A Mother's Death Never Dies

No matter what kind of relationship we have with our mothers, their loss is still an unfathomable one. Fourteen years later I still miss her, even though I never had her.

Today is the 14th anniversary of my mother, Ruth Shenstone Harris Pelmas’, death. It was a sudden death. Really. Totally and incomprehensibly out of the blue. Or so it seemed to everyone but me. In fact, just two weeks earlier we had all gathered–my sister, her husband and son, my mother, and my sons and I–at my sister’s home in San Francisco to celebrate her 75^th birthday. She had given up drinking and had lost some weight. My sister and I shared relief that perhaps she was taking care of herself more, perhaps her mood would be better, more stable, less brittle. 

Within two weeks she was dead.

In my fastidious forensic postmortem in the days and weeks and even months after her death, I was able to weave together a story. Like the lines of a poem that lead the reader, unwaveringly, to a tragedy, a fait accompli. Like how, despite her new sobriety and weight loss, there was an unavoidable, growing, terminal despair beneath it all. Like how she looked at me the night before her early morning departure that weekend, and begged me to take her to the airport as if she had something to tell me, or as if that would be the last time I would see her, or she me.

Mom and the love of her life, Roy, her husband, 1962

 And then there were the strange occurrences that took place between my return to Boulder and her death 10 days later. The premonitions of tragedy, the urgency in my heart. And, as we got closer to April 15^th, 2010, the phone messages I left for her, first just calmly checking in with her, then more urgently asking her to call me back and then, eventually, frantically pleading with her.

My sister and I like to say that our parents were relationally challenged. They did not teach us how to be in relationship. Actually, they taught us how to avoid relationship. We both left home in our early teens and really never returned. We made full rich lives elsewhere, with chosen family. Yet after my father (her husband) died and after my own divorce, both happening in 2005, perhaps my mother and I were so heartbroken we were tenderized into possibility. By some benevolence of the Universe we managed to circle back around to create a sort of relationship. But for that statement to be accurate I’d have to say that the defining characteristic of it was ambivalence. We were ambivalently attached and could go weeks without contact. 

So, when my mother didn’t return my initial calls, it wasn’t particularly surprising. But then when she didn’t return my third and fourth and fifth calls––the ones that simply said, “just call me and leave a message. I won’t pick up. Just let me know you’re okay”––I knew something was going down. Despite there being no concrete evidence, I knew deep in some crevasse of my heart that something was under way I could not stop.

And there really was no concrete evidence. In fact by all ordinary measures, while I was leaving frantic messages, she was fine. Despite the premonitions, right up until the minute she stepped into her shower and left this world, falling to the floor and blocking the drain while the shower water ran first hot then cold over her bluing body, she was living her normal life. She did all the things one does in a tiny town, stopped in at the church and at the school, went to the Valley Grocery, talked on the phone with her friends. Everything was normal. She just wasn’t returning my calls.  

I was prompted to start calling her because of a moment that even a tepid psychic might say was all in my head, a mere flight of female fancy. I had been back in Boulder for a few days post San Francisco. Despite being a dead broke single mother of two boys, I was desperate to work the miracle of having horses in my life again and so, on the beautiful Spring morning of April 10th I was spending time with two Friesian fillies, 6-month old sisters. I was in their paddock playing with them as they did their sibling thing, tender and joyful, when one of them picked up a half-full bucket of water in her teeth and managed to dump it on my head. And the words Wake Up! It’s Coming! called out ominously from behind her playful whinnying. Right then the other sister put her soft black muzzle on my right shoulder and before I knew what was happening she actually bit me, hard. She drew blood. We were making eye contact the whole time, and I saw it in her eyes, the look that clearly said I don’t mean to hurt you right now but what is coming is going to hurt far more than this and you need to get ready…Though it made no sense, I knew they were talking about my mother. And that’s when I started calling her, leaving messages that became increasingly frantic.

