A Shattered Childhood

Before

"Can mommy die?" As incomprehensible as this possibility seemed to my eleven year old mind, I boldly asked my older sister the question gnawing at me. I was only slightly appeased by her emphatic "no!" - announced  with all the confidence she could muster as though trying to convince herself.  I knew my mother was sick, very sick but the facts were buried in whispers and covert maneuvers. She had been hospitalized for a long time. My younger brother and I were told that she had had a tonsillectomy. I found out later that she had breast cancer and had had a mastectomy. When she finally came home from the hospital, she had come home to die.

While lying in bed the night before she died, I could hear my mother's labored breathing. I padded softly to her bedroom door and whispered, "Mommy, are you ok?" She scolded me to go back to bed. Hours later, an ambulance was summoned and took my mother back to the hospital. I peered out my bedroom window to watch the ambulance go. I remember it was snowing. My world was still normal when I went off to school the next morning. It was December 12th, 1963. My mother was forty-two. 

When I walked home from school for lunch, the midday gathering of family and friends at my house was anything but normal.  The startled, deer in headlights look of people as I walked through the door betrayed the devastating news.  My mother was dead. DEAD! I felt my childhood innocence shatter into a million jagged questions. "What are you saying?! Mommy is dead? Where is her body? Where is her soul? Can I see her one more time?  Can I kiss her good night? Can I cuddle with her on the couch just one more time? Who will bake me cherry pies, make me dresses with a bow in the back, knit my Barbie doll clothes, wash my hair under the kitchen sink?  Who will hug me when I walk through the door or chase me through the house when she's mad and laugh at her folly in trying to catch me?  Who will teach me to hoola hoop? Who will replace her as my girl scout leader? Who will take care of me, my father and my brothers and sister?! Whose mother dies?! What kind of God would take away a child's mom?! " 

While death was still an abstract concept, I was old enough to understand its permanence. From that day forward, and for most of my young life, I suspected that crushing despair lurked around every corner. Nothing was for certain. Nothing was permanent. On December 12th, I felt the first inkling that now I was different from my peers...I was a motherless child. This was a tectonic shift in what I knew to be normal and the changes just kept coming.
One of the most horrifying memories was the image of my father lying prone on my sister's bed sobbing loudly while family and friends tried to console him. I was coming up the stairs when he saw me. I turned away quickly and so did he. He sat up abruptly and pulled himself together but it was too late, the image was seared in my brain.  My father, heretofore always strong, strict, a proud marine, was now fallible, flawed, breakable and broken. I saw a lot of adults cry in the days following my mother's death. My mother's mother, my beloved grandmother, was devastated. The adults could not be counted on for anything. They were crying like babies.

We went through the motions in the days that followed using questionable Catholic traditions to structure our movements- three days of viewing at the funeral home, followed by a mass and burial. I can still recall the putrid smell of so many floral arrangements in the funeral home. I went to the viewing once, that I recall, and remember my maternal grandmother saying how beautiful my mother looked. As I gazed down at my heavily made-up mother, I remember thinking, "Beautiful?!  My mother looks dead!!!"  There was nothing more horrifying!

The adults were very busy making funeral arrangements.  Soon after my mother died, I remember being told to go outside and play.  It had snowed and the neighborhood kids were sledding.  It was the first time I experienced the part of me that I labeled the observer.  I remember watching myself from above, as though through a one way mirror, sledding with a neighbor.  It felt like I was "playing" at being a kid, as though nothing profoundly traumatic had just happened. I recognize it now as a kind of dissociation that helped me cope with the unbearable pain of losing my mother. Splitting off from reality kept me from feeling too deeply so that I could function in the real world. Even today, there are times I feel separated from my physical body and watch myself play-acting, not fully present.  Its purpose in protecting me has diminished over the years but I am aware that the observer is still part of my personality.

To shorten a very long story of years of upheaval, I'll give you the abridged version. My grandmother stayed with us in the days following my mother's death and her presence helped, though I was aware that she was fighting with my father...alot!  Within a year, my father remarried. All of my mother's things were donated or given away and my childhood home was sold. My sister married. My older brother didn't get along with his new stepbrother so he moved out.  There was just my brother and myself living in a new house with a new family. Oh yeah, and I was supposed to call this new woman "mom."  A year or two later there would be a divorce and a move to Connecticut.  Soon after, my father's place of employment burned down so we moved back to my childhood hometown in New Jersey in 11th grade.  I took up with old friends and life finally began to feel normal again. I went away to college, became a teacher, married and had a beautiful family of my own. Having my own children to love and mother helped to fill some of the gaps in my own life. My parenting skills were not without mistakes and misgivings but on the whole, my children gave me great joy and completed me.  My boundless love for them helped me realize the love my mother must have felt for me.

Now sixty-three, the loss of my mother is less painful. Through years of counseling I learned to record the loss in adult language.  My shattered childhood is but one chapter in my long life and it doesn't define me. A psychic recently told me that my purpose in this life is to go back and nurture that broken little girl and to love myself. Appreciating the joy and love that I have experienced along the way has done a great deal to heal the broken little girl. She is in the past.  I'm all for staying in the present.  As for loving myself, I work on that daily. Every time I tell myself that I'm not smart enough, pretty enough, thin enough...ad nauseam, I work to change the self talk and to love and appreciate my good qualities. (I'll have to explore self image another time.)

Life's journey takes many twists and turns, with incredible highs and unbearable lows and something called normal in between. I have learned that I am resilient and strong. This piece has been the most challenging to write thus far.  My daughter asked me to explore the loss of my mother and I'm glad she did.  Thank you my darling Shannon, for instinctively knowing what I need to write about better than I do. 

After