To Be Real
This past week’s module in my death doula course involved reflecting on my most impactful death. I can’t quantify between my parents in terms of impact. They’re differently impactful. I can say that I ruminate more on my mom’s death, because it fills me with such guilt and regret. I often feel like there’s something I could have done to save her. I was a child when my dad died and have no such illusions about his death. The 9 Contemplations of Dying by Buddhist scholar Atisha include: “My loved ones cannot save me.” Sitting with that last week helped me to find a little more peace with my mom’s death. I wish she was still here, but I can wish that without believing I could have saved her. I can wish that I had been able to keep growing with her, that I could have asked her questions, that she could have shared more stories with me. But would she have?
My mom was a very private person. I know she often felt alienated and as though she was a burden to those around her. I can’t know exactly why she felt that way, but I sometimes felt to blame for it. Even though she was the one who modeled secrecy, even though my attempts at openness were often met with misunderstanding or fear, even though my brain was developing for almost the entirety of our relationship, even though it was natural for me to explore independence in my youth. I still wish she would have pulled me closer to her. I wish she would have shared a million stories even if I was rolling my eyes. I wish she would’ve laughed her wonderful laugh at my understandable lack of perspective and kept sharing anyway.
I see the same tendencies toward seclusion in myself. My mom was a Scorpio sun like me. She also had Venus extremely close to her sun like me. My friend Elle told me this means I can eclipse myself with other people, that I can be subsumed by the need to be valuable to others more than to myself. I saw this quality in my mom as well. I think the Scorpio piece of it means we internalize this need a lot, we bury it (and dig it up again) within ourselves, a spiral into our inner worlds, a solitary process, one that can pull us away from the relationships that are so important to us. My mom’s sun is in the 5th house, the house of creativity/creation, which includes children. (Side note: My moon is just a few degrees away from where my mom’s sun lived in the same house.) My mom loved her children – there was never a question there. She was solar in her love for what (who) she had created. But she struggled to be fully herself in relationship to us, especially as we got older and started to differentiate ourselves and pull away from her.
One of the memories of my mom that sticks with me most is the night she came to see me perform in the one act play Do Not Go Gentle my senior year of high school. I played Lillian Barron, an 84-year-old wise and funny ghost (type-cast) who realizes she has to mend the rifts between her estranged son and granddaughter in order to move on. After the play ended, I went out to the hallway to greet people, and my mom was there. She came up to me and hugged me tight then pulled back. She was crying and couldn’t get any words out. I don’t think she even said goodbye. I remember watching her practically run out the door as her overwhelming feelings lingered behind with me. I don’t remember talking to her about it after that. Can you imagine?? What a gift it would have been for her to articulate her feelings to me that night.
In May of this year, I discovered my mom’s 1969 high school valedictorian speech in some old boxes of mementos. It’s titled, “A Search for Self” and discusses the pain, risk, and joy of searching for and becoming ourselves and creating our own reality in relationship with others. !!!! The speech ends with that famous passage from The Velveteen Rabbit where the Skin Horse describes the process of becoming real by being loved. I can hardly think of my mom, then just a teen full of so many feelings and hopes and dreams, speaking those words to an audience of her peers and their families, to her own parents. It rips my heart to shreds! One of my favorite passages:
“In the midst of our growing, we must never lose sight of the very necessary ingredient of love, for love can be the key to our existence. We cannot be ‘real’ without love, and just as trust is based on knowledge, love is built on trust. Our realness is formed in relation to those who have affected us.”
It’s everything. I wish I had books of my mom’s thoughts and feelings. I wish she’d felt she could pour out her soul to me, especially once I’d grown. I used to pour out my soul all the time - in paper journals I carried around with me, on Livejournal, MyFamily, multiple blogs, Facebook. I had no filter when I wrote. I was compelled to express my thoughts and feelings and did so freely and confidently. But over time, I stopped sharing. I deleted all my internet haunts and left all social media save for Instagram. Filters grew – and some of them I am grateful for! Some filter out the toxic sludge of oppressive systems. But some of them are more like walls than filters - attempts to protect myself from being bullied or ignored or embarrassed. The fearlessness (/recklessness) of my youth shifted to a great deal of anxiety around how I am perceived and received. Lately however, I feel some balance beginning to emerge. I have been wanting to share again, to return from self-isolation to self-disclosure with care. I think this is part of my work of breaking harmful intergenerational patterns and healing intergenerational wounds.
My mom experienced a lot of trauma in her life, and she had a difficult relationship with her own mother. She survived breast cancer in her late 30s and then experienced the death of her father and her husband by the time she was 42. Two of her most beloved relationships ended, and she was left to raise four children as a single parent. It’s not her fault that she struggled to cope, that she sometimes lashed out or hid away in her room, that she didn’t always know how to talk to her children about her feelings and our feelings. The cultural conversations around mental health and trauma in the 90s and early 2000s were not even close to what they are today. I know she felt pressure to appear strong, and although I understand why, I wish she could have embraced her vulnerability. I wish she could have let herself be real and be seen in that realness. I know she tried her best. I know she got there sometimes.
I’ve been reflecting on the ways I hide from others like my mom did, despite the deep well of love and desire for connection we shared. This project is born out of that reflection. It’s born out of knowing I am vulnerable, falling apart, held together, real. It’s born out of wanting to share in relationship not despite that but because of it. I think my mom was afraid to be real because she didn’t feel supported or safe enough to be vulnerable. I wasn’t able to make my mom feel supported enough to fully open up, and I wasn’t able to save her from death in the end just as my loved ones can’t save me. But I can save myself from repeating the past. Every time I stop the patterns that harmed my mom from harming me, I feel a great sigh of relief from deep within our shared well. Each time I extend my hand to connect when my mom couldn’t, I feel her solar love there.
“This magic of being real is the result of a long process of becoming, a constant process of growing and evolving that is achieved through knowledge, love, and trust. …Trust in others does involve a certain amount of risk, but we must be willing to risk a loss in order to achieve a gain. We must be secure in our insecurity.”
It’s a risk to share my thoughts and feelings, to choose words that I hope will accurately convey what is so often ineffable. But little 18-year-old Josie Perry said we must be secure in our insecurity! The magic of being real is a long process of becoming! A constant process of growing and evolving! Maybe she forgot it a little over the years through so much change and loss, but she passed it along to me. And I’m not going to keep it to myself.