Life-in-Progress

Today is the 20th anniversary of my mother’s death.

Every year January 27th is a day of reflection for me because of this, but some years are obviously a little bit more reflective than others. Predictably, the 20 year mark is one of those.

Background: On December 30th, 1988, my mother got test results back that explained why she’d spent a couple of months with a lingering cold/flu-type bug that she couldn’t seem to shake. Without sharing the details over the phone, her doctor called her and told her to get to the hospital ASAP so that he could run some more tests. I was baby-sitting at the time, but got a semi-hysterical call from my younger sister alerting me to the news. When I got home that night my father told me the results: she had leukemia. For the next 28 days, life was a blur and I honestly remember very little in the way of detail. One of the mercies of things happening so quickly is that it makes it impossible to wallow at the time. The downside, of course, is that it also doesn’t give you time to process through everything. Twenty-eight days and three rounds of chemotherapy later, she died just after 7:00 a.m. on January 27, 1989. It was five weeks before my 14th birthday and four weeks after my sister’s 12th birthday.

Of course, twenty years later there is absolutely nothing that bears any resemblance to what life was then — not in myself, my family or the world at large. And so while I have several dear friends who have also lost their mothers and who frequently feel a vacancy in their life because of it, I end up sounding a little callous because I do not feel the same way. Naturally there is a part of me that would like to have a mother. But the fact is that, after twenty years, I am not even entirely sure what role a mother could or would play in my life. I have become so used to it, that the idea is a bit like me asking, “What if we lived on the moon?” Flights of fancy aside, the fact is that it is too far out of my frame of reference for me to have a meaningful understanding of what it would be like — good or bad.

However, this weekend I was playing with my new scanner and began scanning in some pictures that my maternal grandmother gave me a couple of years ago. They have been sitting in a box since then, and while I have cracked them open to look at a few times, for the most part I don’t think much about them. Given the proximity to today, it may not have been the greatest time for me to start sorting through them, but it did spark some interesting memories and make me think about a few things. So, in the interest of considering the gulf that exists between the 13-year-old girl whose world was turned upside down in twenty-eight days and the 33-year-old woman with a husband, a dog and her own business, I have been pondering the lingering impact my mother has had on me.

There is Nothing More Toxic Than Regret
My mother and I had very different personalities in far too many ways to count, but one of the lessons that is deeply ingrained in me is one I learned from watching her: there is nothing worse than a life filled with regret. And we are far more likely to regret the things we did NOT do than the things we did.

People have often commented that for someone who readily admits when I screw up as much as I do, that I don’t seem to show a lot of regret over ill-fated decisions. My philosophy is and has always been that I will make the best possible decision based on the information I have at my disposal at the time. If more information comes to light later that demands a re-evaluation, then (assuming circumstances allow it) I will adjust accordingly. If I’ve past the point of no return and it’s a done deal, I don’t kick myself over it, I don’t wallow in “if only!” and I don’t bemoan where I am at now.

I am a firm believer in learning from your mistakes, and I believe that if you can’t find a lesson in something you’ve done then you aren’t looking hard enough. But I also firmly believe that lamenting how you got to where you are doesn’t do you a damn bit of good. If you need to re-assess and re-group, then do it. But whining about “shoulda, coulda, woulda” just pisses me off.

No One Else Can Make You Happy
My mother had a cross stitch wall hanging when I was growing up, of a cartoon-like rabbit giving his sweetie a bouquet of flowers. Above the picture it read: “You’re nobunny till somebunny loves you.” Cute though that may be, I detested that sentiment from the time I first stopped long enough to realize what it meant. And I’m eternally frustrated when I see people (especially women it seems, because for some reason parents seem to think it’s ok to raise their daughters to believe things like that) who subscribe to the idea that without a partner they are worthless.

Even more insidious, though, is the idea that someone else is capable of fundamentally “making” you happy. It’s just like a woman who gets mad at a woman who “stole” her husband (or vice versa). Ridiculous. We are responsible for ourselves. We make our own choices and we live with our own consequences. If you make choices in your life that have taken you down a road that you have discovered is not making you happy, don’t blame the guy who laid the asphalt.

Someone who can’t be happy with and by themselves can’t be happy with anyone else either. You have to start with you. Relying on someone else is hiding in distraction and white noise in the hope you can induce amnesia to help drown out the fact that you are unhappy with how you think of yourself and your life.

Our Legacy Is In the Who, Not the What
The day of my mother’s funeral was a surreal experience for me — for any number of reasons. But one of the clearest memories I have was of the crowd. For someone who was — to me — “just Mom,” the crowd was staggering. There were nearly 300 people packed into a very large church, that had standing room only. Until that moment, it never occurred to me how many lives my mother had actually touched.

