having one for a mother (even though she is the patient) comforted me. To a degree, of course.

~

When I say my mom got special treatment because of the surgery, this is what I mean: it was April 2021, so hospitals were still pretty much on lockdown. Which meant that my mom had to sit in her hospital bed alone while she woke up groggy from surgery and was told she had ovarian cancer. They tried to get an exception for visitation several times, but they were denied. One of the doctors couldn’t bear it. He said, “I don’t care what you have to do, get him in here, and I don’t want to know the details.” So the nurse manager snuck a wheelchair out to the parking garage. My dad masked up, sat down in the chair, and they walked right past security and into my mom’s room.

Breaking into a hospital to see your sick wife?

Unparallelled.

~

My Tiny, Beautiful Things finale experience happened when I was last home for Christmas. We got drunk the first night, on white wine and with Megan. I had just crawled into bed, satiated and sleepy, preparing to put on a Harry Potter movie and fall asleep, when I heard a knock at the door and a voice pretending to whisper say, “Mia?” My mom cracked the door open and came in. She clambered up onto the bed and made her way to me. I rolled to face the ceiling and held her in my outstretched left arm. Or was it the right?

Memories of dialogue always fail me. What I know is that my temple touched her crown. Her breath warming my chest. I stared at the top of an ashen bookcase with metal netting on the cabinets. I have no idea now what we said, but I know that the implication was “when I’m gone.” I tried not to let her see I was crying, but I know she knew and that’s why she started rubbing my chest with her palm, like I was five years old again and sick or overwhelmed, being rubbed all over with Badger Balm.

It was one of those moments that felt like a still from a movie: like you’re looking from outside yourself and thinking, “I’m going to remember this.” This is the moment my mother and I were closest.

~

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I chose not to tell my mom the story of how I fucked up my open relationship with Jon. How, when my phone died while I was at a party in Allston, I decided to walk in the middle of the night towards downtown when I met some random guy and fucked him on the Charles River esplanade. This was after sitting at a bus stop with several homeless men, one of whom gave me a jacket he stole from TJ Maxx so that I wouldn’t be cold. I could always leave out the part where I snorted a shitload of Adderall, and the detail about how the guy left bruises below my collarbones from massaging me, or the part about how Jon didn’t know where I was until seven in the morning when I came knocking on his door, my underwear caked in dirt. But the crux of the story would still be a manic Amelia doing something dangerous. I never want to make my mom worry; most of my risky behaviors stay hidden from her.

I can’t imagine what her reaction would be if I were to share this story with her personally. I guess I’m sharing it here so that I can stop worrying about if she’ll be around to read about it or not. I worry about if I will become a different person to her after she knows this about me, but I suppose I want my mom to have the chance to love me for who I really am instead of just the parts I think are worthy.

~

I’ve tried a dozen different ways of imagining my mother’s funeral, but none of them seem right. I don’t think about her funeral much, to be honest, because it seems so unreal and foreign and impossible that someone so strong and so loud and so loved could suddenly be so gone. Because it hurts. But on the few occasions that it’s rattled me, I’ve never been able to curate a proper image. They all seem like something she wouldn’t want.

I’ve only been to one funeral: my great-grandfather’s when I was eight years old. I’ve known others who have died, of course, but I never made it to their memorials. The funeral of my Pop was a devastating affair, but, in some ways, very freeing. It was the first time I had been in a place where weeping was openly accepted and even encouraged. I sobbed my way through the speeches, none of which I remember, and then I sobbed more outside in the rain and refused to stand under my dad’s umbrella while the casket was lowered into the deep abyss.

I think my mom would rise from her grave and strangle me personally if her funeral looked like that. When I picture my mom’s funeral, I picture a full bar featuring shots of Tullamore Dew. In fact, I think that she would much prefer an Irish-style funeral. In Ireland, they believe that a funeral should be a celebration of life, not a lament of death.

I don’t know how I would make it through my mother’s funeral without crying. I suppose you can smile while you cry.

~

Writer and neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi says in When Breath Becomes Air, “If the weight of mortality does not grow lighter, does it at least get more familiar?” This is what I’m hoping will happen to my grief. Like I’m practicing for the real thing. Like if I get to really know grief, if I come to understand it, perhaps I can be familiar enough with it that it feels more like a scratch than a cut. Familiarity breeds a lack of attention, and maybe that’s all I need to lessen grief.

~

If grief came ziplocked in a hierarchy of severity, the death of my mother would be stacked on the very top, making it seem like all the heartbreak I’ve felt before was inconsequential, insignificant. I use the memories of all these other heartbreaks now as a sort of barometer, episodes heightened by my imagination until they are exaggerated enough to, hopefully, mimic what may happen to me when she’s gone.

Grief is crow-colored; it is crying so hard you find drool dripping down your chin on the rare occasion that you can finally catch your breath enough to take a look at yourself. Sentimental drivel and disjointed despair; overcome with the inability to articulate this pain because grief cannot be contained by question marks and periods: it propels past any sort of barricade, somersaults inside your gut, evades any rational explanation your mind might make. Obscuring it, muddling it, provoking chaos, turmoil, misunderstanding.

The overwhelming ache, the numbness, the shame of isolation, like you should be able to smile; why can’t you smile?

You are not here; you are not you.

Of course, you are here, which makes things even worse, even more complicated because it feels like your life is being lived, slowly and lazily, by someone else, or something else, this sort of fucked up autopilot you succumb to because it’s easier, because it’s the only thing you can think to do. And maybe it really is the only thing you can do.

So your life has been taken over by this feeling of trudging through thick molasses. Helplessly, uselessly. It isn’t often that you’re able to feel anything at all; it’s rare that you’re able to empty the stale air from your lungs and replace it with life. You don’t believe in life.

Grief is gripping your shoulders, steering you away from life with long fingernails and a persistent gait.

You are a thing cavernous and vacant. An empty shell.

This loss, this grief: it turns you into no one.

~

A few years ago, I went to a small town in New Hampshire, the kind where the mountains hug the sides of the roads and everyone eats food that their neighbors grew. I thought of her the whole time—it was the kind of place she took my sibling and I as kids, the kind we detested for its stillness and maturity. Now I was here of my own accord.

In the afternoon, I walked into a local artisan store. On the front table was an array of colorful bar soaps. I gasped and said “Oh! Soap!” in the exact tone my mother would have articulated the sentiment: the widening of the eyes at something pleasant and surprising, the verbal expression transposed an octave higher than a normal pitch, and the searching for someone to share in this simple joy.

That was the moment I knew I had become my mother. I know that most people don’t want to turn into their mothers, but I would be lucky to be half the woman she is.

I suddenly saw in myself the tenacity, the fire, the tenderness in her body and her eyes and her insides. I saw her quirks and downfalls, her interests and intonations. I saw her story spelled out on my body, as if everything I watched her go through had somehow seeped beneath my skin and changed me, too. I am grateful every day to share her genes, to be both proof of and witness to her story. It means I have her for good.

---

Amelia Clare Wright is a recent graduate of Columbia's MFA program in nonfiction creative writing. Her work has appeared in Oyster River Pages, Variant, and The Hunger Journal, among others. Amelia grew up in Baltimore City and now lives in Los Angeles. She is currently working on a memoir about pain and trying to decide if she wants to be a coral reef or a tree when she dies.