Mom, Me and my younger son Simon, 2000

I had been dating a man for a few months at that point. I remember sitting on the edge of the bed at 10pm on April 14^th. It would have been midnight in the Adirondacks, where my mother was. “If I call the state troopers and ask them to check on her they’ll just get her out of bed, right? And that will just scare her and probably make her angry. I’m just overreacting, right?” He assured me that if we didn’t hear from her by the next morning we would do the next thing, whatever that next thing was.

By the next morning I hadn’t heard from her so I decided to call Elizabeth, the neighbor, who had been lifelong friends with Mom and knew her strange relational habit of dropping off the face of the Earth for short periods of time. Elizabeth said she’d check into it and get back to me. Several minutes later she called and reported that Mom had been spotted in the Valley Grocery just that morning and everything seemed fine. At that point I was pissed. Why aren’t you responding to me?! This behavior was definitely out of the ordinary. I’d left three urgent messages letting her know I’d gotten many repeated and scary premonitions that she was in trouble and I just needed to know she was okay. Why hadn’t she responded?

I waited another half hour and then called Elizabeth back and asked her if she would just go over to Mom’s house to check on her. She said she would. Twenty minutes later she called me back. If a voice could be ashen, Elizabeth’s was. “I don’t know how to tell you this CC….Your mother….she’s….dead….In the shower….There is water everywhere. It’s just so awful. I’m so, so, so sorry….” According to the coroner she’d only been dead about half an hour.

Her lunch dishes were stacked neatly next to the kitchen sink, waiting to be loaded into the dishwasher. Her clothes were laid out on the bed, tickets on the bureau, for the afternoon opera event she was scheduled to go to in Plattsburgh. Up until half an hour earlier, everyone in town had seen a woman whose life was in its normal flow. Yet 2300 miles away, a daughter was having another experience. A life coming to an end. A life no longer able to be lived.

We did not do an autopsy. We saw no point. The gist was that my mother died of a sudden cardiac event. I remember the word ‘thoracic’ in there somewhere, but can’t remember in what context. I rushed to get to the morgue on time––to get plane tickets and get my two young sons situated with their dad, so I could be with my mother before they cremated her body. Getting to Keene, New York from Boulder, Colorado is definitely a planes, trains and automobiles sort of affair. And despite speaking with the coroner multiple times, letting him know I didn’t want my mother cremated before I got there, I arrived about an hour too late. I never saw her. Never got to simply see and say goodbye to her body. Because of the nature of her departure, the days leading up to it, the fact that I seemed to be in constant communication with her despite not receiving a single phone message from her, there’s a way I can almost tell myself she didn’t really die. She just disappeared.

And yet, when the shock wore off and the dust of her death settled, I was not at all surprised. She was a woman who had nothing left to live for. She’d lost her husband, our father, five years earlier and then she’d lost the only home she’d ever loved––our beloved summer house––four years later, the upkeep being too expensive for her to handle. Not the kind to embrace grand-motherhood, her grandchildren were no comfort to her. Her only two daughters lived across the country and were, as we’d always been, deeply woven into lives of our own making. Lives that didn’t really include her, because she’d never included herself.

My favorite picture of Ruth, when she was in her early 40’s

I came to see the shower stall as the makeshift portal she’d constructed to simply take herself away from this life––a life that had been painful, full of deep longings despite the fact that she had no capacity to participate in a relationship with the subjects of them. It took a few years to acknowledge that, somehow, I knew she was leaving. Somehow, she told me. The opera tickets and clothes laid out, her morning visit to the Valley Grocery, and perhaps even her newfound sobriety and assurances she was healthier than she’d been in a while, were all simply the choreography we keep up until the very last minute. We are alive until we are dead. Ruth tried to live until she died.

No matter what kind of relationship we have with our mothers, their loss is still an unfathomable one. Fourteen years later I still miss her, even though I never had her. Our mothers are archetypal, practical and essential. Whether they’re able to fully occupy their place in our lives, that place seems to have a story of its own. And it lives on, long after they are gone.