My Life Got Better When My Mom Died

(From Reductress.com)

(Ed. note–This essay was submitted in 2016 for the “It Happened to Me” column in xojane.com. It was under consideration when the website went under.)

On the day after Thanksgiving, 2012, I picked up the phone and learned that my mom had died.

It was a shock – her death was sudden, a massive heart attack that struck without warning and killed her quickly. But it wasn’t a surprise.

My mother was only 64 years old, but she was in bad shape, both physically and mentally. For the past ten years, she’d been living with her fifth husband, a paranoid schizophrenic, and their 25 cats, letting her house fall into squalor, letting her Multiple Sclerosis go untreated, ignoring the signs of her own mental illness. She’d become obese, gone bankrupt, and alienated everyone in her life besides her husband. Every time I tried to contact her without success, I thought, “She’s dead.”

So as I stood in my living room with the phone in my hand, listening to her fifth husband weeping on the other end, I wasn’t all that surprised by the news.

I was surprised by the relief.

It was near instantaneous, the feeling that things were okay now. I felt deep sadness for my mother – my poor, sick mom, who could never catch a break – but for myself, there was only relief. It was like I’d been holding my breath for the last ten years, and now I could exhale. Finally, the thing I’d feared so much had come true. Now I didn’t have to fear it anymore.

My mother died a “good death,” for which I’m grateful: Her heart attack killed her almost instantly. She didn’t have time to be afraid, she didn’t feel any pain, she didn’t suffer through a long illness or linger in a hospital. She was at home with her husband when she died; she passed away while holding his hand, which is exactly what she would have wanted. Now she was gone, and she would never feel pain, or sadness, or unhappiness again.

She was okay now. For the first time in a decade, I didn’t have to worry about her, or be angry at her, or take care of something for her, or dread our next interaction, or hope that she’d wake up and change the conditions of her life. There was no more hope for her, so I could finally give it up. She was gone.

Thank God.

*

I want you to know: I didn’t hate my mother. She’d become pretty difficult to love, ever since she married Husband Number Five and became an animal-hoarding, tea-partying, virulently racist right-winger. But I cared about her. I hoped for her health and happiness. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her. We’d been through a lot in our years as mother and daughter – in high school, I’d had to leave home for a youth shelter because of Husband Number Three – but after the passage of 27 years, 15 of them spent in therapy, I’d forgiven her. It wasn’t her fault that she was mentally ill. Nobody asks to be mentally ill. I hated her illness for what it had done to her, but I didn’t hate her.

Nor was I “happy” that she was dead. Her death was a terribly sad ending to a terribly sad life. Whatever it was I was feeling that first few days, as the shock subsided and the grief swept in, it certainly wasn’t happiness. I wept, I raged, I smoked my weight in weed. I tortured myself with guilt, thinking, If I’d only done this or that, her death could have been prevented, and, I must have wanted her to die, and that must have caused it.

Strangely enough, though, in the weeks following her death, my chronic migraines became less frequent, and my chronic exhaustion started to lift. I wasn’t apoplectic with anger anymore, nor was I distracted by what if and maybe I should try…

I felt it most concretely when I threw away the special notepad with all the numbers on it: The local police station, Adult Protective Services, the ASPCA; various doctors, various social workers, various hoarding experts. The crisis was over, the to-do list was done. I wouldn’t need those numbers anymore. None of them had done me any good anyway.

Now that the situation with my mother wasn’t actively causing me distress, I could stop flinching at the thought of her. It’s a lot easier to forgive someone when they quit doing the thing that harmed you.

I was able to love my mother again. I was able to feel sympathy for her. Now that she wasn’t in my face, I could let her back into my heart.

I was able to remember the woman she was when I was much younger, before she started to fall apart, when she was dynamic and beautiful and on top of her game. This is how she wanted to be remembered. This is the person I want to see when I close my eyes and think, “Mom.” This is the Mom I loved.

But that Mom died a long time before her body did. That Mom was fragile to begin with, and she’d been falling apart since the late 90s. Watching this wretched woman walk around in Mom’s skin was too much to bear.

I don’t have to watch that anymore.

*

Nearly three years later, I remain grateful that my mother is dead, and not just for my own sake, but for hers. She wasn’t happy living the way she lived. She didn’t enjoy or treasure her life. She had suffered enough in her 64 years. There wasn’t much ahead for her besides more pain.

I don’t expect you to understand how I feel about my mother’s death – in fact, I hope you don’t. I hope you’re thinking right now, “This ‘Janice Erlbaum’ person is an awful human being. I never want my mother to die.” I know many people who’ve lost their beloved mothers, and they definitely don’t want to hear about how great it is that mine is gone. If you’ve lost your beloved mother, I’m sincerely sorry for your loss. (((You.)))

But if you do understand, that means you have a parent who’s addicted, or mentally ill, or incapable of being a parent in some way, and you are the one I’m writing this for. I want you to know that it gets better when they die.

I want you to know that you can feel relief over your parent’s death. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It doesn’t mean that you never loved them. Your parents are supposed to die before you do; it doesn’t mean you caused their death, either actively or passively, by not “saving” them. It simply means that you were sacrificing a piece of yourself every single day, and now you don’t have to sacrifice anymore.

They had their life. This one is yours.

To my friend whose mom’s gambling addiction drove the family into a shelter; to my friend whose father hit him and wrote bad checks in his name; to all the friends of mine whose parents were too drunk or angry or crazy to take care of them as children, and now want those children to take care of them:

There is freedom ahead. All you have to do is live.

(2015)