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’s death. Ruth Shenstone Harris Pelmas death was a sudden death. Really. Totally and incomprehensibly out of the blue. Or so it seemed to nearly everyone but me. It made sense that everyone was surprised. Just two weeks earlier the family (my sister, her husband and son, my two sons and I, and Ruth) had all gathered at my sister’s home in San Francisco to celebrate Ruth’s 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. 

Yet 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 in a poem that lead the reader, unwaveringly, to a tragedy. I was able to acknowledge that, despite her new sobriety and weight loss, there hovered around her a growing despair. Beneath the activities and outward appearance of a life being fully lived, there was a terminal vacancy. Certain moments during our birthday celebration weekend in San Francisco came forward as epiphanies, clues; moments I’d simply been annoyed with at the time. The night before her early morning flight home she begged me to take her to the airport as if she had something to tell me. Or was it that she knew that would be the last time I would see her, and 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 and then franticness that pervaded my every moment. Then there were my fierce messages which turned to pleading messages as we got closer to April 15^th, 2010. At first I calmly checked in with her. Then more urgently I asked her to call me back. And then, eventually, I frantically pleaded with her. It was as if she was already gone even though, as it would turn out, she was still going through the choreography of her full life.

My sister and I like to say that our parents were ‘relationally challenged’. They didn’t teach us how to be in relationship. Actually, they taught us how to avoid relationship. We both left home in our early teens and essentially never returned. We made full rich lives elsewhere, at first with chosen family then each, eventually, creating families of our own. As I was busy with the first years of motherhood, raising two young boys Ruth and I spent years in a kind of cool constellation, only coming together for the necessary and expected holidays.

Then in 2005, each of us experienced our own cataclysmic events. My father (her husband) died and my marriage ended. Despite neither being sudden, they both left gaping holes in our respective lives. And in the wake of these life-shattering events, she and I found each other in ways I had never imagined was possible, nor even knew to long for. Perhaps we were each so heartbroken and disoriented we were broken-open into possibility. And still, to be clear, I’d have to say that the defining characteristic of our newfound relationship was still a kind of relentless ambivalence. Where before we would go months without reaching out to one another, now we would go weeks. No matter how old we get, we women are always daughters, hungry and in fact requiring the kind of wise and timeless nurturing only mothers can provide. Whereas before, I’d always felt an otherness in relation to my lack of a true mother who mothered me, I experienced a kind of blessed normalcy in this new connection. I felt like I’d finally joined the ranks of daughters with actual mothers who know how to, and even enjoy, mothering. Even though it was far from an intimate relationship, I felt a sense of wholeness in my life.

So when––less than two weeks after our San Francisco birthday celebration, after we’d all returned to our lives––I began to feel a strange sense of dread in relation to her, a newly unfurled instinct to reach toward my mother felt almost shocking. Though when I did reach, she did not reach back and this level of avoidance wasn’t in-keeping even with our old way of relating to each other. When one of us called, the other would at least eventually respond. 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 happening. Despite there being no concrete evidence, I knew deep in some crevasse of my heart that something was under way I could not stop.

But there was no concrete evidence to point to my growing fear. In fact by all ordinary measures, while I was leaving ever-more 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 was doing all the things an avoidant yet civic-minded retiree might do in a tiny town. She’d stopped in at the small congregational church then at the k-12 public school. She’d gone to the Valley Grocery and talked on the phone with some friends. Everything appeared normal. In retrospect, as I continued to piece together the days and then hours and the minutes before her shocking death, I had to face the curious truth that, as it turned out, she was simply not returning my calls.  

I remember the moment the strange sense of dread began––the one that instigated my ever-more urgent calls to her. 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. So, on the beautiful Spring morning of April 10th I was spending time with two 6-month old Friesian filly 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 water bucket in her teeth and managed to dump it on me. At that same moment, as the cold water drenched my vest and seeped through to my skin, the words Wake Up! It’s Coming! rang in my ears. Right then the other sister put her soft black muzzle on my right shoulder and before I knew what was happening she bit me, hard, even drawing a small amount of blood. We were making eye contact the whole time and I saw it in her eyes, a look that so 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, while she hadn’t spoken directly to her, 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?! Even for her, 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 wasn’t she responding?!?

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. She spoke so slowly, as if she was desperate not to have to tell me what she knew. But I already knew. “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, at that point 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 Ruth before they cremated her body. Getting to Keene Valley, 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 finally disappeared, removing herself from the life she could no longer live. A life that was no longer a life.

When the shock wore off and the dust of her death settled, when I began piecing together all the moments in the days prior to her death as well as the ones weeks and months and even years before, I recognized that we’d been on borrowed time with her. She was a woman who had nothing left to live for. She’d lost her husband five years earlier. Then fours years after that, she’d lost the only home she’d ever loved––our beloved summer house––the upkeep being too expensive for her to handle. Not the kind to embrace grand-motherhood, her growing brood of 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 wanted to be included.

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 crafted simply to take herself away from this life––a life that had been painful, full of a deep relentless hunger that remained unsatisfied to her final moments. And yet I knew she was leaving. Somehow, despite her inability to connect in any kind of consistent or intimate way, she’d warned me she was leaving. 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 she would keep up until the very last minute.

Despite the fact that she and I never managed to cultivate an abiding intimate connection, her 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 has a story of its own. And it lives on, long after they are gone.