It took me a long time to realize it, but I was trying to hold on to my mother with a house full of “things” that “reminded” me of her. And they were slowly suffocating me — the furniture, the knick knacks, the stuff that I clung to out of some misguided sentimental notion that it would keep something of her in my life. When I finally realized that no one’s life can (or should) be measured materially, I was able to let go of all of it. In March 2005 when I left California for New York, I had done something I never imagined was possible: I had only my own personal items (clothes, jewelry, etc.). I was free of the albatross I had created out of trying to use material items as a substitute for memories.

I think about this often these days, thanks largely (strangely enough) to the ubiquity of social networking. Most of us rarely stop and think about the broad span of people with whom we’ve come into contact over the years, because on a daily basis, our circle of contacts is much smaller. But, little-by-little, over time it morphed a bit here and a bit there, until five years later, the people you spend the most amount of time with are completely different. Our lives change, and the circles of people with whom we interact often reflect that — hence why most of us are not still super close with the person who was our best friend in high school.

For me the interesting thing about looking at my list of “friends” on Facebook is that it’s a bit like the feeling I recall so vividly from the day of my mother’s funeral: “Wow. That’s a lot of people!” When I start looking at each person I can recognize that each of them belonged/belongs to a certain time or place in my life — a job, a school, a town, a social group, etc. — and they certainly did not all have huge roles in my life, but seeing them all in one long list is something I find comforting, especially if I’m getting settled into a new town or questioning how good a job I’ve done maintaining the important relationships in my life.

It’s common for people to fantasize about their own funeral: Who will show up? What will they say? Will my ex be a wailing, hysterical mess? Will my sister actually wear make-up? Everything from the somber to the petty, which is why the fantasy makes such good fodder. But I think that the thing that everyone ultimately wants to know is: what was the impact of my life on those around me? What was compelling to me about my mother’s funeral was how the actions of your life dovetail together to create your legacy — and in most cases, they are born of small gestures that you didn’t necessarily think would be that big a deal at the time.

So thanks to my mother, I have three questions that I ask myself almost every single day:

1. “If given the chance to make that decision again, given the same information, would I chose differently?” If the answer is no, then I consider myself in good shape.
2. “What do I need to do for myself to be happy?” And then I do not wait for someone else to give it to me — especially if I haven’t told them what it is. (A common habit of women in relationships: the assumption that a poor confused husband is a mind-reader.)
3. “Am I being the type of friend/spouse/daughter/employee that I would want?” If so, good. If not, why and what do I need to do to change it?

We all take a lot of lessons from our parents (or the people who raised us), both good and bad. And most of us have at least one or two moments in our adult life where we hear a phrase come out of our mouth or see a picture someone took of us and think, “Dear God! When did I turn into my mother/father!??!” Even those of us who like and respect our parents are often horrified at that notion, if only because it makes us feel older than we like to think of ourselves as being.

Some parents are easier to take negative lessons from. The mental lists we make as teenagers that start with, “Things I will NEVER do when I have kids…” never entirely go away, and we measure much of our own success by how few of our parents mistakes we see ourselves repeating. Other parents are easier to canonize and romanticize in our memories a bit, especially after they are gone. Like memories of high school, the more time passes the more the bitterness fades and the stronger the nostalgia gets.

In the end, of course, the natural course of life dictates that most of us will bury our parents. There are few things in this world filled with more emotional landmines, because parents are often such sources of emotional conflict — there are times we worship them, and there are times we hate them. And most of the time how we feel about them has far more to do with us than it really does with them.

Yes, I was a bossy ENTJ even as a child.

So, twenty years after she died, I comfort myself with the knowledge that I learned very good lessons from some of the things that my mother found hardest to deal with in her life. But as I look back at those pictures from my grandmother, I see two cute little girls with their (shockingly young-looking) Mommy and Daddy. In most of those pictures we were laughing, playing, celebrating and having fun. Camping trips and picnics, snowy winters in Lake Tahoe, Christmas presents, birthday cakes and Easter Egg hunts are all captured on fading, discolored paper.

But because I’ve trained myself to think of my mother in the context of the lessons I learned from or because of her, I often forget that she was just a 39-year-old woman with a husband, two daughters, parents, a house full of pets, a business and nearly 300 people who showed up at her funeral because she had touched their lives. In the end, if I have a funeral with even half as many people who care about me, I guess I’ll be in pretty good shape.

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