What is your birthday

When your mother is dead?

My mother and me, a few months before Patrick was born. She’d have been about 25.

I turn 60 on December 10, and December 15 is the first anniversary of my mother’s death. I’ve been very much fine about it all until the last few days. There’s an unmoored feeling to having no immediate family left. I mean, my father is still alive, but he moved to Prague in the early 90s and we don’t really have a relationship.

What I mean by no real family left is the family of your body. Your animal family. The animal body. Your mother. Your brothers. All of you in a pile on the couch, in her bed watching TV, bickering in the backseat of the station wagon. The other humans with whom you had almost continual physical contact all those years. The people whose smells you knew like your own.

My mother was a stupendously difficult person for most of my adult life, and I had to be brutal at times in order to keep her from capsizing my life the way she capsized her own, over and over again. But I never doubted she loved me. She just loved me in a deeply problematic way.

Loss is funny.

When Patrick died, it was the physical sense of him, just behind me, literally having my back that I both missed ferociously, and that took the longest to fade. For my entire life, especially my entire adult life, Patrick had my back. Every picture we have, he has an arm around my shoulder. I knew, no matter where I was, no matter what was happening, I could call him and he would come.

Which he did when I finished the PhD. I was a wreck. Physically, emotionally, spiritually. I finished, but with zero fanfare. I had no real support among the faculty (none of whom bothered to show up when I came back to SLC a year later when my novel was published). There were no teaching jobs, and especially no jobs in the West. The whole experience was crushing, and while I did get a book out of it, and an ability to read theory, well. It’s the reason I left academia and moved over to corporate life. Which has seemed humane in comparison.

Patrick came to Salt Lake, packed a truck with my stuff (we did have one giant fight over packing the 2x4s that formed the foundation of my platform bed. Later I found out it was because he was so appalled and upset that I’d been sleeping on a bed platform I cobbled together from plywood scraps I found in the alley.) He drove me to SF, set me up in his dining room on my futon, while we waited for our 2 bedroom apartment to come open. That I got to return the favor 5 years later when his Sears Point job evaporated overnight was a bittersweet pleasure.

I’ve gotten used to him being gone, but not having him there when Mom died was strange. I am not good at parsing my own emotions. Patrick did the emotions. Look at the face on that baby up there. I fixed things. I did things. I figured out how I felt about it afterwards.

My cousin Adam stepped in when my mother died. Funny how the younger cousins sometimes know who you actually are rather than who you think you are. I was sure I could handle it by myself. But Adam got in his truck, drove eight hours with a six horse trailer, and he and his wife Darla went through that filthy apartment with me, salvaging what could be saved. It’s all still in his basement. I keep thinking I need to deal with it, and he reassures me every time that it’s fine. It can just stay there. It’s not in the way.

When I was home to bury her in May, I was visiting with Ellie, who is my mother’s age. Ellie lost her daughter a year after we lost Michael, also to cancer. Ellie was one of those adults who saved me as a young adult, one of the people who told me in my 20s that I didn’t have to cover up for my mother, that everyone knew she drank. Ellie also told me that she knew my mother wasn’t very nice to me, and that it wasn’t okay — a message I couldn’t take in for years.

“How does it feel to be the last one?” she asked.

It’s a tricky question to ask someone. She wasn’t being prurient. She was genuinely curious.

“I’m not sure,” I told her. “I need to get the funeral over with, and then maybe it’ll sink in.”

This year has been an enormous relief. That I no longer live with the terror that my mother is going to bankrupt me has been hugely liberating. All these years I’ve had corporate jobs, all these years I’ve worked to pay off this house, my car, my debts were in part, fueled by the terror of watching my mother pinball her way through old age with no safety net. We had about 10 years where all she had to live on was social security, so I paid her rent, and her brother sent money for groceries, and between us we barely kept her head above water. When my grandmother finally died at 102, my mother inherited a sum that shouldn’t have kept her as well as it did for as long as it did. Thank god for Aunt Ruth, the long-gone cardboard box fortune, and a bull market.

But all that time I thought the money would run out, and then she’d come for mine. This was not an empty fear. That I did not have to put my elderly mother in a Medicaid nursing home is one of the things for which I am deeply grateful.

Ellie’s question hit me last night as I was bringing up the Christmas ornaments. I’m feeling this impending birthday on a physical level. There’s no one left who I shared a body with. I’ve been re-reading Daisy Hildyard’s The Second Body and maybe it’s her assertion that the world is a kind of second body, a collective body to which we all belong, even when we can’t feel it, that has me thinking this way. I’m still working through my ideas about Hildyard’s book, and I’ll write about it soon, but for me, the second body that I’m missing right now is the family body. The animal bodies of people who you have always known.

It took my mother dying for me to realize that a birthday is a collective celebration. My birthday made my mother a mother. It was an anniversary we shared, not something that belonged only to me. And now, there’s no one left who remembers the day my terrified young mother went into labor. I was late. Not a characteristic I carried into my outside life, but I was in no hurry to leave my mother. My mother, who told me that she’d looked at Dr. McLaverty, a man who became a kind of father figure to her, she’d looked at him 9 months along and said “Okay now, explain this to me again? Because what you said the last time makes no sense at all. How is it going to come out there?”

It’s one of the few situations where not having had children of my own factors in. Since I never had kids, I don’t have their birthdays to mark the passage of the animal body moving through me into the future. When Patrick died, I did have a flash of thought: now I have to have a baby. I didn’t, mostly due to circumstance, but that was the animal body speaking. The animal body that is haunting me this year.

That photo at the top of the post. It must be sometime in spring or early summer 65, because I’m a December baby, and there I’m walking. Patrick was born in September 65. My mother had a terrible time with that pregnancy. She was deeply depressed. I can see it in her 25 year old face, the animal body of the mother I knew so well. I know that look. That’s the look she had when she was trying to hold it together. She has on a nice dress for some occasion, and she’s trying to make sure that her determined, not-depressed, exuberant toddler doesn’t faceplant, but what she really wants is to go back to bed. It took her a couple of years to recover, including a short stay in an institution. She did it. She pulled herself out of the hole. She was happy when Michael was born, when we moved to the farm. That she had the rug pulled out from under her after all that was stupendously unfair.

Funny how it takes them dying to make them people. I remember reading Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby when it came out in 2018, and envying the space of tenderness and affection she’d reached with her own difficult mother. It did come at the end. We were good. We both knew we loved one another, and managed to be kind for the last year or two. She was still herself, and often kind of a nightmare, but it was mostly good.

Grief is unpredictable. Even when you’re fine, sometimes you’ll get swamped by a wave. Carrying Christmas ornament boxes up from the basement, in tears because I have a birthday coming up, and she won’t be there to annoy me by singing “You are my sunshine” into the phone in the most sticky sentimental way possible. That she won’t be there to annoy me by sending weird presents, or by forgetting the date and calling two days later. I’ve found myself tucking the last two pair of socks she sent, soft cashmere socks that got holes almost immediately, tucking them back up in a corner of my sock drawer to keep, because she gave them to me.

The grief of the animal body. Our bodies that we think we control. The grief of the animal body, realizing after almost a year that she’s gone, that my brothers are gone, and although I have a really good life, and am actually as happy as I’ve ever been, nonetheless, being the last one standing is weirder than I imagined it might be.