She listened to the rattle of her mother's labored breathing.
"This is it," she thought. "My mother is going to die." At 25,
she had never felt more like a child. Without Her
Surrounded by cultural silence, a young woman struggles to cope with her mother's death
Angela Nurre stood in the corner of the bedroom, her thin frame pressed against the wall. Tears streamed down her face, but she didn't bother to wipe them away.
She listened to the rattle of her mother's labored breathing.
"This is it," she thought. "My mother is going to die." At 25,
she had never felt more like a child.
Her mother drifted in and out of sleep as the rest of the family assembled at the house. Later that evening, satisfied that her mother's breathing had finally begun to ease, Angela went in to kiss her goodbye.
"I love you, Mom," she said softly. "I'll see you tomorrow." She squeezed her mother's hand and then left for her boyfriend's apartment.
Only minutes after she arrived, the phone rang. "Ange, you need to come back to the house," her brother-in-law said. "And bring somebody with you." Angela hung up the phone and began to sob. After nearly five years, her mother's battle with ovarian cancer was over.
Back at the house, Angela watched as two men placed her mother in a black plastic bag and zipped it up. They lifted her mother onto a gurney and rolled her out into the cold rainy night. "I'm not ready for this," Angela thought. "I'm not ready to never see her again. I'm not ready to be on my own."
During the months that followed, Angela didn't talk about her mother's death and the sadness, anger and guilt that accompanied it. In a culture that fears death rather than celebrates it as a natural part of life, mother loss is rarely discussed. People whose mothers are alive don't want to think about losing them. Those whose mothers have died are reluctant to speak about it not only because death is a cultural taboo, but also because mothers are supposed to be immortal.
From Mother Earth to mother country, the concept of mother is central to our notions of comfort and security. Mothers are cultural icons. They are keepers of home and hearth and symbols of all that is warm, gentle and nurturing. Their images are everywhere, constantly reminding women like Angela of the void in their lives. But these images of womanhood do nothing to help women connect to their deepest feminine roots, planted and nurtured by generations of mothers. When women lose their mothers, they lose their connection to their source, their femininity and their history.
Angela's mother was a source of emotional support, but she wasn't nurturing in the traditional sense. "We weren't best buddies," Angela says. "We didn't spend evenings sitting on the bed eating Häagen-Dazs, watching old movies and crying." Norma was a working mother, and her career as a surgical nurse was important to her. "I grew up feeling like her job came first and we came second," Angela says. "And that was OK. Mom was independent; she could have her life. But we weren't her life."
Norma's life began to change, however, when she was first
diagnosed with cancer. As her illness progressed, her
independence waned, and Angela came home to care for
her.
Shortly after Angela returned, she enrolled at the University of Oregon, but school was a mixed blessing. "It was nice being able to go someplace where I could think about something other than my mom and the cancer," she says. But it was hard for her to focus on her studies. "What's the point?" she thought. "My mother's dying, and this is just a grade." Making friends did not come easily. Other students had different concerns, and Angela couldn't relate to them. She kept to herself and didn't talk about her mother's illness.
There wasn't much emotional support at home either. The family focused its attention on meeting Norma's wants and needs. If she didn't like what was on TV, somebody changed the channel. If she didn't like the topic of conversation, somebody changed the subject. Having to give her mother so much attention while her own needs were ignored made Angela burn with resentment, but she couldn't bring herself to discuss her feelings with other family members. "What about me and my young life?" Angela wondered. " I need acceptance, and I need people to pay attention to me." But she said nothing.
As her mother's illness advanced during the next several years, Angela grew tired of the constant emotional roller coaster. She was angry about having to put her life on hold, and sometimes she wished her mother would die. "God, what a terrible daughter I am," she thought. "I'm going to live for the next thirty years, and I'm begrudging my mother the last six months of her life." But Angela didn't have any place to put her anger, and eventually it was swallowed by guilt.
According to Edelman, the experience of a young adult woman who loses her mother is often misunderstood. Because she is likely to be independent and living on her own, she may feel frustrated and confused when her mother's death sends her into an emotional tailspin. As if that weren't enough, she is also likely to hear, "'[She died] when you were 25? Well, you really didn't need a mother anymore.'"
But Angela did. Throughout her mother's illness, she struggled to find her own identity. Like many young women, she had wanted to be as different from her mother as possible. "Most women don't want to be like their mothers," Lowinsky says. "They use their mothers as a touchstone, but it's often as a negative touchstone -- 'I'm going to be a different kind of woman.'" But now Angela must feel her way alone, and she wishes her mother were still here to offer the guidance she had often rejected. "This woman was the main female role model in my life, and she was so incredibly strong and courageous. Part of me felt like I could never live up to that," Angela says. "Who am I next to her? She's the strongest sense I have of what it is to be a woman."
"I'm really scared, Mom," Angela said.
"I know, Ange. I'm scared too."
Looking back, Angela wishes she had asked her mother to tell her more stories about her life. "What was her life like when she was a kid? How did she meet my dad? What was she like in school?" Angela asks. "Did she have a lot of girlfriends? What things interested her? What was her mother like?"
According to Lowinsky, women find their female roots and
their sense of what it means to be a woman through the telling
of personal histories. Handed down from mother to daughter,
"they are essentially about the female identity and the weaving
of a kinship web." When a mother dies, it severs her
daughter's primary link to this generational knowledge, and
the daughter must search for a connection through the
narratives of other women in her family. For women like
Angela, this is another painful reminder that their mothers are
gone.
Several days before Norma died, Angela found a gold ring outside the house and took it inside to show her mother. Norma smiled.
"When you were a little girl, you always used to bring me treasures," she said. "You'd find something and bring it to me, whether it was a flower or a rusted nail. You always had such a sparkle in your eye." Her mother paused. "You've always been my little treasure."
"That was such an important moment for me," Angela says, "knowing for the first time that there weren't any expectations. I didn't have to grow up and be a great teacher or make lots of money. That day, for the first time, she told me she loved me for me, for the little things I did."
On the day of the memorial service, Angela decided she would give her mother one last gift. Norma had asked the family not to wear black, so Angela bought a creme and beige pantsuit that showed off her long lean lines. She picked out a pair of chocolate suede pumps, wishing she could ask her mother whether they were an appropriate choice. She curled her hair, made up her face and went to the service looking as beautiful and ladylike as her mother had always insisted she could.
Almost a year later, Angela became the first member of her family to receive a college degree. But she didn't march in the graduation ceremony or tell her family until well after she received her diploma. Graduation seemed insignificant without her mother.
By Paige Bills
Illustrations by Tom Blazier
