Chapter 29: Life After Death
I’m not quite sure what to write about.
Tomorrow will be four weeks since my mom’s death.
My dad has been extremely depressed.
From what I can see, he carries tremendous guilt over what happened.
I don’t believe the responsibility for my mom’s death belongs to him.
But I understand why he searches backward through everything that happened, wondering what he could
have done differently.
I do it too.
There are so many layers to this tragedy and so many questions that will probably never have answers.
What began changing in my mom five years ago?
Was there some biological or psychological component we never understood?
Did watching her own mother disappear into dementia affect her more deeply than we realized?
Did becoming a grandmother cause her to reflect on her own life and where it had gone?
Was she experiencing some kind of crisis that none of us recognized?
Was it some combination of things?
Or was it something else entirely?
I don’t know.
I don’t think I ever will.
I can only describe what I watched happen.
Over those years, I saw problems with eating, impulse control, spending, and online shopping. Then came the
celebrity scammers and the devastating financial and emotional consequences that followed.
I cannot imagine what all of that felt like from inside my mom’s mind.
I have wondered about the moment she understood that the relationships she believed were real had been
lies.
What did she think about herself?
What did she believe the people around her thought about her?
Did she feel ashamed?
Humiliated?
Trapped?
I can ask those questions.
I cannot answer them for her.
In the weeks after her death, I found myself trying desperately to understand why.
Sometimes I thought I did.
But understanding the circumstances surrounding someone’s death is not the same as knowing what was
happening inside that person when they died.
That answer belonged to my mom.
And she took it with her.
My dad continues to wonder whether he should have done more.
Whether he should have been there more.
Whether he should have been kinder.
I understand those questions because I have asked similar ones about my own life.
I think about my wife and the way I treated her when I first learned about her eating disorder.
I think about my anger and the things I said because I didn’t know how else to reach her.
At the time, I sometimes believed being harsh could force her to open up.
Looking back, I have had to ask myself a difficult question:
Even if I believed it worked, was it healthy for either of us?
I don’t think it was.
I saw some similarities in the way my dad sometimes responded to my mom.
There were times when I believed he became angry or harsh because he was desperately trying to break
through to her.
But that is my interpretation.
I cannot tell you exactly what was happening inside my father’s mind any more than I can tell you what was
happening inside my mother’s.
What I do know is that none of us knew how to fix what was happening.
My dad lived beside it every day.
Sometimes my mom seemed like herself.
Sometimes she didn’t.
Sometimes we thought she understood what was happening.
Sometimes we weren’t sure.
I watched my dad move between anger, hope, frustration, exhaustion, and the desire to believe that somehow
his wife was going to come back to him.
I had criticized him for that many times.
Four weeks after losing her, I understood that desire differently.
He wanted his wife back.
So did I.
I am tired.
I feel stretched as thin as I can possibly be.
I have spent so much time trying to remain strong for people who cannot yet find their own strength that I
can feel the weight of it accumulating.
I hope life becomes easier.
But right now, I don’t know what comes next.
I am learning that I cannot prepare myself for every possible tragedy.
I can only respond to life as it comes.
Sometime afterward, my dad spent a few days away at a cabin with other people who had also experienced
traumatic loss.
I was glad he went.
I could not imagine his loneliness.
The previous years had been incredibly difficult for both of my parents, but I believed that if my dad had
been given the choice, he would have endured all of it again just to see my mom one more time.
Watching him grieve made me think differently about regret.
Loss has a way of sending us backward through our memories.
We find arguments we wish had ended differently.
Words we wish we hadn’t said.
Things we wish we had noticed.
Moments we wish we could have again.
But reflection cannot change what happened.
And it cannot give us perfect knowledge of what we should have done when we were living through it.
All I can do is look at the person I was, acknowledge the things I wish I had done differently, and decide what
I carry forward.
I cannot change what happened to my mom.
I cannot change the mistakes I made before she died.
I can only decide what those things change in me.