What Happened the Moment After My Mother Died

When Mom arrived at the curb, she sobbed, loud and dramatic.

“I’m dirty,” I said.

Her hysterics took center stage. I grew quiet and still.

Mom’s feelings felt like they mattered more than mine. No matter what the cause or cost, my little mind settled on needing to please my mother and ease her pain. This was my new identity, sprung out of the depths of our agony, though neither of us knew it at the time.

For years, I adhered to my strict Irish-Catholic mother’s rules with a goal of making her jovial. I complied with her demands to be a good girl, which were to be seen and not heard. I feared misbehaving or misspeaking. Anxiety grew. I pushed myself to excel in my academics and practiced my Irish dancing (her choice for my hobby) until my heels bled and my calves ached. Distance swelled between me and my peers, and that little voice in my head, begging to be loud and lively, got suffocated. When I left my family and mother in Missouri, first for college in Chicago, then for law school in Manhattan, I told others, “I escaped.”

In New York, far from my mother, I broke her rules and those of her religious institution. I embraced my sexuality. I dated men whom she didn’t approve of. But the more I stepped out of her boundaries, my expectation that I’d be happier didn’t fully materialize. Then I fell into a profound grief when my closest friend died. My anxiety ballooned, as though I was always at risk of falling from a van and getting crushed. Success and failure were like life and death. Defeat was one slip away. Pressure stole joy from my life.

A few months after my mother's chemo failed, she was forever quiet and still. But grief didn’t weigh me down. Instead, repeating the prayers I’d said for her tethered me to the serenity I’d experienced as she departed. My relationship with my father deepened. I delved further into my spirituality and found meaning as a volunteer providing companionship to dying strangers. I even quit my long-term lawyer job in New York and followed my gut when the chance for real love appeared 1,200 miles from my Brooklyn apartment.

I no longer had a role to ensure Mom was happy and took care of my own happiness without burden — a load I didn’t fully understand until I lay there in the therapist’s room, holding tappers and a pillow comforting my belly. My body shook. My jaw trembled. My feelings unmoored.

“Good. Feel it. Don’t ignore it. Don’t push it away,” my therapist said.

Exhaustion enveloped me as my body calmed. But I felt lighter, larger, free. It was as if I’d returned to that moment when Mom took her last breath, and I became one with the stillness. Blinking my eyes open, I could see. Little me needed validation that her feelings mattered. Little me needed to be held and told she was OK. Little me needed a mother who comforted her, not the other way around.

Day by day, I integrate my inner work, feeling more and more aware and released from those minutes of my life in 1978 and all that transpired because of it, the complexities of life and my mother’s own unconscious struggles. Now, she’s long dead. How I perceived my reality is too. As I age, I’m grateful for the chance to start each day more peaceful than the last.

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.