Grappling with the Absurdity of Grief

Last week, my husband and I were in a cab. The Bangles’ “Manic Monday” came on the radio. I smile and casually said, “My mom loved this song.”

My husband look at me, eyebrows raised, looking slightly concerned.

For a breath, I was confused. I didn’t understand his look of concern.

And then I realized: though I think of my mom often, I rarely talk about her.

My mom was sick for nearly my entire life. Diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 32, she underwent round after round of chemotherapy, had multiple surgeries to remove tumors, and enrolled in several experimental drug trials for the next thirteen years of her life.

That sounds dramatic — it is dramatic—but it was also part of my daily life. I became used to it the hair loss and the prescription bottles.

It became normal to come across an article while doing research for a biology paper about some sort of new treatment or an old folk remedy while studying for history and immediately say, “Hey, have you heard of this? Could something like this work?” She would write it down and then say, “I’ll ask my oncologist.”

But it also became so normal that I stopped thinking about her being sick. One night in high school, I was out with friends—we had gone to someone’s house to watch a movie and afterward were just aimlessly driving around, wasting gas as we listened to music and talked about nothing—and I got a call from my grandmother. I screened it. She called again. I screened it again. She called a third time and I finally answered. She was furious with me—not because it took her three tries to get me to pick up, but because I wasn’t home.

“I’m out with friends,” I said.

“Your mom has surgery in the morning!” she yelled.

“And what am I supposed to do?” I asked, annoyed by her anger, by the fact that the conversation was happening at all.

She insisted that I come home. I was mad, but I went.

Looking back at it now, I’m horrified. But back then, it was just another tumor, another hospital, another surgery—that had all happened before. I’d lived with those words and realities for so long that it didn’t feel dangerous or scary anymore.

I wasn’t nervous about her surgery.

It didn’t cross my mind to wonder if she was. My mom never let on that she was nervous. Then again, I didn’t ask.

The next day, I went to school while my mom had a golf ball-sized tumor removed from the top of her spine.

The surgery was successful. It never occurred to me that it wouldn’t be.

Even so, the cancer still wasn’t gone.

Eventually—years later—the options available for treatment became more limited.

Eventually, it became clear that there were no more treatments available.

Eventually, it became clear that her body couldn’t fight anymore.

And then one day she gave it permission to stop fighting.

It was fast. It was peaceful. It wasn’t a surprise.

In all honesty, that’s probably the most ideal way to experience the loss of a parent. You know it’s coming, you have time to prepare. You make all the preparations and say all the things. You mourn together.

And yet I still find it hard to talk about her most of the time.

Later that day, I sat on my front porch and read the print version of a conversation between Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift. As they talked about the joy of writing and the freedom pseudonyms can bring, Taylor mentioned that Prince wrote “Manic Monday” using a pseudnym.

I cried for half an hour.

_________

It’s been almost eight years since my mother died.

I wonder constantly what she would be like had she not.

I wonder if she would like The Alienist or if the first season’s storyline about cross-dressing boy prostitutes would have offended her too deeply.

I wonder if she would have been as disappointed in me writing a YA book with characters who have (a lot of safe and consensual) sex as my grandmother was.

I wonder if she would share my love for BTS the way she did for NSYNC and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

_________

One day in 2012, my sister called me.

“You need to come home,” she said.

I told my boss there was a family emergency and I had to leave, right then. I took a cab to LaGuardia. I had just opened a new credit card. I had planned to use it the way I would use a debit card and very responsibly pay off the balance every month in order to build my credit. Instead, I walked up to the American Airlines desk, handed the customer service person that shiny new credit card and told them to book me on the first flight to Northwest Arkansas.

I still don’t know how much it cost. It didn’t matter.

When I landed, my sister met me at the airport and then took me to Firehouse Subs. It was sitting in a booth in a sandwich shop chain that she told me things were bad — worse than I probably could imagine. That the meds had stopped working, that the oncologist was running out of treatment options. They thought she might be gone soon.

I was angry. I couldn’t believe no one had told me before this. I didn’t understand how my family decided they “didn’t want to bother me with the news until they had to.” I couldn’t grasp how me living and working in New York meant that I shouldn’t be privy to information about my mom’s health.

But mostly, I was angry that she hadn’t told me herself. We talked every day. I asked about her health all the time. She just didn’t want me to know.

So I spent the weekend at home, angry and heartbroken. When it was time for me to head back to the airport, I was terrified. I asked my mom if I needed to move home.

She said no.

So I got on the flight back to New York. There was a layover in O’Hare. I got to the gate, sat down, checked my phone. There was a long message from my mom telling me how proud she was of me for following my dreams, for making it in New York, for not letting anything stop me. She promised she’d be more honest with me about her health. But still, she told me not to worry.

When I got done reading the message, I realized I was sobbing.

Loudly.

In that ugly, full-body way that scares people.

But there was nothing I could do about it.

I didn’t even want to do anything about it.

