First The Grieving, Then The Reckoning

Mother's Day Thoughts On Losing The Mother

In the weeks before my mother died October 30, 2017, I cried, mourned, and wrote about how much I loved her and how desperately I was going to miss her as we Hospiced her to the other side. When I woke up six hours after she died just before midnight, I woke up furious- and so incredibly confused by this uprising of rage. I wrote the following piece 48 hours after her death but never published it. It felt like publishing it would be a kind of betrayal to her.

After I wrote it, I read it to my best friend and my spiritual teacher, but then I hid it away and never read it again- until I read it out loud to my partner Jeff today. Now that nearly seven years have passed, I’ve decided to share it here, in case it gives some of you permission to have complicated feelings on Mother’s Day or after the loss of a parent.

Let this me an offering to any of you who had conflicted feelings about someone you loved and lost. May we all let it be okay to have parts that might be angry at someone that we also loved. On this Mother’s Day, let us welcome all parts and all their feelings when we put our attention on our mothers, on all who mother, on being mothers, and on the mothering instincts of many who are untraditional mothers.

*The photo is me and my mother on safari in Africa, when I had an open pit bull wound on my leg and she had stage 4 cancer.

Here’s the piece from 7 years ago:

First the grieving, then the reckoning. Nothing prepares you for what a jumble of emotions follow the death of the mother. I lost my father twelve years ago, and it was brutal. But there’s something about losing the mother, especially if you’ve already lost the father, that opens up a portal into a whole new potential for BEing. It can be startling and confusing as hell. What struck me last night, 48 hours after losing my mother, was that for the first time in my 48 year life- I AM FREE. There is no parent to please, no parent to judge, no parent to guilt or manipulate me into violating my authenticity, no parental obligations, no caregiving of parents to weigh on me. I am- for the first time in my life- truly free to be all of myself, unguarded, uncensored.

When I first started blogging in 2009, my promise to myself and the topic of my very first blog was the mission to be “ALL ME, ALL THE TIME” and let the chips fall where they may. Trust me, the chips fell- hard. Some people cut me out of their lives for writing publicly about my private life.  Some people who live secret lives themselves judged me for sharing things about my inner world, my sexuality, my vulnerable spots, and my shadows, insisting that my own secrets should not be broadcasted to the world. Those people fell out of my life very quickly, rejecting me before I could barely blink. I thought the fallout was over, that I was honoring my promise to be truly authentic. But how much of me was still censoring myself, filtering my writing and my experience through the disapproving or approving eyes and judgments of my mother, not just in my writing, but in my life? 

Sure, there are other family members who could take over as the superego voice in my head if I let them. I could still piss off my brother and sister or disappoint my aunties or fail to meet the expectations of my cousins, but it’s not the same as having the watchful eye of the mother or father scrutinizing everything you do, every word you write, every choice you make. I could keep myself in that kind of prison by succumbing to the voice of my mother in my head- but that would be a choice. I don’t have to do that. I could choose to actually be all the way free now.

We like to think we can choose to be free before we lose our parents. I thought I did so when my father died. Had my father still been alive, I honestly don’t think I ever would have written Mind Over Medicine or gone to Esalen for the first time, which changed my whole life. My father, who I adored, was a committed materialist, rationalist patriarch physician, a stalwart of Western Medicine (with a capital “M.”) He sneered at all alternative medicine practitioners or spiritual healers with arrogant contempt, judging anything “New Age” or metaphysical as “hogwash.” Had I taken a workshop at Esalen while my father was still alive, he would have given me holy hell, the same way he criticized me when I was trying to learn to speak Spanish like he did, having been raised as the son of missionaries in Cuba. “You’re speaking University of Chicago Spanish,” he sneered, full of contempt. “You’ll never be a real Spanish speaker,” he scoffed, reading the back of my Spanish text and making fun of the publisher. I quit studying Spanish after that.

Having failed to do so for most of my young life, I yearned to please him and I feared his self-righteous contempt. Would I ever have dared to write about mind-body medicine or spiritual healing if he had still been alive? Would I have mustered up the moxie come out publicly as a stealth mystic if he hadn’t died? I’m honestly not sure I would have been that brave.

My desire to please my father pales in comparison to how much my mother dominated my young life. As a young adult, I left the Methodist Church after having been a church member my entire life, condemning the church for its judgments, righteousness, and narrow-mindedness. I joked that I had “post-traumatic church syndrome.” I avoided the church like ebola. Last night, as I was thinking about my very wise auntie, my mother’s sister, who tended my mother faithfully at the bedside until the end and who has been married for almost fifty years to my uncle, who was Harvard’s Methodist pastor for many years, it occurred to me for the first time that maybe it wasn’t the Methodist Church I needed to reject. Maybe it was my mother’s filter of the Methodist religion that I reject.

When my auntie and I were with my mother in Italy this past May as part of Mom’s bucket list trip, my auntie and I were strolling down the street in Bologna without my mother, because my mother was too sick to walk and needed to take a cab. I shared some of my church traumas with my aunt, and she was shocked at how my mother had framed what Methodism espouses to her young daughter.

“That’s not the church, Lissa. That’s your mother. How arrogant of her to interpret Jesus’s teachings that way.” It was an “A-ha” moment for me. When I tried to bring it up with my mother that night, she shut me down so fast I felt slapped. When your mother is still alive, you learn where her trauma bubbles live, and you learn to avoid those “off limits” places. When your mother is dead, you are suddenly free.

