By Liz Petrone
My mother died when I was 37 weeks pregnant.
She took her own life.
Three weeks later I gave birth on my bathroom floor to her last grandson, a baby boy with her blue eyes that she would never meet. It was a miracle, his birth, a gift that was the glue that held my family together through our tragedy, and yet still, I became obsessed with death. It’s like my mother died and all at once it hit me: my own mortality and the mortality of everyone around me: my husband, my kids, my family and friends and everyone I cared about and even those I didn’t. I’m sure I knew that death was inevitable before, but I didn’t think about it all the time like I did now. I would sit in a restaurant, trying to have a date night with my husband, and fade out of the conversation and into an inner diatribe on how much longer the older couple at the table next to us could possibly have, and how could they be just sitting there eating fried clams when they were going to die??
I was holding a newborn, the symbol of all that is fresh and new and pure, and still I was death-ruminating. It was embarrassing, and paralyzing, and made a lovely cocktail of dysfunction when mixed with the fresh sting of grief. If I thought too long about it, I could feel my heartbeat accelerate and my palms sweat, like I could see time rushing by, the edges of the present blurry with the speed of it all. And at the end was this, well, END.
How did other people do it, I wondered, wanting to stop people I only half-knew at neighborhood events or the grocery store or the school drop-off line and ask, frantic: What about you? What have you lost?
And more importantly, how did you go on? Do you think about it every day? Do you wear it like a stone around your neck, heavy, pulling your gaze down so you never see the sun; or do you shine out the hole that loss left in your heart, lighting the path for those of us who can’t yet look up?
And if you are the second, will you teach me?
And then one night, after the other children were in bed and the house was quiet, I lay in bed and nursed the baby. And I felt her. It sounds crazy but I knew my mother was there with me and my baby. When she was alive our interactions were often stiff, cold, neither of us able to reach or even see each other around the mass of trauma that sat in between the two of us. But this was different. Her presence felt soft and warm and easy, like the best parts of both of us together.