Laying to Rest: Reflections on my Mother's Life, her Death, and our Relationship

The text below is what I shared at ATD's Laying to Rest Ceremony*.

What do I say about my mother? Our relationship when I was a child was that I adored her, I worshipped her. I was her accomplice, her accessory, and in some ways, very much too involved. Our relationship in my adult life was intense, volatile, and painful.

I am a recovered alcoholic. In my program, we share our “experience, strength, and hope.” This doesn’t necessarily yield what we have been taught to expect from a daughter’s eulogy to her dead mother, so bear with me.

“Laying to Rest.” That is the name that seemed best for this gathering. To me, it implies my hope for everyone here. It is a formal act, a community act, to set someone’s body down gently in its final resting place after her spirit has flown. My community, my ever-evolving tribe, has given me joy and comfort. It’s carried me through many, many years of painful conflict with my mother, 21 years of estrangement from my siblings following the death of my father. It’s held me as I learned from others how to be a friend, a partner, and a mother. It’s held me in deep love as I got sober; and it’s held me as I supported my mother however I was able, before and during her labor of dying. My community has grown wider, deeper, and stronger, as I hope it will continue to do throughout my life.

Because life is a team sport. We do it together, we’re built to do it together, to nurture each other and hold each other up.

As boisterous in her warmth as she was, my mother railed against this fundamental reality of life. At her core she simply couldn’t fathom that people WOULD hold her up, and she thought it was only weakness that would require help. That was for others. She didn’t want it. She wanted to captain the team, to set the rules and the standards, and most of all, to dictate the outcomes. She was impulsive in her generosity, fierce in her love, bold in her storytelling, and devastating in her wrath.

Anne’s grit was inspiring, epic even:

throwing a party for over a hundred people and just cooking it herself, drafting children, and even guests who showed up early to pull it all off.
Sewing the tip of her own severed finger back on.
Being the original “do it all” career woman, becoming a doctor at a time when women simply didn’t do that
Serving thousands of people over a span of decades in a free clinic that couldn’t ever fully meet the need in a country that refuses to provide a healthcare safety net
helping patients, friends, and family with alternative medicine while some called her a nut job
moving heaven and earth for any treatments that might slow the encroachment of my father’s peripheral neuropathy

Sometimes, her application of huge will was a herculean but rear-guard effort:

Fighting as a newly-minted doctor to save her beloved mother and tormenting herself with guilt when failing to do so.

Fiercely holding her husband back from death’s embrace when it was his time
Waging a battle to stave off her own aging—through supplements, diets, plastic surgery, an impressive array of anti-aging products, and–of course–her vigorous regimin of bio-identical hormones.
Hiding her dementia diagnosis. She managed this for months, amassing a library filled with duplicate purchases of books on preventing memory loss and presumably threatening anyone who might have told me in case she was “sent off to the loony bin”
Shaking her fist at death itself, waxing philosophical about a friend’s passage, “Well, we can’t ALL live forever.”

Ultimately, many of her campaigns to control people and outcomes were actively—explosively—destructive:

She lived a zero-sum game, demanding total fealty from anyone around her. In this model, people are either “on the team” (completely on her side, jumping to meet her needs, and in fervent agreement with every opinion) or “the enemy” (really, anyone with a different answer, opinion, or boundary). If enemy, any action of theirs must by definition stem from malign intent. And at some point everyone is “the enemy” because in this view even LOVE itself is limited in this model. She had to ensure that she was “just a wee bit better” in everything, in order to feel for a fleeting moment that she was “enough.”
Digging herself further into a state of embattled enmity by lashing out when she felt “defied,” or “betrayed” whether by friends, employees, or family. Her wrath was relentless, vicious, and sustained.
Directing the actions and the very feelings of everyone around her, including and most particularly, as I experienced it:
- trying to compel her step-children to admit that she was a better mother to them than their own;
- denying my very individuation as a person, and driving to dictate my most intimate life choices, even for decades after those choices were made, even after her own death.

Her attempts to control, impressive or futile or destructive, all rose out of a deep chasm of trauma, a desperate fear of being on the outside, of being rejected or unloved, an aching sense of not being enough. Her words to others could be lacerating, excoriating. Her self talk, which seeped out as dementia progressed, was *unbearably* brutal.

Her trauma emerged in bits and pieces at the end, defying the stories she held so tightly for so long.

Anne was the daughter of a mother who was a nurse in World War I–who, I suspect, carried her own deep scars and trauma. She was distant, demanding, and disparaging.
Anne was cruelly bullied by cousins as a child, taunted as ugly and freakish with her white hair.
She nearly died of scarlet fever as a child, and later, TB.
She survived years of bombing during the war (as some of her friends did not) and severe rationing for years after it.
She persisted through the sleeplessness and brutal stress of medical school, and as a woman doctor in an often actively hostile work environment.
She almost died because of a botched back alley abortion, surviving only because her medical school mates literally stole blood from the hospital to gave her an infusion.

