I Want To Talk To My Mom

I want to tell her everything, absolutely everything. But I can't.

My mom wasn’t really a coffee drinker, but I am and have had plenty of cups of coffee in Florida when talking to my mom. Photo by karl chor on Unsplash

This is the longest I’ve gone without talking to my mom. Almost ten months.

I write this and want to cry.

There are moments where I want nothing more than to talk to my mom. To tell her about something that had happened in my life. For example, I recently went to my first dental hygienist visit in Scotland. I was very afraid because I’ve had horrible experiences going and getting my teeth cleaned. A mouth full of blood due to swollen gums and pain so piercing I’ve asked to have my gums numbed. To say I was apprehensive about my dental visit would put it mildly. The dental hygienist (as the attractive and surprisingly around-my-age dentist explained to me when I saw him a few weeks ago) used this Air Flow method that is advanced technology from Switzerland. I was skeptical but it had to be better than what I’ve experienced before. And it was! The only pain I felt was when the dental hygienist poked around my gums with the sharp metal thing, and then that was it. She said the Air Flow got most of the plaque and stains off and finished up afterward.

I was floored.

It was expensive, but SO WORTH IT.

Yes, I would have called my mom right after the dental appointment to have gushed to her all about this amazing dentist appointment, and why couldn’t I have grown up with this Air Flow thing, and we could have talked about our teeth and my mom’s teeth and I know she would have been happy to know that I took care of my teeth and went to the dentist. When I was a caregiver toward the end of my mom’s life, I stopped really taking care of myself, sometimes.

I mean, I did break my third metatarsal in my right foot because I walked too much in bad shoes and did these dance workouts barefoot on tile. (Not the smartest thing I’ve ever done.)

However, she would appreciate that I’m still looking for a partner and would be curious to know about the dentist and she’d ask me whether or not he was single. I mean I don’t know for certain whether she would or but but she would—probably.

She wants me to be happy, and happiness to her, in a way, is being in a loving and supportive relationship. Someday, maybe I will be in a loving and supportive relationship. But for now, I’m still single and figuring out different things.

A stock image of writer’s block and what it might be like for me writing a letter to my mom. She had terrible handwriting, so I feel like I’d be better off typing it out. Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

I’ve heard people write letters to loved ones who have died, but something is blocking me and I get too angry and upset and sad in order to do so. Instead of writing about new things, I want to write down the story of what the hell happened while she was alive and what I went through as her caregiver.

I’m still processing all that had happened as her caregiver and the journey she went on while she had cancer, and even writing that it makes me even more furious. She didn’t go “on a journey” with cancer.

She (and we) navigated through hell with this whole process.

Journey sounds like too fun of a word to associate with cancer.

I keep going back to this one article from Esquire, about a man recounting the experience of his best friend coming to stay with him while his wife had cancer and underwent chemotherapy. I feel a kinship toward the line when he states we’ve been lied to about dying, about death.

“I was in shock and stayed there a long time. We don't tell each other the truth about dying, as a people. Not real dying. Real dying, regular and mundane dying, is so hard and so ugly that it becomes the worst thing of all: It's grotesque. It's undignified. No one ever told me the truth about it, not once.”

- Matthew Teague, Esquire

I’m not here to say that my experience with death and dying and grief is the only experience with death and dying and grief. But it’s the experience that digs deep and goes behind the edited-to-perfection writing, the stripped down versions, about all of this.

I want to talk to my mom, and there’s this deep pull inside of me that just wants to scream and scream and cry out, “MOM” at the top of my lungs. Sometimes, in my room, I scream out the word as loud as possible in my head, but no one will hear it—only I do.

Sometimes I fantasize about going to the most remote place and being all alone and in the dark I scream. Out loud.

Scream until my throat is raw.

Until the tears have dried on my cheeks.

Until there is nothing left.

Until I am a shell of a person.

Until I somehow go back my life.

Some version of what I think about when I want to let everything go and release. Photo by Luca J on Unsplash

What’s hardest to reconcile is while my mom was going through her radiations and physical therapies and all these various things, I wanted to talk to my mom. I mean, of course I talked to her. But what I wanted was to talk to Healthy-Mom about Cancer-Mom.

Like, I know my mom was dying of cancer, but I still had a lot of things to figure out!

It’s been almost a year since my mom told me that she wasn’t going to pursue chemotherapy, that she was going to do palliative care and hospice.

I still remember those moments.

I will always remember those moments.

And I want to talk to her about it, about everything.

But I can’t.

And that’s a new kind of pain I can barely describe.

A new kind of hell that no one tells you about, that no one talks about.

Eventually, the feeling, the insane yearning to talk to my mom will pass. And I’ll go back to reading a book or studying for classes or out for a walk. But it will always be there, this lingering thought that I’ll never be able to talk to my mom again.

That my mom is dead and I’ll never be able to talk to her.

That I was her caregiver and there was so much I want to say to her, and yet there was so much I wanted to say to her but could never say to her.

My mom didn’t really believe in the afterlife. She was convinced that her mom—my grandmother—would have sent a message or something if there was an afterlife. My mom believed that we die, and that’s it.

I still have her memories, shared experiences, old VHS videos and cell phone recordings and pictures and things.

I visit the same places she used to visit.

I don’t know how to tell her anything.

But at least I’m trying, or something.

I still have the “Phone call with mom” weekly calendar event—9 pm EST on Wednesdays—saved on my phone. That was from years and years ago, where my mom wanted to have a call with me each week. It brought her so much joy to catch up on the phone.

Even though she’s gone, perhaps I can still do the same or something similar. Imagine having a phone conversation with her, but in all of the empty space, I can imagine her replying to my thoughts, to my stories, to my observations.

I can imagine her happy.

Madeline Wahl is a postgraduate student pursuing an MLitt in Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. She is a writer, solo traveler, and millennial caregiver to her mom, who recently passed from terminal cancer. Her writing has appeared on Reader's Digest, HuffPost, Red Magazine, and McSweeney's, among others. She is working on her first novel in YA Fantasy and her first nonfiction book proposal on millennial caregiving.