Mourning My Mother — on Yom Kippur and Throughout the Year
The writer, with her mother.
Sitting around the table — four young women, all of us had lost one of our parents — we told the stories that we always tell or never tell: when we knew it was inevitable (cancer was the cause of death in every situation), where we were when we had to drop everything and come home, the worst and the silliest things people have said to us, the mysterious inability to account for the time between death and the funeral.
We waved our hands and talked faster and passed around second and third helpings of squash casserole. Some of us cried. I thought about what it meant to share these things, our moments of vulnerability and terror and grief, and how, in spite of feeling connected, the very unique texture of our losses would always separate us.
Twelve years after my mother’s death, I’m still forgiving her. Trust me when I say there’s enough work to be done that it takes the whole year, every year, and not just the month of Elul or the 26 hours of Yom Kippur. This is what no one tells you about — how big the task is of mourning an entire person.
My mother died when I was a sophomore in college, after dealing with breast cancer on and off since she was 40 and I was seven. We fought a lot. She was a single mother. I was desperate to be independent and sick of taking care of her, sick of doctor’s offices and being the one in the room listening to numbers and diagnoses and options, sick of being a parent when I still needed to be taken care of. My grief feels complicated, because my mother was complicated.
She taught me to be a feminist, but I had to wear make-up and have a boyfriend and always let him pay for dates. Before a dance to which I went stag, I overheard her conversation with my grandmother in which she wondered what was wrong with me that all the other girls had dates. She wanted me to be popular, to live the life that stopped for her when she developed thyroid cancer at 15. In many ways, I was not the daughter she wanted, and still, I wonder if I could have worked harder to be.
On Yizkor, I stay in the room. Sometimes I sit down, sometimes I pace, but I don’t look at the words anymore. I do not think of when she accused me of loving my friends more than her, or of the time she told me I’d eaten too much and looked like a horse. I try to think of our trips to the library on rainy afternoons, the way she would sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in a screechy voice just to make me laugh, our late night trips to Friendly’s. I try to think of how she and my grandmother and I made the queerest, most imperfect family I can imagine. And more and more often these days, I realize how far away I am from understanding the depth of what I’ve lost.
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