to hold my mother’s fear
elias lowe
My mother’s voice trembles. She raises her hands above her face and shakes them back and forth, fingers wide and strained, making an “eee ooo” squeamish sound. “Pray for me, pray for me,” she says after my stepfather, driving the golden Toyota, reminds me to be grateful for the pain I’ve just complained about. He says, according to recent studies, I am less likely to get Alzheimer’s since I have consistent menstruation periods. “I’m in the opposite boat,” my mom growls from the passenger seat as we pull up the drive to Pittsburgh Airport. She reminds us once again that she bled irregularly throughout her life. “Lucky you,” I cackle and crouch as my ovaries are strangled by an invisible stone. We’re on our way to Mexico City to meet a family friend. On this trip, I notice my mother’s increased obsession with the health of her body, her paranoia about death running deep through our days.
“In that case, just take me out on a cold, cold day and walk me into the woods and leave me there,” she says to me as we approach the topic of her acquiring some type of neurodegenerative disease. This conversation is far too dark, too soon. “I really don’t like to talk about this type of thing,” I say, over and over, which elicits literally no change in the frequency of her mentions of death and aging.
My mother fears death like no one I know. Her mortality is always present. But perhaps her greatest fear of all is developing dementia. She can’t stand the thought of my sister and I caring for her, even though we’ve been caring for her all our lives.
Dementia and Alzheimer’s impact more and more people every year. Every 16 seconds someone develops Alzheimer’s. Between the years 2000 and 2017, deaths from heart failure went down and deaths from Alzheimer’s increased 145%. I imagine how these numbers ring in the head of my mother, how they wiggle and float on her yellow ceiling as she fails to fall asleep most nights. She tosses and turns for hours before taking Trazodone and Klonopin to keep the stats from ringing loud. Each night she waits, prays, listens to podcasts before taking the medication that may weaken her liver, she reminds me. I made the horrible, deeply regretted mistake of telling her that sleep deprivation can impact the likelihood of developing dementia, which, of course, worsened her life-long insomnia. To hell with my liver, I need my brain, she whispers to herself as she tosses a pill down.
My mind is now crowded with the image of me, my mother, and a winter day. I already have a location in my mind’s eye, as if abandoning her in the woods were a feasible option. My mom, in my mind, looks just as she does now, of course. She’s wearing black yoga pants and faded brown boots. Her navy blue coat is half zipped up, with a piece of duct tape on the left sleeve barely holding in the cotton that begs to pile out, looking perfectly strange. Her golden-gray hair is half held up in a ponytail, half tangled at the side of her head. We walk down the hill in Kingsley Park where my sister and I went sledding as children. I hold her by her arm and we walk through the snowy opening in the trees that swallow us in. The ground is pure white. Huge, swirling snowflakes fall from the sky like a winter wonderland. My scarf flies backward behind our bodies in the wind. I begin to cry. We walk.
In addition to her coat, there’s always a new duct-taped “fixed” object appearing in the house. First, it’s the toilet seat. The toilet seat in the purple bathroom connected to my mom’s room has been stained for as long as I can remember. It’s one of those toilet seats that always looks like there is pee on it, consistently causing mild aversion, until one realizes it’s permanently marked and harmless. I never commented on the seat and I’m not sure that anyone else did either. But one day, I came home to find blue-penguin duct-tape covering it. “Isn’t that fun?” she would ask me later. Next were the cushions on the flimsy old kitchen chairs. Blue-penguin duct-tape all over her house. Now the penguins march with her on her ripped coat sleeve, down all the roads she ever walks on, down the snow-covered trails in Kingsley Park.
My mother is “chaotic-good.” Her heart is too big for her body. It literally beats far too fast, which she doesn’t let me forget. “My heart rate is too fast. My heart rate is too fast. My resting heart rate is over 90 bpm. Did you know that?” She asks me all the time. I always look away. “That’s normal, it’s healthy, it’s within the safe range,” I assure her, over and over, as if it’s true, as if I know.
The traffic is deep and dense in Mexico City. The week we are there, it’s the pilgrimage of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe is the most visited Catholic pilgrimage site in the entire world. People walk and crawl on their hands and knees for many dozens of miles, for many dozens of days, to the shrine of “Our Lady,” as a commandment and commitment to their faith. Enormous paintings and statues of Mary are tied to their backs as they crawl and sob along the side of the highways. The sound of their weeping is both moving and disturbing. My stepfather insists that we, too, are pilgrims—which we, of course, are not.
I listen to music in the back seat of our friend’s car after he picks us up from the airport and watch the pilgrims moving in every direction. The singer of Krill commiserates with me through my headphones in his song “Mom”: but if god brings you joy, then by all means, go with god. why would I stop you? why would I stop you?
My mother’s fear of death feels so expansive and pathetic that I impulsively appease it with any means necessary. Often, I talk about heaven or the divine connection with God that is to come. “I know, I know, I will be with Jesus,” she says with such certainty. But my mom has doubted her faith plenty. Once she told me that when she was young, she slept at the ocean in New Jersey all alone, looking for a sign from God. She sat on the shore as the waves tumbled, profoundly loud as the salty water stacked and crashed, accentuating the silence of the universe, which is sometimes composite with my definition of God.
