On Grief and Coffee Mugs

Today I was unloading the dishwasher, sorting forks and spoons into their rightful places in the silverware tray, not really thinking about anything in particular–maybe about how unloading the dishwasher is such a boring, adult activity–when something about a mug I was holding made me think of my mom.

I don’t know if it was the colors–an iridescent brown reminiscent of the Tiger’s eye stones in so many of the earrings she wore–or her love for good coffee, or even just that I have countless memories of her unloading the dishwasher, but one moment I was happily going about my day, and the next I’d been slammed with a wall of grief.

These moments happen less and less often, but they’re no less potent when they do. In that moment, as I cupped the mug in my hands, I thought of all of the early morning coffees we could’ve had together. I didn’t drink coffee before she got diagnosed. Of course I didn’t–I was so young. We had no kids. I wasn’t exhausted all the time. Back then–the last version of me that she knew while she was herself–I was still essentially a child. I didn’t need coffee yet.

Sometimes it is difficult for me to remember her as she was–feisty and warm and sharp as a whip and funny as anything–but in that moment with the coffee mug, I remembered her perfectly, and I felt the full force of how utterly, irrevocably terrible it was to lose her. That kind of knowledge is too big to deal with all at once–and when it comes, I can only bear it for a short period. I feels like a weight in my sternum, pressing my collarbones inward, into my lungs and esophagus. Now, as I remember the feeling while writing about it, I can feel it like a ghost on my chest.

Mostly, my grief presents in other, smaller ways–ways that my busy mind can process in the short drive to soccer, or once the kids are finally in bed at night, or while I shampoo my hair in the shower. It might be a pang as I pull on the pair of jeans I stole from her once they stopped fitting her. Or a moment of longing as I think about what she’d say about our three, beautiful kids. Or a sense of guilt every single time I look at the blanket that my dad tried to drape over her legs while she was dying and that I asked he swap out (it was the blanket that I had first wrapped H in after his birth–in that moment I was worried that if it was associated with her death, it would erase the lovely memories of his birth. Now I know: better to have life and death wrapped in one blanket than to wrap myself in this guilt).

Guilt has been an odd part of the grief process. I have always considered myself fairly immune to guilt–my dad loved to use it in a teasing way when I was growing up, and through his jesting and teasing, I learned to largely ignore it. But I have guilt about the oddest things. Things that I know I couldn’t help at the time. About things that I don’t feel like I should feel guilty about.

For example, this past Mother’s Day, I was plagued with a sudden terror that I hadn’t celebrated her last Mother’s Day well enough with her. Had I made sure that Jordan and the kids celebrated her too? Had I gotten her a present? Had we made her any special meal, or spent any special time with her? Did I know it’d be her last? Did I savor it? I can’t remember, and it haunts me.

I do remember she wasn’t eating much at the time. I think we might have made a meal–shrimp tacos, perhaps? And I’m fairly certain I gave her a present, but I can’t remember what.

So much of the time, I think I had this sense that I had already lost her, even while she was still alive. To a certain extent, that was true. I had lost her as she’d used to be. But she was also still there–still there to celebrate. Still there to love with all my heart.

Early on in her disease, I went through a phase where I was angry with her for getting sick. But one of the ways that I know I’m being too hard on myself in my grief is that I did love her with my whole heart, especially at the end. My anger had long faded by the last few years, and I desperately loved this new, sick version of my mother–even as I grieved who she used to be. I cried into her hair while I brushed it in the shower. I could hardly tell her how much I loved her without my throat closing up with tears, but I told her anyway, and sometimes, on good days, she cried with me.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the year after she was officially diagnosed, I wrote an entire novel that was essentially an ode to how much I loved her, while it was simultaneously a practice run for what it would be like to lose her (apologies for any Little Birds spoilers here). On her deathbed, I swallowed my tears, and I read it to her, so that she’d know how very much I loved her. And then, because that wasn’t explicit enough, I also wrote down everything I needed her to know about just how much she meant to me, and I read that to her too.

I loved her so much that it was unbearable to lose her. Only, I had to bear it. I still have to bear it. While unloading the dishwasher, while driving to soccer practice, while shampooing my hair. And so I’ve had to shrink my love down into manageable little pieces, or stop being able to function.

The other day, I was scrolling through old notes, and found this poem, written while she was on hospice. Grief is a big topic, and I’m sure I’ll write about it many more times. So I’ll end with this:

My mother is on hospice.
I sit in the shower and think the words,
over and over
Hoping that they will sink like stones to
my belly
And digest into a reality I can understand
I am a 32-year-old woman and yet I feel like
a child
Beside the social worker, who at
my mother’s age
Tells me that this is her job, but that she speaks from
the heart–
She lost her own mother only several
months ago

Her children are grown up, cooking the
Thanksgiving turkey
While mine scramble onto my lap and away
again like puppies
I wish I could ask my mother: is it normal to feel like a
broken thing
Carrying on for everyone but myself?