A very kind man wearing a business suit on a Sunday night asked if I wanted his points for an upgrade so that I could “be more comfortable.”

I didn’t take him up on it.

_________

I went home more often. Things started looking up—a new drug trial, positive results. Everyone was surprised.

But a few weeks later, my sister called again.

My mom’s liver was unhealthy. The oncologist said they were out of treatment options.

It was the end. But we didn’t know how long it would be.

I went into work with a letter for my boss because I knew I wouldn’t be able to say it out loud. He told me to go home, that he’d take care of everything with HR.

A friend whose roommate was a flight attendant booked me a hugely discounted flight home.

And then I was home.

The thing I remember most — aside from my mother’s sudden jaundice — is how quiet it was.

Everyone was so quiet.

That unnerved me more than anything else.

_________

I wonder if she would’ve video chatted with me every day after I moved to another country.

I wonder if she would’ve hated the Netflix season of Gilmore Girls, too.

I wonder if she would have foreseen the seating arrangement-fiasco that occurred at my wedding reception that is, to do this day, An Issue, and stopped it.

I wonder if we would’ve ever gone to Paris together.

_________

When I was in college, my mom was taking her step-daughter on a trip to Disney World the week of my birthday and invited me to come, too.

I skipped a test to go.

The two of us waved goodbye to my step-dad and step-sister at the gates of the Magic Kingdom, and then hit every single Disney park in one day. We were exhausted, but we had such a good time that we decided we should do birthday trips every year.

And we did. The next year, we went to Savannah. The year after that, she came to see me in New York.

My mom was a homebody, but she enjoyed traveling. Our trips were always domestic — nothing fancy, often spontaneous, always fun.

As I got older and more curious, I wanted more than road trips—I wanted to see the world. I wanted to be Samantha Brown from the Travel Channel.

My mom went to Paris when she was in high school. A school-sponsored trip to Europe, actually. But while she was in Paris, she got food poisoning while there and spoke zero French, but the tour guide had to take the rest of the students out for their itinerary and left her at the hotel. When she finally got to see Paris the next day, she was enchanted, the way all teenage girls are. She bought a chess set that she thought was beautiful, only to have it stolen from her suitcase on the way home.

But she never blamed Paris for any of that. It was still enchanting and beckoning, even with her terrible experiences.

When I got my first full-time job in New York, I told her once that I thought I should save up so that we could go to London and Paris for a birthday trip. I’d never been. She hadn’t been since she was 17.

She said yes, definitely.

Neither of us talked about her health.

For what would end up being our last birthday trip together, we went back to Orlando, but to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter rather than Disney again. We rode the rollercoasters and drank Butterbeer. We had to take it easier than we did on the day we hit all five Disney parks—she couldn’t push herself that way anymore. But that was fine! We were there! The Harry Potter park was small. We had all day. We could take our time. We had a blast.

As we were driving that weekend, she all of a sudden said that she was so incredibly grateful for our trips.

She sounded less peppy, more emotional than usual.

I told her I was, too. That I couldn’t wait until next year.

She told me then, in a steady voice, that she was always grateful for the extra time she had been given.

I didn’t understand what she meant. So I asked her.

She told me that when she was first diagnosed, she asked God to let her live until my sister and I had both graduated high school.

She asked for eight years.

She thought it was too much.

She didn’t think she would see me graduate from high school, let alone university and graduate school. She didn’t think she’d know me as a young adult. She didn’t think there would be birthday trips.

She asked for eight years.

She got thirteen.

_________

I took my mom to her last oncology appointment.

My mom told the doctor she wasn’t afraid. He told her she shouldn’t be — that it would be like drifting away.

I held it together until I had to go to the reception desk to sign her out.

The staff knew me — they’d watched me grow up. They were all endlessly kind and cheerful and lovely.

They didn’t say anything when I tried to speak and then realized I couldn’t. They didn’t rush me away or try to make me move somewhere else when I started crying so hard I had to grip the edge of the counter so that I wouldn’t collapse.

My mom’s oncologist quietly placed a prescription for anxiety medication on the counter in front of me.

My mom held my hand all the way home.

_________

One day that week, I got a phone call from HR. They were processing the sabbatical paperwork my boss filed for me, but the problem was that I was too junior to be granted a sabbatical — they could only give me unpaid leave.

I didn’t care. I said that was fine even though I had no idea how I was going to pay rent if I wasn’t getting paid. It didn’t matter then. My mother was dying and rent could be figured out later.

And then the woman asked, “When do you think you’ll return?”

It took me several breaths to even comprehend the question. I told her I didn’t know. She pressed for an answer. I started crying. She got flustered — she said she was sorry but that she needed a date. She explained that they needed to hire a temp to do my job while I was gone, and to do that, they needed an idea of when I’d be back.

She didn’t understand that she was asking me to tell her how quickly I thought my mother was going to die.

_________

I wonder how often she would’ve made the trip from Arkansas to Singapore.

