I Know Something About Death Now

I’ve come to realize that I survived the worst day of my life—and then the second worst. The worst day of my life was the day my mother died. The second was the day after, because it was my first full day without her. For the first time, there was no more maybe. Maybe she’ll turn a corner. Maybe this treatment will work. Maybe she’ll pull through. Maybe we’ll get more time.

For as long as I can remember, I feared the day my mother would die. Losing her felt like the one thing I could never survive. I imagined it. Anticipated it. Even grieved it in some distant, abstract way. I thought I might find her collapsed at home, in her bathroom or her bedroom. I imagined a rush to the hospital, some terrible final moment, and then she would be gone. I never imagined she would die days into a hospital stay, days into treatment, when we had gone there believing we were still trying to make her better.

Hope had been such a constant presence in our lives that I don’t think I realized how much we depended on it until it disappeared. Hope was in the way my mother continued to get dressed every morning, in her silk dresses and jewelry, with a full face of makeup by nine o’clock, even in the days leading up to her death. It was in her doctors encouraging us that the new chemotherapy could work, that she could be better by summer. It was in the brief periods when her oxygen stabilized, and in watching the number on the little monitor clipped to her finger rise when she took a good breath. It was in my phone ringing first thing in the morning, because if she was calling me, I knew she was awake and had successfully made it through another night.

Hope was in the sound of her voice when she finally agreed to the new chemotherapy infusion and we began imagining life after it. And then, only days before she died, her numbers started to improve. I cried with joy. I thought we might get her cancer back into remission. She appeared to be getting better, and I began sleeping through the night again because I believed I was going to have more days with my mother.

We had watched her defy expectations before. Why wouldn’t she do it again?

Looking back now, I can see that she had been dying for months. Her world had been quietly shrinking. Her oxygen needs were increasing. Her body was becoming more limited. But I couldn’t face the truth then, and in a way, I’m grateful I couldn’t. Hope allowed me to keep living alongside her instead of spending our remaining time anticipating her death. If I had known we only had days or weeks left, I don’t know that I would have been able to bear it.

But when she was actually dying, I realized something I hadn’t allowed myself to see before.

She was ready.

That morning, she told the nurse she was ready. There were things she had needed to finish, she had needed to know we would be okay. And somehow, by then, I think she knew we would be. She didn’t need to hold on anymore. And she didn’t want to.

I had always imagined death as a door slamming—abrupt, harsh, final. It didn’t feel that way at all. The closest thing I can compare it to is birth.

We played The Beatles. We cried. We told her we loved her. We encouraged her. There was something almost ancient about it—the intensity, the collective emotion, the rhythm of it all. Her breathing. Her body. Even the way she lay there. It resembled labor. She couldn’t speak, but I knew she could hear us. Somewhere in those hours, I began to feel that we weren’t only witnessing a death. We were helping someone we loved through a transition we couldn’t follow her into.

As her body began to shut down, it grew colder. Her heart rate stopped and started. Her breathing changed and intensified. We watched the body that had fought so extraordinarily hard to stay alive begin, system by system, to let go. The final hours were agonizing. She was no longer conscious, and there are images from those hours that I know I will carry for the rest of my life.

And then, just like that, she was gone.

I felt two things that I would once have thought impossible to feel together: agony and relief. Not relief that she had died. Never that. Relief that the dying was over. Relief that the body I loved was no longer struggling.

As agonizing as those hours were, I am eternally grateful I was there. I consider it one of the great privileges of my life that I was able to be beside my mother as she died. She had brought me into this world, and now I was there as she left it. There was something circular about that. It felt as though she was returning to the same place I had come from when I was born.

She was there when I arrived. I was there when she left.

I don’t know how else to explain what happened in that room. It was the deepest pain I have ever felt, and it was also profoundly beautiful. I didn’t know those two things could exist at the same time.

I felt her soul leave her body.

I realize how that sounds. Before this happened, I might have questioned it myself. But I felt it. And in that moment, something changed in me. The questions I had carried about what happens when we die became much quieter. I don’t know what comes after death. I couldn’t possibly explain it. I only know that after watching my mother die, I no longer believe the body is the entirety of a person.

And then came the second worst day of my life.

I don’t remember much about that first morning without her. I remember the agony more than I remember the details. For the first time, there was nothing left to wait for. There would be no next doctor, no next treatment, no improved number on the oxygen monitor, no phone call telling me she was awake, no better morning. The worry was over, but so was the hope. For the first time in my life, my mother was no longer somewhere in the world.

It was over.

Eventually, I got out of bed. I washed my face. My brother and I went to our mother’s apartment, and we started doing what needed to be done.

My mother was a do-er. She always had a list. So we began with hers.

She died on a Thursday. By Sunday, she had been cremated. Everything had been put into motion. And then we didn’t stop. From the day she died until we moved out of her apartment nearly one hundred days later, there was always something that needed to be handled, arranged, signed, packed, decided or finished.

Looking back, I wonder whether that was another way she had prepared us without any of us realizing it. She had spent our entire lives showing us what to do when life required something of you. You get up. You wash your face. And you begin.

Since she died, I have felt her differently. Sometimes within me. Sometimes around me. Occasionally I joke to myself that I’ve lost all privacy. I don’t feel that she is gone in the way I spent my entire life fearing she would be gone. I feel that she is no longer here in the same form. That distinction has become incredibly important to me.