Anne was also raped as a young resident. Beyond the violent assault itself, she lived endured public victim shaming when she joined fellow victims to seek justice. Worse, she held the shame of the event and the shame she felt she had caused her own father by being raped. It was one of the last things she told me she needed to tell me before she died.
She nursed her often raging mother at home for two and a half years, as she frequently reminded me. But she carried the guilt of not saving her through her whole life. Close to the end, this 93-year old woman cried out, wretched, “mummy, why won’t you love me?”

She had also promised her dying mother she would marry “that nice young man” and then, when it came time, bolted to the other side of the ocean to escape fleeing the chiding of her aunties that she would end up a lonely spinster.

She lived all of that before she was 25. Which, as we now know from contemporary neurobiology, is when our frontal cortex is finally fully formed, our gray cells and neural pathways shaped by our very life experience.

So is it a surprise to anyone here, that Anne functioned in a deeply ingrained model of scarcity? Her core identity was that of a survivor. A survivor who didn’t dare show weakness, who couldn’t, ultimately, trust anyone. Even– or perhaps especially– those whom she cherished the most.

We humans are storytellers. We create and maintain a story of ourselves, and it becomes us. Then we find we need to maintain that story as if it was our own survival. Anne turned her considerable will to weaving her story. She would MAKE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that people loved her, that they couldn’t abandon her, that they did what she wanted them to do, that they did what she saw as RIGHT–then, now, and long past her own death… absolutely certain.

Certainty is the direct opposite of trust. Those attempts to ensure certainty crushed out any meaningful relationship in her life. They damned near crushed me, among many others. Ultimately, they left her MORE alone in the world, her worst fears realized in a ghastly, self-fulfilling prophecy.

Trust is a kind of faith, and faith is perhaps a kind of preemptive gratitude, I think.

As my mother drew closer to dying, she softened. Dementia loosened the threads of her tightly-held narrative, frayed and unwound them. The illusion of control faded. The illusion of linear time faded, bringing the stories and the spirits back, in fits and starts, without the strict cohesion she demanded for so long. There was space for something else.

She grew into gratitude, into a degree of trust that I had not ever witnessed in her before. She was held in community, in loving kindness by her caregivers and by dear friends. I was held there, too. As my mother labored to die, she grappled, with fear, shame, guilt, and regret. She shared them with caregivers in night-time whispers, often in Spanish. She relied on them for help she had previously rejected (forcefully, I might add). She confided in them, she asked forgiveness and consolation of them. She sought faith, and found it, with them.

I own my own alcoholism. And, I can truthfully say that I drank AT my mother for many years. I resented her relentless drive to control me. At times I hated her.

When I got sober, I went through all the 12 steps with a fierce determination… yes, I am my mother’s daughter! In AA, these steps, and our amends in particular, are the keystone to our sobriety. We face our darkest thoughts and actions, and make amends for the damage we caused to those around us, and accept the consequences.

This was in sharp contrast to what I learned at my mother’s knee: go on the offensive, never concede, win at all costs, scorch the very earth rather than admit you were in any way at fault.

I went after those amends like my tail feathers were on fire. But through all my years of sobriety, I was stuck when it came to my mother. I prayed for the willingness to even be willing to make an amends to her. And on a phone call in May, out of the blue, it seemed, she suddenly asked me for forgiveness, from her heart. I was able to give it to her, with love, and then ask for her forgiveness, from an open heart. We shared the amends that I never thought would be possible and in an instant my whole world was transformed.

From that reconciliation, from all the little puzzle pieces assembled by all of us around her as she did her labor, from the love and kindness of this litte knot of people who held her death nest, I found myself healing as I hadn’t before. I had managed a kind of abstract compassion for Anne. But now I found myself, for the first time in well over half my life, able to hold so much more than pain and resentment toward her.

I was able to put a cool cloth to her brow, to stroke her hair and hold her hand, to soothe and listen and support her. I was able to sit with her as a loving daughter.

The doors to my heart were thrown open, allowing me to embrace all the good that she brought in the world—I hadn’t been able to hold that before because I felt the memories of joy threatened my armor, my very existence separate from her demands of me.

Now… now, I can hold all of it. The dark and the light of my mother, and of myself.

It was as she grew into gratitude and trust in the people around her that she was able, however haltingly, to lay her catastrophizing to rest. She was able to name her sorrows and her regrets, then lay them to rest. She was able, with help, to lay her deepest fears to rest, and slip off to freedom.

As I said, trust is a kind of faith. Nadia Bolz Weber, a pastrix and a sober woman, said something about faith that rings true to my heart:

“I don’t think faith is given in sufficient quantity to individuals, necessarily. I think it’s given in sufficient quantity to communities. The same with that whole thing like God will not give you more than you can bear. I don’t think God will give you more than a community can bear.”

I’ve felt this truth keenly as we prepared for this event. And now we are here, as a community, to bear our grief, together. We are here, as Debra said, to honor, acknowledge, and lay our sister Anne to rest. I am so grateful to be able to do that with you, and to be now able to relish the loving, powerful reflections from others here today.

And with that, I will invite my dear friend Sonja to share.