I Don't Know How To Write This

How do you write down all of these complicated feelings?

I was looking for a photo to include and felt compelled to include this one, so I did. Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

It’s a quiet Saturday night. My mom is tucked into bed. There was a thunderstorm raging outside. Dark gray clouds, thick humid air, cold wet raindrops. The air inside the house has been lowered to a cool 71 degrees Fahrenheit. I am sitting in a beige recliner which reclines by an electric remote, and sometimes when the remote slides between the seat and the armrest the chair moves by itself. As if it has a mind of its own. As if it has been sitting still for too long and wants to be in a new position. As if, like a person, it wants to stretch its limbs.

It’s always hardest at night. While I have access to streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime and countless library books and podcasts, my thoughts still creep into the forefront of my mind. Thoughts about my mom’s cancer, thoughts about going through the belongings in the house, thoughts that at some time in the somewhat near future, my mom won’t be here anymore.

During the day, my mom is watching TV in her chair. She’s wearing headphones to hear better. In the beginning of the pandemic, she and her partner didn’t wear headphones. I heard the sounds of the television through my bedroom door when I was working remotely at an old job and in the evenings trying to relax. I complained to her so often about turning the volume down, she eventually bought headphones for her and her partner. I could wear the headphones too, of course, but I didn’t. Not really. I always associated the headphones with her and her partner.

Now that she is toward the end of her life, and I am sitting here in silence, I think about all of the things I used to complain about. The loud television. The conversations she’d have on the phone early in the morning while I was trying to work or that would wake me up when I was sleeping. The conversations I’d overhear through the doorways about her cancer diagnosis, about potential cancer treatments, about being in remission from her cancer, about what to do now that her cancer was back and here to stay.

It’s at night when the guilt catches up with me. That I would do anything to go back in time and shake myself and say, “Don’t you realize how good you have it right now?” I told my therapist how bad I felt about these past memories, that I should have done more, and she told me that I didn’t know. I didn’t know my mom was going to be diagnosed with cancer. I didn’t know that the cancer would go into remission, and then shortly after that the cancer would come back. I didn’t know, and she told me to forgive myself.

But it’s hard to forgive myself.

I know that in the future when she is gone there will be a silence in the house and I would give anything to hear her voice on the phone again or hear the too-loud television playing in the family room. I am cataloging these sounds in my mind. Sounds of Mom, in a way. Her voice on the phone. Her laughter. Oooooooh, which is the sound of her recognition of a paperweight from the world’s fair, apparently. Her mothering me even though she is the one who has cancer and I am the one in reasonably good health, that I am the one who is supposed to be the strong one, that I am the one who is the caregiver and should be caregiving.

I try to hide my tears from her but even when I tuck her in for her naps during the day and we have our nap talks I still sniffle and my eyes water and my nose tickles in that weird way like I’m about to sneeze. I don’t want to cry in front of her because she is already going through so much and I don’t want to add to her pain.

I am doing what needs to be done in terms of opening bottles of Ensure and putting them in the refrigerator so they are cold for my mom to drink. Getting cheeseburgers for lunch from Burger King, which is what she likes. Pouring pear juice from the container to a cup so it’s easy for her to grab from the kitchen to take to her chair. I bought her lots of flowers for Mother’s Day and displayed them on the table, roses and spray roses and some tall flowers I never remember the name of but they last for a while. My mom calls the flowers on her glass table her little garden, which I like.

This is probably the last Mother’s Day I’m going to spend with her, because she may not be here for the next one. Even though it’s May, she keeps a little plastic Christmas tree on a table by the foot of her bed. She says she doesn’t know if she’s going to be here for the holidays, so she doesn’t put the little Christmas tree away. I like looking at the tree. It’s from my childhood. I remember sleeping in the family room at the old house next to this tree waiting for Santa Claus. At this point the tree has more tinsel, ornaments, baubles, and bows than plastic pine tree but that’s fine with me. I love that tree. I love her.

Where do all of these memories go? Who will share all of these memories? Who knows my childhood better than my mom? I feel like I am running out of time in terms of collecting all of these memories into recordings on my phone. And yet, I’m also thankful that I am being forced to do this because she is passing? I don’t want to have to record all of these memories because she has terminal cancer, but I am glad that I am doing this? How is it possible to be glad to do something, but to be so angry at having to do it in the first place?

I don’t know how to write down all of these complicated feelings.

I don’t want my mom to go.