I can still close my eyes and remember what her hair smelled like and how it felt against my face. I always kissed her in the same place, between her eyebrow and her hairline, and I can still feel the texture of her skin there. In the hospital, I would sit beside her and rub her legs, the same way she rubbed mine when I was a little girl. I remember how her hands felt inside mine. I can’t summon every detail of her visually anymore. Memory doesn’t seem to work that way. But I can close my eyes and almost feel her hand in mine.

The body can disappear before the feeling of the body does.

Her death has also allowed me to see her differently. When someone is your mother, they are simply your mother. You love them beyond measure, but you also argue with them. You get annoyed. You disagree. You call them when something goes wrong. You expect them to answer. They exist so closely to you that it can be difficult to step far enough away to see the entirety of the person.

Now I can.

I always knew my mother was kind and beautiful. But now I see the force that she was. I see her strength. Her generosity. The way she lifted people. The way she inspired them. The way she made the world better simply by being in it. And more than anything, I see how fiercely she lived.

Her doctors used to say she treated cancer like it was a walk in the park. She defied statistics and expectations. It baffled them that someone could be so sick for so long and still have that much energy, passion and determination to live. Not just exist. Live.

She never took her life for granted. She celebrated it. And strangely, I think I understand that better now than I did while she was alive.

Death has taught me things about my mother that life couldn’t. It has also taught me things about myself.

For my entire life, I believed losing her would be the end of me.

And then it happened.

I stood there. I witnessed it. I felt it.

And I’m still here.

There is something about surviving the thing you were certain you couldn’t survive that changes you. Not because the pain suddenly becomes meaningful. And not because suffering is some gift we’re supposed to be grateful for. I would choose to have my mother here every time. But I can’t. And that’s the part of death I’m still learning.

Death feels less like someone disappearing to me and more like losing access to them. It’s like the house you grew up in being sold to someone else. The house still exists. You can picture every room. You remember how the light came through the windows. You know exactly how it felt to walk through the front door. But you can’t go inside anymore.

That’s what I miss.

The access.

I want to call her. I want her opinion. I want to hear her laugh. I want to tell her something completely insignificant and hear what she has to say. I want the ordinary things. And I can’t have them.

That is where I feel the loss most.

But I’ve also begun to wonder whether losing that access is forcing something else to happen. There is a part of me that feels like my mother’s death was her final way of pushing me out of the nest. Not gently. Completely.

For my whole life, she was the person I leaned on. She was my anchor. There was always somewhere to return to. Now there isn’t. There is no going back. Only forward. And I have to become for myself some of what she was for me.

Maybe that is the real beginning of this next part of my life.

For so long, I thought life was about building something stable enough that it couldn’t be taken away. A career. A home. Relationships. Family. A future you could picture. Now I understand that nothing is immune to change. We spend so much of our lives trying to avoid pain, control outcomes and hold tightly to the things we are afraid to lose. But life moves forward with or without our permission.

I don’t think the lesson is that everything happens for a reason. I don’t believe my mother had to die in order for me to learn something. I would rather have remained ignorant and had another twenty years with her.

But death came anyway.

And because it did, I have to decide what I do with the life that is still here.

Even her memorial challenged everything I thought I understood about death. We asked everyone to wear color. I wore an ivory sweater covered in butterflies in her favorite shades of pink and lavender, with one of her muted pink skirts. We served her favorite iced teas and mint chocolate chip ice cream from Sant Ambroeus. A piano player played her favorite songs.

There was color everywhere. There was music. There were people telling stories and remembering her. And yes, there was tremendous sadness.

But it wasn’t only sad.

Her memorial didn’t feel like a room about death.

It felt like a room about life.

Her life.

Maybe that’s because my mother had always been so extraordinarily alive. She loved color. She loved music. She loved beautiful things. She loved people. She celebrated things. So perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me that even the gathering after her death could contain those things too.

But it did.

A lot of this has surprised me.

And I think that’s one of the reasons I want to write about it.

I’m not trying to tell anyone what death is. I don’t know. I’m certainly not trying to tell anyone how they’re supposed to grieve. I am only a few months into understanding my own grief.

But I do wish I could go back and speak to the version of myself who spent so many years terrified of losing my mother. The girl who lay awake imagining the day it would happen and believing there was no possible version of her life on the other side of it.

I wish I could tell her that she was imagining only the absence.

She couldn’t yet imagine everything that might remain.

I would tell her to keep an open mind.

Because it might not be exactly what you think it will be.

It might be devastating and beautiful. It might feel like an ending and a beginning. You might experience something you cannot explain. You might discover that the person you were terrified of losing somehow doesn’t feel entirely lost.

I can’t promise anyone that. I would never try.

I can only say that it happened to me.

Death was different than I expected.

And if sharing my experience gives someone who is lying awake terrified of losing someone they love even the smallest possibility that perhaps death doesn’t have to look exactly like the dark thing they have constructed in their mind, then maybe there is something worthwhile in telling this story.

Because I was that person.

For years.

I thought the thing I feared most would be the end of me.

Instead, it seems to be the beginning of a different version of me.

I am not grateful that my mother died.

I am grateful that she lived.

She fought extraordinarily hard to stay here. And when she was finally ready to leave, she did.

She was there when I arrived.

I was there when she left.

For forty years, my mother helped me live. And then, in the very last thing I ever expected her to teach me, she showed me that I could live without being able to reach her.

Not without her.

Never without her.

Just differently.