I wonder if she, like so many other white women raised in the American South and who had usually voted Republican, would have voted for Donald Trump not just once but twice. (I tell myself she wouldn’t have voted for him twice. I also tell myself it’s probably for the best that I’ll never know.)

I wonder if talking to her would make me feel less terrified about the prospect of starting a family.

I wonder how if she would’ve applauded Harry and Meghan’s decision to step down as full-time royals.

_________

I wrote my mother’s obituary.

I told my step-father that the funeral service should be an actual “celebration of life”. That the message should be lighthearted, uplifting, that the music should be joyful.

I asked that everyone wear colorful clothing.

Afterward, my dad wanted to spend time with me and my sister. He asked what we wanted to do. We wanted to go for ice cream.

The days that followed were slow. Odd. I remember watching a TV show my mom liked and thinking, “She won’t ever know how this show ends,” and then feeling absurd.

I woke up one morning and decided to get a tattoo.

I had told work that I needed a month—and I still had two weeks left. I had actually scheduled a trip to Thailand and Singapore with some friends months and months before, and I had canceled my trip.

But I looked at the calendar and thought, “They only got to Bangkok yesterday, I could still go.”

So I did. And I brought my sister.

We were exhausted. Though we had, effectively, mourned the loss of my mother with my mother, we were both beginning our individual grieving processes. In some ways, the trip was a distraction from that. But in others, it was exactly what we needed—to get away, to go somewhere unfamiliar, to have things to do and experience and eat and see.

When we got back to New York, my sister stayed with me for awhile. At the time I thought it was because weren’t quite sure how to be by ourselves yet. Now I think it was because she thought I would fall into a hole there’d be no way to pull me out of.

When I went back to work, the temp was still there.

Everyone seemed surprised to see me even though I had emailed to tell them when I’d be back.

In a department meeting, the president of our group asked where I went on my “long vacation.”

Because I was exhausted and had yet to understand that grief is incredibly weird, I said, “Well, my mom died and then I went to Southeast Asia,” to a room full of people.

That’s how I discovered that almost no one knew why I had been gone for so long.

Later that day, I returned to my desk to find a bottle of dry shampoo and a sticky note that said, “I’m so sorry things are shitty, here is some dry shampoo.”

I laughed for ten minutes.

It was the best possible sympathy gift.

_________

After you’ve experienced the death of someone significant in your life, you’re often told that it’s perfectly normal to forget the person has died. That it’s perfectly normal to find yourself picking up the phone to call or text them, and that you should be kind to yourself in the horrifying moments of realization that follow.

I never did this.

Never, not once, have I tried to call my mom since the day she died.

I also have never visited her grave, a fact that always shocks the few people I’ve told.

A small part of this is because of geography — she’s buried in a cemetary in Arkansas and I now live in Singapore. But the bigger part is that I’ve never wanted to visit it because she isn’t there. Not really.

I know that many, many people take comfort in visiting a love one’s grave. That tending to it, caring for it, visiting it brings them joy and peace.

But, to me, the moment she died, she was gone. The body wasn’t her any longer — it was just a body. And her grave is just a grave.

This is odd because I have always had such a strong reaction to stories of graves being disturbed.

I particularly remember a day in history class when my teacher mentioned there were so many mummies excavated from pyramids in Egypt that they were sold to 1) wealthy people who thought of them as “exotic curiosities” and trotted them out at dinner parties to impress guests, and 2) train companies to use as fuel. I was outraged in a way that was hard to articulate.

My teacher asked me to stay after class—he tried to understand why I was upset. He gently asked if I had experienced a recent loss. At the time I hadn’t, so I said no—but then couldn’t properly express why I was so angry except to say that it was outrageously disrespectful and I couldn’t believe people could be so horrible. He agreed with me on that, gave me a late slip, and then sent me on my way.

I thought of that day when I visited The British Museum and looked at the rows upon rows of mummies that are on display there. As I walked up and down the rows, I looked at the sarcophagi, at the mummified remains. I tried to pretend I was an archaeologist, I tried to think academically and curiously. But it was no use.

All I could think was that these people’s bodies had been stolen and that they shouldn’t be there, on display for people to ogle.

I felt my chest constrict, my temperature rise — I could tell I was about to have a panic attack.

So I turned around and hightailed it out of the museum and into the grey, chilly London afternoon, fuming as I walked to the Underground.

Recently, my husband and I watched an episode of Unsolved Mysteries that saw an unidentified woman’s body exhumed so that forensic scientists could try to salvage DNA. They marveled at how intact she still was. Though I understood the utility of the exhumation, though I agreed with the decision, I still recoiled, horrified.

So. If I have such intense reactions to the idea of people’s bodies being moved or disturbed after burial, then why do I find the idea of visiting my mother’s grave rather pointless?

I think perhaps the answer lies in what I said after the woman was exhumed. As my skin crawled, I said, “I’d rather be buried in one of those eco-caskets so that I could naturally decompose and become a tree.”

_________

I wonder, most of all, if she would like who I’ve become.