What is Death?

This is a personal essay from my first book, Wise by Nature. I hope you enjoy!!

The textbook definition of death is “the action or fact of dying or being killed; the end of the life of a person or organism.” Societally, the end of life is defined biologically, when one stops breathing or their heart gives out. It’s weird having to speak about my mother in the past tense for multiple reasons, but sometimes it just feels like she’s dead. With peopl I’ll never see again, I tell them that my mother died about a year ago, and was never really involved in my childhood. People I know correct my usage of the past tense when describing what she liked, didn’t like, loved, how she acted, and who she was, but it makes my blood boil. Half of me, my bones, my blood, is derived from her, but she isn’t here anymore. The woman who raised me for six years is gone and can never come back. Doctors have confirmed it, those close to us acknowledge it, but there’s no obituary found online. There’s no memorial I can visit or a tombstone, and no public “proof” that my mother isn’t here anymore. When I speak about it, I usually get stares or harsh glances of judgment, and I’m told I’m insensitive or dramatic. For the six years where my dad practically lived at his job, I was the only person who consistently spent all day, every day with my mother. I grew up knowing every detail about her, from the way she always dyed her hair blonde and wore red MAC lipstick. She preferred flare yoga pants, and I know she’d love how they’re trending now. She drank Folgers every morning with milk and two sugars, but stopped because of her high blood pressure and anxiety in 2011. Her favorite color was blue, she loved linen scented candles, and smoked Marlboro ultra lights since she was 16 and living in Jackson Heights with her eight siblings, and she was the seventh. My mom’s life ended when she was hospitalized last year for an overdose and experienced permanent, disabling brain damage, but she’s still alive.

It’s weird having to look at someone and know they’re not the same anymore. I can tell by her formerly electric blue eyes, which lost their vibrancy and are never enhanced with Great Big Lash mascara, but only on the top lashes so she doesn’t look tired as the day goes on. Her athleisure has retired for hospital-style sweats and her Reeboks have been replaced with grandma-style velcro shoes. She stopped ordering her coffee with milk and two sugars, but gets it black now, and she doesn’t care what cigarettes she smokes, as long as she has some. She hasn’t watched a housewives rerun in years or fangirled over Bruce Springsteen and lost her gold hoop earrings she wore every day since her sixteenth birthday on August 20th, 1977. She also forgot when her birthday was, when mine is, and how old I am. She misspells our special nickname from when I was younger. It was Mimi, short for Sammi, which she spells with an “i”, short for Samantha. She spells it “m-e-m-e”  now, and it’s heartbreaking and frustrating every time she tries to alter a strong memory like that. It’s like recording a new show over an old VHS tape, it’s just never the same, and you can never get back what you had. She’s mean to my father for being slow because she forgot he had Parkinson’s disease, and she didn’t show up to go prom dress shopping with me. When I found my dress, I cried alone in a Windsor dressing room- and not over the $60 dress which fits fine and is a nice shade of red with sparkles. The entire point of junior prom is to wear a cute dress, but one you can upstage next year, so it’s nothing Earth-shattering. I was distraught that my mom would never see it, but rather this shell of a woman with brain damage and irregular dopamine levels due to heavy drug use which manifested itself into Bipolar 1 disorder. So I sat there, torturing myself with pictures from almost ten years ago, from when I had a mom and a dad, and they were both okay. They were both great, actually. I lived the perfect life for a toddler, with two loving parents, a beautiful house, and a well-off family, until everything came crumbling down. I cried for the little girl, who had no clue. I remember my mom talking about prom, and being excited to take pictures with me and send me off to prom, and I opened Instagram to see a “Happy Birthday, Mom!” post on my timeline. It reminds me how unique my circumstances are, or how some people still have the life I lost.

Sometimes I feel uncomfortable when aspects of my life change, because my mom isn’t mentally here to experience them with me. She doesn’t know that I’m going to be an English teacher, or that I wrote a book. She loved reading, and I know she’d love that I love writing. She walked out on my life when I was fifteen after isolating herself from me for seven years before, and it hurt for a while knowing that our short interactions while both trying to cook in the kitchen or waiting for the bathroom would never happen again. Addiction is weird like that, because I know she only ever wanted to be a mom, and the best she could be. Sometimes I wonder whether she disconnected from my life in order to protect me. Maybe that just helps me sleep at night, rather than the internalized second option, that I was a horrible daughter who deserved all of her Alamden boxed Chardonnay fueled abuse. Verbal, physical, mental, and I was too young to realize that if my mother says talking about my home life is strictly forbidden and I have to lie about every bruise on my body, then something’s really wrong. 

My mom’s emotional, mental, and personality death will never leave me. In some ways, I will never leave my mom’s room, when I clutched a suicide note and let out a scream that my voice and soul took weeks to recover from. I can confidently say that she will never be that person again, and it was the end of her life, because my mom doesn’t wear mauve lipstick, and gray sweats, smoke whatever cigarettes and obscene amounts of weed every day, and does not favor purple over other colors. She does not listen to Adele for hours every day, but the stranger in her skin does. The woman who resides in her room and the stranger who drinks her coffee black does. Part of me died when my mom did, and I know the woman in my living room would be offended by reading this. 2014 me would be shocked and confused, and my mother would cry, and hold me, but never had the self esteem to apologize. She’d just hold me, and that would be enough for me. 

Death societally is when I can’t put my mom on my FAFSA. Death to me is when her Facebook is an untouched relic of who she was, memories of us, and the life we shared. It’s proof that at one point, the woman sitting in my living room wasn’t a stranger, and at one point, the mom I’ve described and imagined was real, and she loved me. The end of that woman’s life has come and gone, and it’s difficult to understand. It’s difficult to write about. It’s difficult to comprehend, but if i simplified this, it wouldn’t do my dead mom justice. If I made this easier to read or less complicated, it wouldn’t justify how I’ve felt. I’ve always questioned my choice of the past tense, and I’ve never understood how she can be dead but alive, but I know deep down that it’s the closest way to describe my circumstances. This is not an easy read that makes you feel fulfilled or inspired at the end, because experiencing this never had a silver lining. There is no pot of gold at the end of grief or death, you just keep existing after someone else’s life ends. My dad always said that when he died, he’d be the itch in my pocket or that random tickle in my sleeve. My mother is the dull, stabbing pain in my arthritic knees from years of cheerleading. I exchanged ten years doing what I loved for a lifetime of pain when I walked upstairs. Temporary happiness for a lifetime of sad mother’s days’ and anger when seeing girls my age with their mothers. I’ve seen many definitions of grief, but I’ve always loved the idea that grief is the love we never got to share, or that grieving deeply is to have loved fully. In my entire life, I never have, and now know that I never will love someone the way that I loved my mom, through the abuse and burned bridges. But I will spend my entire life describing it and trying to make sense of the unspeakable and indescribable.

Death is a synonym for the absence or loss of something which creates a hole in you, subsequently called grief. The hole is expected to close after an amount of time, but the dirt beneath us is never quite the same after a tree has grown and blossomed and is then taken out following its death. Its nutrients are sparse and the dirt isn’t as compact as the layers before it, and the hole is always slightly there. It remains, as grass and new flowers grow over, perhaps in memorium or as a sign of the times. Death is the moment of loss and the traveling through the space between life and what comes after, whatever that may be. She is gone, and can never come back, but at one point, she was here, and she was all of the beautiful things that life contained and every memory that breaks my heart to think about. 

Time is a thief, but death is a trap of quicksand that punishes us for loving and assuming any future, teaching us that nothing is guaranteed and everything is a blessing. Death is real, devastating, natural, inevitable, and most of all, complex.