I always get a little sad this time of year.  I usually credit it to the changes in the light; by this time in Cleveland we’ve lost the hazy white gaze of summer, the days are noticeably shorter, and our long, frigid, unrelenting winter is on the horizon.  Or, I reason that since I work on an academic calendar, autumn also brings me more work, more complicated inter-personal interactions, more responsibilities, and just plain more to do and to keep track of.

and twenty–six years ago my mother died in October.  I was twenty-three at the time.

Grieving is complicated business.  And my relationship to my mother was very complex.  By the time I was born, she was under the throes of depression and agoraphobia, in a time where the only “cure” prescribed to her were amphetamines, to which she became addicted, and afterwards, would never take a pill, not even an aspirin. By the time I was nine or ten, she never left the house unless she was in the company of my father.  My siblings were older, so I was home alone with her for long hours while my father was working.  She didn’t have the wherewithal to do what mothers are supposed to do.  And her neuroses, when full-blown, were pretty devastating to anyone caught in the cross-fire.

I coped by staying away from home.  In swimming pools, in theaters, hiking alone in the prairie.  When I returned home for dinner, I would shut myself up with a book or the TV.  By the time I was in high school, I found a way to be out of the house almost every night.

My father divorced her when I was seventeen, and didn’t consider what it would mean to his youngest daughter to be left alone in the house with my mother, my mother who was too afraid to leave the house or get behind the wheel of a car.

I don’t remember much of my senior year of high school, except for horrible screaming matches with my mother, since I didn’t understand why she couldn’t go to the grocery store by herself, or why she expected me to do all the household chores.

I went far away to college.

It was August of 1983 when I got the phone call.  My mother had been sick on and off for a year, but refused to see a doctor until she turned jaundiced.  The doctors diagnosed renal failure, and began doing exploratory surgeries to find the problem (this was before MRI’s were invented).  Eventually, they found the cancer.  The prognosis was very bad.

I was set to begin graduate school in September.  I went to visit my mother in the hospital, and offered to stay home with her, but she told me not to.

She died in October.

I found it odd that I didn’t grieve.  Yes, I cried, but I knew that I wasn’t truly grieving.  Years later a therapist helped me to realize that I had left my mother long before she left me.

But here it is, August.  And I’m unaccountably sad.  And anxious. And I’m suddenly struck as to why.

Grief can go so slowly.  It can be stealthy, and hide beneath layers of exhaustion and denial.  And part of me is angry—angry that my mother STILL has the power to tear me up inside.  Angry that I have to go through this, now.

I wish I could shout and scream Shakespearian style: “Woe, O Woe!"  But  the truth is that my body only offers grief up and out in small teaspoons, seeping out in tiny puddles.  I’ve known for years that this day would come, but I sure as hell don’t enjoy its light.

Text and photos copyright 2009 voicegal