WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO LIVE A GOOD LIFE?

Reckoning With My Mother’s Early Death

I recently started EMDR therapy to process the loss of my mom. The goal of the treatment is to help move traumatic memories to a different part of your brain using bilateral stimulation so when you recall what happened the memory isn’t so charged. During one of our first sessions, we worked on the memory of me being in the room with my mom after she died as I waited for the funeral home to come take her body. (Going from never having seen a dead body before to the first one being my beloved mom was quite a shock to my system.) But last week, I realized that the thing I am having the most difficulty processing, the thing I feel the most inner turmoil about, isn’t a memory at all. It is the fact that my mom died so young.

Obviously, in the wide range of human experience, dying at 69 isn’t an aberration. For much of history, that was at the far end of life expectancies. And I know it isn’t the same level of tragedy as losing a child or young adult. Yet, given modern medicine and my mother’s health-conscious lifestyle, not even making it to 70 feels unbearably unfair to her. The day we broke the news that her fatal CJD diagnosis had been confirmed through her spinal tap, she took it better than anyone could have expected or hoped. But she did say one thing that burned into my brain: I thought I had more time. 

Now that two months have passed since we lost her, I’ve spent a lot of my time grappling with what it means to have a good life. What matters most? The amount of time you have or how you spend that time? Can good fortune in adulthood make up for misfortune in childhood? Do periods of bad health and chronic pain–two things my mother dealt with frequently in the final years of life–overpower moments of joy? And does the way you die tarnish the way you lived? Because the way my mother died was something I wouldn’t wish on anyone. (Except maybe some members of Trump’s transition team.) 

My answers to these questions fluctuate based on my mood. In moments of optimism, I am reminded that my mother was deeply loved. She was a true matriarch with a decades-long marriage, rich friendships and daughters/granddaughters who were so connected to her that the hole of her absence is earth-shattering. In my darker moments though, it’s hard not to see all the missed opportunities. My mother’s photography never reached the level of success or recognition she’d hoped for. She never got to go to Russia or Alaska or countless other places on her bucket list. She’ll never have the chance to see me pregnant or meet my future child (if I’m lucky enough to have one). And, after a lifetime of putting up with my father’s intense workload, the last five years that he’s finally been retired were punctuated with the pandemic and a variety of health challenges including a stretch when she had a fever every day for four months. This next period of her life was supposed to be the best, part filled with travel and grandchildren and the payoff of all her hard work. It will never be okay that she was robbed of it. 

My mother was not someone who believed that things happen for a reason. The mere implication of such a thing would make her scoff. There was no grand plan behind her sudden and shocking death for her to find comfort in. But she was a master of nuance. She understood how to live in the gray and take the good with the bad. She knew how to roll with the punches better than most but that didn’t make her immune from sorrow and rumination. 

While we never got to have the end-of-life discussions I longed for due to her trouble speaking, she did manage to share one regret before conversation became too difficult. As we went through her office one day, she told me for the first time that she wished she had become an artist sooner. Growing up, she’d dreamed of being a writer but after getting a master’s in journalism, she realized it wasn’t the right fit. A deeply private person, my mom didn’t feel comfortable sharing herself with the world through words. Visual art, though, was different. And she regretted not discovering photography until she was in her 40’s.

It felt painful to know the years that my mother did pursue photography didn’t make up for the time she hadn’t. That she felt she never got to fully develop herself as an artist because she hadn’t had the support to pursue it from the beginning. I want to somehow go back and fill her childhood bedroom with art supplies and film cameras. I wish that part of her had been nurtured from the get-go rather than forced to grow between the pavement of her already established adulthood as a wife and mother. 

I can’t rewrite my mother’s past. And I can’t give her the future she so deserved. But I can try my best to learn from her experience. For all the hurt and pain, for all the dreams unnamed and unfulfilled, the life my mother built tooth and nail for herself was an admirable one. Nothing highlighted this more than her final photography opening on September 7th–a little over two weeks before she died. Despite being wheel-chair bound and not in control of her misbehaving limbs, she managed to make it to the gallery and found it packed with all of the people who loved her. Surrounded by her artwork, she talked to person after person who had come to celebrate her from all areas of her life. It was as close to a living funeral as one could get and it was also the last time she left the house. 

I don’t know what it is like to lose someone that close to me when they have actually had a long life. Maybe some people eventually hit a point where they feel like they have had enough time and are ready to go. I have an inclination, though, that there is always a part of us that feels we could have lived more or done better. Maybe it is impossible to be fully satisfied with the life you have led because you intimately know all the things you didn’t get to do. But from the outside looking in, my mother accomplished more in her short 69 years than most people could hope for. She built a community, a family and a legacy of work. She made hilarious jokes we will still tell years from now. And she taught so many of us how to show up for the ones we care about. 

Her life was simultaneously well-lived and also not nearly long-enough. Given her complicated history and her affinity for holding many truths at once, this seems strangely fitting. It feels so very my mom. 

xoxo,

Allison

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