Gift
By: Cortaney Mj
Tags: MWC, Mothers, Mourning, Mwc Death

My sister, myself and my brother, in that order, from left to right.

My life started rough. I was 3 months premature and not quite able to catch my breath.

Often, premature infants cannot sustain their lives on their own, so incubators and tubes and needles sustain it for them while they soldier their developmental wars. It is commanding work, in the beginning, for many of them to breathe.

Breathing, then, is a luxury and a gift. It is not always inherent or natural; sometimes our lungs are a space we must have carved out for us with machines and latex gloves and weeks of physical isolation. Sometimes breathing falters. Sometimes breathing stops. I learned this the hard way.

I learned that sometimes warring with the body is not worth it, and we must surrender. We must set down our weapons and let go. At 17, I learned that my mother was on the frontlines of a war that I always thought she would win, and she surrendered.

The doctor wrote down each battle in black pen, in the order that they were diagnosed throughout her life, scrawling and bleeding: alcoholism, lupus, cirrhosis. She died five months after she told me her liver was failing. I spent weeks at a time beside her hospital bed, treasuring every breath, every gift. I wanted to thank each of her inhales for coming and beg every one of her exhales to return.

Seventeen years prior to this loss, the doctors removed me from my mother’s womb while she lay delirious from the medicine. They did not place me in her arms so that she could hold me. It took weeks after my birth for her to get to touch me for the first time.

I tried to pay her back the lost time during her final days in the hospital: my hand in hers, my lips against her forehead, my head resting on her heart. I tried to remember each moment before it had even passed. She died like this, while we were still trying to create memories to last the rest of my lifetime. She could not move or speak. All she had was her breath. I held onto that. I dug out a space for its softness in my chest for my own lungs to recall.

When my mother held me for the first time, after my first days were spent struggling to catch my breath, she embraced me like my existence was a luxury she had always expected to come. When I held my mother for the final time, after her last days were spent struggling to let go of her breath, I embraced her because her existence was a luxury I had always expected to stay.

Hear this: A pause. A deep inhale. Relief. Like this, my mother put me against her chest and gave me permission to breathe, to live. And, like this, I put myself against her chest and gave her permission to stop.

My favorite photo of my parents.

—

It is three years later, and my heart has begun to do this thing where it does not know what state of motion my body is in. I am running, running, running — I die, for a second — then a deep inhale and I am taking off toward nowhere once more. Beat beat beat — pause — beat beat beat. My psychiatrist calls these “palpitations.” I call them mourning.

There is always this brief moment where I wonder if my heart will start again; I feel that it has fallen through my ribcage into my stomach and buried itself there. Eventually, it beats again (too fast, but I am content that it still works at all). I am always so relieved to keep running toward nowhere.

To mourn, I’ve learned, is to write letters of love and gratitude to people that will never receive them. After she died, I found a barely-used journal my mom had kept while in the hospital. As time passed, her mind had become a disorienting space, her understanding of time and memory was coming and going like the tide. Her thoughts were flying away from her, water through her fingers, waves eroding her mind’s shore.

The journal had two entries, both shakily written and incomplete:

The word “remember” was followed by a list of the names of her loved ones — her brother’s name was written over her sister’s, her son’s name was misspelled, mine was missing. Periods and endings had been dragged down the page, led astray by a hand losing its strength and a mother forgetting the names to remember.

In the next entry, the letters were spaced out in places, an “h” crawled over an “a”. It read: “Thank you for — .” The rest of the entry was illegible.

Perhaps dying is writing toward nowhere. Perhaps dying is never getting to write the letter in the first place.

—

The journal I use to write letters to my mom.

To honor my mother, I have been trying to give myself permission to breathe, even when my heart has buried itself and my breaths become difficult to swallow. I have been writing to her since her death. Every word in my letters, in my poems, in my work is a breath — both proof and thanks to her that I am alive. I am trying to say to her that I am moving forward; I am running, writing, toward somewhere.

Forward forward forward. I inhale her words, her love letters, her wars. Run. Falter. Run. I write little breaths, little memories, little names. Despite her war, she inhaled gunpowder and blood and exhaled something gentle and resilient into a daughter.

I will make every one of these breaths a gift that I return to my mother.