“Disbelieving is toilsome. It can be a pleasure for adolescent brains with energy to spare, but hanging on to it later saps and rigidifies,” Peter Schjeldahl writes in his own reflection of his terminal lung cancer. I don’t know what this means for me. But I am even more eager to assure her, to neutralize the saps and soften the rigidity of her aging bones. When she says she will be with Jesus, I nod with the certainty of 100%, while believing with 8% of me that any of it is true.
This is not a lie that hurts, though. When my mother and I talk about the politics of religion, I speak my truth. I don’t believe in Jesus. I don’t believe in idols, although I might believe in something. X thing is oppressive, Mom, while X thing is liberating, I explain. I remind her that I will never worship any male figure any more than I already worship masculinity, accidentally, quietly, in passing moments on the street, in my bed, in my dreams. But when she talks about her death, there is only Jesus—love and Jesus, and I am complacent. I must allow her this.
I turn death into a positive, wonderful thing when talking to my mother. It’s comical, almost absurd how I insist. “Don’t fear death, Mom, it’s the birth of eternal life and peace. You should look forward to it!” The corners of my mouth are forced upwards and I look toward the horizon. Her worry and grief are far too big for me. This helps mask my own fear, too.
When my good friend died when I was in high school, it was sudden and in a car. From this, I know grief. The grief was all at once—less grueling, awkward, and anxiety inducing than my mother’s aging. But this grief filled me up as if I were an empty glass.
It goes like this: You don’t even know you have a drop of space in you. You think you are a full human. You don’t know that you aren’t already filled by the other heartbreaks, pains, coughs, and colds. But you are, in fact, entirely empty and ready to be turned new. Now each drop of your hollow body is filled up, in a flash, with grief. It is impossibly full and it might burst. Death, death, death.
My mom’s processing and ongoing anticipated grief of dying goes more like this: death, death, organic smoothie, trip on a plane to Mexico City, death, novel about divorce, duct-tape, death, death, supplements, death.
I know that grief is big but I try to convince myself that grief is not pure bad. And while I’m not certain of the promise of eternal heavenly life, I am not convinced that death is “bad” either. I’m aware of how unique our society is in the way it has identified death as the ultimate worst thing that can happen. I’m also aware of how the silencing around death is so related to the other violence of the world—the rise and spread of global capitalism and its cultural hegemony. Death, in modernity, has been gradually separated, erased, and disappeared out from our everyday lives and rituals. We try to pretend it doesn’t exist, which makes it that much more terrifying. Through politics and markets made up of myths of infinity and linear, ongoing progress, we have projected ourselves as necessarily, materially, ongoing, too.
We keep death far away: hidden inside medical, funerary, insurance, or government industries. While walking the streets in Mexico, I notice how different Mexican shops are from the U.S. in the way that they bleed out onto the sidewalk. I see many funerary stores with visible coffins of all different sizes and colors: bright blue miniature coffins and huge mahogany ones. I’m almost shocked, briefly offended at the sight of them. How can I integrate the pain these symbols hold into my afternoon walk? How can I turn the grief into something that is neither rescued by god nor hopelessly lost to the harrowing winds of tragedy?
My mother and I are getting off a plane together, returning to Pittsburgh, and I’m already standing in the aisle, anxious to get away from the smoky fumes of the plane. People are scrambling all around, knocking each other’s elbows, reaching toward the overhead bins. Over my mom’s shoulder I watch her click on an email with the subject “How to overcome fear of aging,” when my grandmother calls her on FaceTime.
My grandmother has some form of dementia that hasn’t been diagnosed, but she lives in a state of bliss, in song. The iPad which she calls from in the nursing home is never angled correctly. We can see her only from her mouth down. Her ancient mouth opens wide, disgustingly, letting out laughter and tender words. “I love you,” she says, and we repeat it back. And I lean away, walk forward, do what I can to escape the view of the camera, as if it would make me actually absent and far away from the awkward grief that is the relationship between my grandmother and me.
My mother’s fear of death stems from the delusional, cultural dream of immortality, combined with a ferocious love of her children and of life. I know that her father’s sudden death five years ago and her mother’s subsequent, steep demise into illness and dementia have accentuated her fears. But despite my mom’s life-long depression and anxiety, her love of life is impossibly grand. Her heart is so beautifully impacted by the subtle things: the colors of the buildings in the sunlight, the rough and low sound of Spanish-speaking voices in the taqueria, the length of my hair. The sensual details. These are, in fact, what make human life, human. Full in its aliveness and unique to other conceptions of existence that my mom can fathom, even in her faith. It’s cold in Pittsburgh, so we stand just inside the door to escape the bite of the wind as we wait for a ride from the airport. “I just need to get you and your sister into your nineties, and then I’ll be able to die,” my mom says after she has an emergency trip to the bathroom, her bladder noticeably weakened by years. I throw my head back in laughter and we cringe and smile at the Christmas music playing, and I cringe and smile at my mom’s aging, as tender as it is haunting.
