remembering my mother's body
by joann meadows

In grieving the dead, the question of memory is tough. Perhaps some people feel that they may have lost a loved one’s physical presence, but they refuse to lose the presence in memory. They can keep the person alive that way.

When my mom died, and I was going through the shock of learning to live without her (she was a very vivid daily presence in my life), I recall thinking that not only would I never see her again, but that even my last memories of her would fade. Even the accustomed daily sense of her would become remote. I would lose my sense of being accustomed to seeing her every day.

In the first few weeks, I could tell that this was already happening. Although grief and loss seemed to make her the central figure in my attention, I was actually living without her already. I was already growing used to her absence. It’s hard to explain: it was just an odd realization that, underneath the acute sorrow, was a sort of inexorable normalizing that was occurring even then, hour by hour, day by day, the incessant and steady acclimatization to the new circumstance of her absence.

If I had been determined to hold on to her, it would have been a very frightening thing to realize. Even as it was, even though I felt it was a positive challenge to learn to live without her, it still had a tinge of insult and outrage, loss upon loss, that I wouldn’t just lose my mother, I would lose my “habit” of her, the sense of living with her. Our daily routine, our conversations, the familiarity of it, would become more and more distant, till I would look back on it as a curiosity, “bygone days”, “the way things used to be”.

So it was a bittersweet memory, that last night I saw her. I had come in late from work, and she was sitting up late, sitting in her favorite corner of the couch, with the lamp on, reading, waiting for me to come home. So I leaned on the doorway and we talked a few minutes about my day, about her day. I could tell she was tired, but there was a gentleness about her that last year, after Melinda died, and we didn’t have any arguments at all; all our interactions were genuinely friendly, like this late night conversation, and I could sense her interest and concern for me. Then she came out into the dark kitchen and poured herself a glass of water from the faucet. She was on a reducing diet and was trying to drink extra water. She drank it all at once, and I looked at her very closely, in the light that shone from the living room, almost as if God were letting me really see her for the last time. I noticed that she had slimmed down a few pounds. I took in how much we were similar, how much our bodies were alike, how much I took after her in physical build. She was wearing a white turtleneck sweater and dark blue stirrup pants with brown penny loafers. Her dark brown hair had a permanent wave, and the curls were growing out just a bit. She always touched up her curls with a curling iron in the morning before going out. I really looked at all of this.

I noticed dirty dishes still in the sink but decided not to volunteer to do them; it was so late, they could wait till morning. I said goodnight and went upstairs. It was after midnight.

Then it was mid-morning, and Dad was knocking on the door, waking me up with the news that Mom and Sally had been in an accident.

At the hospital, I had to go in to a special room to see her, to provide the positive identification. Dad wasn’t in a state to do it and I felt like the practical strong one. Mom was wearing the same white turtleneck sweater and stirrup pants, dressed exactly the same as she had been the night before. She had escaped visible trauma, except for a superficial abrasion on her forehead, and a stain of blood where her left lower leg had been broken, only slightly darker than the blue of the stirrup pants. I looked at her, lying on the coroner’s table. It felt terribly odd to see her like that, but it also seemed like such a matter-of-fact scene somehow. Yes, that was indeed Laura W. Meadows, my mother, yes, she was indeed dead. I walked round the table and looked at her some more, not really sure what I should be feeling, or how long I should stay, or what else I should do. It seemed a last visit with my mother, and I did not feel in a hurry to leave. I had a certain right to see her, even like this— looking at her was my right as her daughter.

Once, years before, I had looked at her as she lay on the couch one afternoon, taking a nap, and tried to imagine what I would feel like if she were lying there dead; if the stillness of her face was that of death, not sleep. And for a moment did find him, and that’s a kindness!

I had been taken into the reality of that imagination, as I crouched silently and stared at my mother’s supposedly lifeless face. But to see the reality of her lifeless body seemed merely strange, not awful; unpleasant, but surprisingly easy to understand. My mother was dead, and it seemed quite similar to the way I had imagined.

For days I wept, not that my mom was gone, but that her poor leg had been broken. I felt so dreadfully sorry about that. When I brought the bag of clothes home, I laid out the blue stirrup pants on a box at the end of the bed, with the bloody stain visible and for days it served as the focus of my most immediate grief—almost like a shrine. I would actually kneel there and cry and cry to think mom’s poor leg had been hurt. It was such a simple thing that would bring tears, transferring a large complex sense of grief on to something I could understand.

I had a small but stinging regret for several weeks that I hadn’t washed the dishes that last night. Mom was chronically tired from taking care of her grand-daughter and yet she had managed to wash the dishes and stack them in the drainer before she took Sally to day-care that morning. It was just another task for her, and I wished that I hadn’t nonchalantly shrugged it off for someone else to do. I wondered how she felt: if she was feeling down that morning; if the sight of the dishes left over from the night before had discouraged her (it was a pet peeve of hers); if she felt she didn’t have enough help; if she had sighed and resigned herself, washing them up without dwelling on it, but still realizing the fact of having to do them herself. Or had she felt energetic and optimistic and positive, with that strange feeling of hers that heaven was just around the corner? “It can’t be long,” she used to say.

But back to the theme of memory, and trying to hold on to a loved one’s memory. I did submit to the “outrage” of seeing my mother’s memory and the feel of her fade away, out of sight—and it does seem outrageous, a second inner loss that parallels the objective loss of the person. I realized that the utterly ordinary encounter of the last night, and the glass of water, would not be allowed to be ordinary, as I would have preferred, but special and rare, the last glimpse of my mother alive, a significant scenario, like historic film footage. I resented the relegation of mom, part of my daily life to mom, part of my past. It was hard for me to imagine that she would become “someone I used to know”. And yet it happened.

Now, sometimes, I wonder who my mom was; I try to remember how she was, and realize that I hardly knew her at all. There were facets of her personality and character that I had no idea about, or in my ignorance assumed that there was nothing noteworthy to find out. Familiar, so familiar when I was living with her, and so enigmatic now that she is gone.

And that is perhaps the third loss which I am experiencing more of lately: seeing how different she was, seeing that she wasn’t as ordinary and familiar as I had assumed, seeing how much I fail to be like her. She seemed to embody my own sense of failure, failure by comparison. She used to tell me that when I was little, questioned about what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said, “I want to grow up to be just like you.” I hear other women say, “I always knew I wanted to be an actress; or, I always wanted to do this—or this—have children, wanted to write, always loved drawing, wanted to travel.” In fact, everyone who accomplishes anything noteworthy seems to have had that impetus from an early age. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I remember no passion like that from my childhood. Only hearing the sound of the mourning dove in the yard, which made me picture a shepherd boy playing his pipe and calling his sheep, and wanting so much to be able to see him—except that I knew he and his sheep were invisible. That, and wanting to be like my mom. Now it turns out that we were so different, I don’t have a chance of that. But the shepherd calling his sheep…. I did find him, and that’s a kindness!