Gone

The hole that a death creates does not sit empty; a family's parts are not so discrete. A death is a black hole, consuming and changing every person and relationship it touches.

What they don't tell you when they talk about cancer is that the one who dies isn't the only one who is gone, that the hole in a family that death creates does not sit empty. A family's pieces are not so discrete. It is a black hole, pulling each person into it -- consuming and changing each relationship.

For the first three months after his death, my mother and I were inseparable. We got up each morning and made too much breakfast and served it onto two plates instead of three. We took long walks through the neighborhood; she had lived there for almost six months but didn't even know what was on the next block because she had so rarely left my father's bed side. We dragged ourselves to the gym, only to leave after ten minutes of wandering around aimlessly. We cried together, we stared blankly at the places he used to be, we waded through sorrow as thick and deep as quicksand. We planned his memorial and sat surrounded by seas of family photos, exhausted and rendered immobile by the memories. We laughed at stupid things to avoid the emptiness, then felt guilty for feeling anything but grief. For a week after his death, we even slept in the same bed. I rubbed her head as she cried herself to sleep and she calmed me when I woke, night after night, to dreams of his face being twisted into grotesque perversions. I ached for the day when the memories from twenty-two years of seeing my father's face healthy and glowing would replace the sunken, pained, and emaciated image burned into my mind in last three months. 

"Circling the wagons" -- that's what we called it, and for nearly a month it seemed to be working. The small things -- her disregard for other people's time, her apparent unwillingness to listen to anyone but herself talk -- seemed like normal reactions to the loss she had just suffered. 

Once she adjusts to being without him, she'll start being my mom again, I told myself. 

In the mean time, I did what I could. I moved in to the house they had shared to help with rent. When I heard her crying in the middle of the night, I got up to sit by her side. I did everything I could do to preserve the traditions our family had maintained and to keep our lives as cohesive as they could be -- eating meals together, talking openly and often, and celebrating holidays like we always had. There was a brief respite in which it felt like things would be okay. We explored the solemn beauty of the Pacific Northwest, searching out beaches and hikes and finding solace in our surroundings. We did things that we had never done as a family -- trying new restaurants, drinking wine -- and I discovered my mother in a way I had never known her. Despite my best efforts, however,  the cracks began to show. She simply was not the same person without him. 

Where before she had been thoughtful and kind, now she was calloused and inconsiderate. Her usual tendency toward lateness evolved into a complete inability to keep plans and appointments. The motherly presence I had counted on to comfort and console me had drained away, leaving in its place an adolescent sense of selfishness and entitlement. She spoke often of all of the things she wanted to do now that she was no longer obligated to a spouse and told me how smothered she had felt by my father's intensity and dreams. It seemed that as she healed, empowered by the sense of being independent after 34 years of marriage, her allegiance to our family and to me crumbled away. She seemed excited by the prospect of a new life in which she was the sole protagonist. 

I tried. Tried to be supportive, tried to be strong, tried to be a daughter, therapist, and friend all in one. I hinted and asked and begged and pleaded for her to be my mother, my family, but her grief was too great. And when I missed my dad -- his boundless knowledge, quick intelligence, maddening stubbornness -- my feelings were magnified and lit on fire by her absence. Love, dedication, tradition, the knowledge that someone always had my back... the realization that all the things that made up my perfect family had been constructed by him, not her, was devastating. It was all gone.

I had prepared myself for the pain that I knew would come from losing my him. After seven months of watching him wilt away, I knew that I would wish to hear his voice say my name and that I would fear the day when I would have to walk down the aisle without him. I was ready for the silence from his office and the questions he could no longer answer. My missing him was a dull ache, constant but not cutting. 

But the absence of my family took my breath away. 

The pain of knowing this was everywhere. I hated my friends for not understanding it. I hated my mother for causing it. I searched for a way around it, then drowned in hurt knowing there wasn't one. When she accidentally let it slip that she was "glad to be free, with no husband or children," something in me just let go. 

I was overcome by my fatigue. Too tired to comfort, too tired to work, too tired to grieve or laugh or cry. When I felt emotion getting too close I smothered it with alcohol or the arsenal of pills left over from seven months of my father's pain. He had faced it head on, not touching his medication. I was not so brave. 

I craved dark things. I wanted harder drugs and stronger booze and tattoos and pain, bondage and rough sex. I wanted, I needed something depraved. I drank at work, during breakfast shifts, at home, and late into the night. I stole liquor from the restaurant I worked at, I laughed as I sat next to a cop at a stoplight, chugging Grey Goose out of a water bottle. I told myself that I was partying like everyone else does -- that lying on the floor watching the ceiling spin and being so sick from someone else's prescription that I couldn't stand up was just part of being a young adult. That it was fun. 

Oddly enough, I was popular; my air of flippancy somehow translated to cool. I was willing to try anything and was always looking for more -- more fun, more crazy, bigger, better -- so being around me was an adventure. And since I knew that I had nothing inside, and I countered by making my exterior as charismatic as possible. I sparkled with wit, smoldered with sex appeal, and charmed everyone I met, all masking the fact that my soul was numb. 

And so we lived. My mom drifted in one direction and me in another; our shared past was not strong enough to keep us together. My father's absence had pulled us in, then sent us spinning erratically into our own grief. 

Author's Note

In progress. This is a first draft.