Remembering my mother on the second anniversary of her death

Anne, with cat and my older sister, circa 1959

When it’s gone, it’s over: a riff on “What I want back is what I was”

When my mother died two years ago today, it was not sad.

Well, that’s not true.

Anne: April 2024

It was very sad to be saying a final goodbye to the woman who gave me life and shaped my life with her own. But, while holding her hand as she passed on, I knew our time together on this plane was well past done. Not because of anything between us but because of the state of her body — a body that had carried her well for more than 90 years, but a body that now at 95 and a half years of age was done. It no longer could do its job.

We cannot live one without the other — spirit and soul without a body.

Well, that’s not true, some would say. Spirits remain and can be felt, some would say. I like that idea, but I have no personal experience of such things.

My focus here is on the body that carries us, because, by her end, my mother’s body was broken. No longer able to carry her through the days and long nights of her very old age.

In those final weeks, she spent no time on regrets, on wishing things different or other. As she always had been, she was then rooted in the present, though with one cautious eye towards the endless future into which she was, she knew, heading.

In those final weeks, our conversations covered a lot of ground, we gave each other a lot of grace, and I was able to say to her, “You gave me everything I’ve needed for my own life.”

Did we want more time with each other? Well, no, not really. By then, her days were threaded with pain and, when that final day came, she was ready to be gone from this world.

Anne: October 1999

A realist to the end, Mum would not have said she wanted back what she was. That could not be. Though since that day, I have often said to myself, If I could have my mother back, I would want back the mother of my 40s, her 70s. Those years, we were both active, capable and energetic, and often we were those things together.

But that is not how life works. We live through our days, until they’re done. We cannot turn back the clock.

A friend said to me of her husband who had died, much too young, of a fast-acting cancer, “That body had to go.”

My mother’s body had to go.

Wanting back what once we were is an interesting idea to ponder — but most helpful to ponder only while we can still, ourselves, take our body or mind back to whatever state it is we are longing for. Leave it too late and that pondering will be more frustrating, even sad, than fulfilling.

If, at life’s end, we can say, This body has to go — taking our leave with a sense of peace at the inevitable closing of our own particular circle — if we can do that, then, maybe, wanting anything other than that moment of passing becomes unimportant.

What was in the past has been, is over and done. What is now, in this moment, is what counts, what matters. 

What mattered that day? My hand in my mother’s. Alone, each in our own body.

My mother is always in my heart and often in my mind (and writings) — the woman who gave me life, the mother who gave me everything to be who I am today.

No going back. Just this. Every day.

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My mother had a medically assisted death on April 26, 2024. My sister and I held her hands as she passed from life to death.

This piece was sparked by one line from Sylvia Plath's poem The Eye-Mote, 'What I want back is what I was'.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.