I imagine some people would feel guilty for having these kinds of thoughts and feelings only 2 days after your mother has died, as if the expansive relief and liberation you experience after the death of a parent in some way violates your deceased beloved. I can speculate that some people would hide such feelings, kicking themselves for disrespecting their beloved’s memory by reveling in the feelings of vast liberation.

I do not feel that way. I adore my mother and am so grateful I had 48 years with her. I feel heartbroken and torn apart, like my organs have been ripped out. I can’t imagine life without her, and every breath without her here has sharp edges that shred my heart. Every wave of grief feels like I’m in labor, and I have to practice my Lamasse breathing just to survive the contractions in my heart.

AND it’s also true that I’m reveling in the freedom I’m only starting to glimpse, that I am super curious who I will be without the ever-present scrutiny of my mother’s perpetual judgments of me. Given that the death of my father shifted the whole paradigm in my development, resulting in an almost instantaneous phase shift, I wonder what will become of me in the wake of this devastating loss. I have no problem holding that paradox- I’m horrified that she’s gone AND I am relieved that I’m free. I’m so grateful I got to be her daughter, AND I wonder what will open up now that I don’t feel the immeasurable pressure to conform to some artificial fantasy my mother had of the “perfect daughter,” an expectation I clearly failed to fulfill, despite spending the first 40 years of my life spinning my wheels with futile attempts to please my mother.

I do not feel guilty for these feelings, and if you’ve had them when you’ve lost a parent, I hope you don’t either. Feeling relief when a parent dies does not dishonor or disrespect or discount your love for your parent. We can simply hold the paradox, honoring that many seemingly conflicting feelings can be simultaneously true. One feeling does not cancel out the other.

I wonder what else I rejected because I couldn’t bear to reject my mother. What parts of me did I compartmentalize and dissociate from so I didn’t have to choose between my authenticity and my relationship with my mother? What else might need to be reintegrated back into my own sovereign wholeness?

I thought I had done this work before, like when I became an OB/GYN who was politically pro-choice, and I had to choose whether I would be a doctor who performed abortions. My rabidly anti-abortion mother begged me to not to do so. She said she couldn’t bear to have a daughter who was a baby-killer. “Say no for me,” she pleaded, hot tears streaming down her face. I mustered up every ounce of courage I could find as I told her it wasn’t fair of her to ask that of me, that my integrity required me to perform abortions for my clients, that to be an OB/GYN who claims to believe in a woman’s right to choose but doesn’t want to get her hands dirty would cast me as a hypocrite and require me to violate my soul’s truth. She considered rejecting me permanently that day back when I was a 28 year old resident, but she couldn’t do it. She loved me too much, and her motto was “The relationship is more important than being right.” She stuck to her rightness, but tolerated my “sin.”

Mom tried to resolve this conflict by making me promise I would never, ever bring up this topic with her again. I did not honor her request, and it ate her up. She is sure I’m going to hell because I was once a baby-killer. She begs me to apologize, to get right with God and beg for forgiveness, but I do not regret the choice I made. The women whose babies I aborted were more grateful for my nurturing compassion than the women whose babies I delivered. I saw it as a calling, to sit at the bedside with these women and hold their hearts in mine as they made devastating choices that moved them to weep. My mother could never see it that way. In spite of all of my other virtues, in her mind, the fact that I was a “baby-killer” overshadowed any of the other blessings I might have give to the world. In her eyes, God doesn’t forgive murder unless you repent and express your deepest remorse.

Still, she did not reject me. She just had to pretend it never happened, which created a cognitive dissonance between us, pushing a wedge between our intimacy that began twenty years ago. It broke my heart.

The part of me that wanted my mother to be proud of me for honoring my soul’s integrity rather than letting her control me in order to fit me into her world view, the part that wanted her to say, “I’m so glad I raised such a strong daughter, one who will follow her heart instead of her conditioning,” cries and rages even still. I never once got the sincere validation the little child in me wanted. I hold that wounded, heartbroken part of me like a mother as I write this, cooing, “You chose well, precious child. You were brave. You were strong. I’m sorry she never understood you. I’m sorry you tried so hard, and you failed to ever be good enough for her. You are enough. You have a Divine Spark in you that makes you inherently worthy. You don’t have to do one more thing in this life to earn that love.”

I feel that child part of me snuggling into my Inner Pilot Light, finally free of the impossible, unfulfillable burden to be good enough. I sense there is more soul retrieval work to be done, more ways that I sold myself out so I didn’t risk rejection or need to reject my mother, more ways that I compromised because the mother bond is stronger even than the yearning to breathe free. What are these ways that I compromised my truth and authenticity? What needs to be reclaimed? I have work to do. I am so curious.

I got into the best therapy of my life weeks after I wrote this piece, and just as I had predicted, it was a phase shift in my life, a whole new beginning, even more so than after my father died. When I shared my confusing feelings with my spiritual mentor Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, she validated my feelings and said, “Congratulations, Lissa. Your mother left you a precious gift. Upon leaving her body, she gave you back your anger.”

I miss my mother every day, especially on Mother’s Day. I also am grateful to be free of the weight of her constant scrutiny. And that’s okay- to sit with both.

Let this be your permission to feel whatever you might feel on this Mother’s Day. Let it be permission to have many parts and many feelings when you lose a family member. Let it be okay to be free.

I’d love to hear from any of you who have had conflicted feelings upon the death of a parent or other family member. Let’s be with one another in normalizing that there are many parts involved with those we’re most intimate with.