What you learn from losing
By: Lucy Yao
Tags: Moms, Grief And Loss, Grief, Love

So how do you lose your mother? By believing that nothing truly dies.

Ann Arbor, Michigan

There’s a small hill in our backyard that runs parallel to the row of houses — each stacked neatly next to each other. If you’re in the kitchen, you can see its spine, slowly rising above the commercial parking lot and emptied out medical supply buildings.

That hill, is the only place where the trees clear, and it is between this hill and trees, that I come to think about my mother.

I didn’t lose her when she died. I started losing her in this kitchen, and my loss will turn three years old on this mother’s day. This will be the third anniversary of her diagnosis of Stage IV Lung Cancer. I came back home, after my first year of study at an intensive conservatory for music, to surprise my mom on mother’s day. My mom had worked every other Mother’s Day at the ICU, along with thanksgiving and Christmas. She always worked with an urgency, and proudly told me, “My hobbies include making money- what can I say; I love making money. I want you to live a better life where you don’t have to work so hard”.

This year would be different, when I got a call from my mom during exam week to tell me that she finally felt like she had worked too hard. No more back to back twelve hour shifts at the ICU and then immediately to home care — she was retiring. This news came on her 60th birthday; three weeks before Mother’s Day. her survival mentality, wanted to also maybe get some free food and have her much coveted pork chops and lo mein, which she never failed to deliver, but she gave me a surprise of her own.

In that moment, everything became unclear, as to how much time we had left together. I didn’t know if I should go back to school. If she would see me graduate, one year later. If we would have one more christmas together. Our timeline, seemingly expanding and endless, ended. In that kitchen.

We sat, holding hands, with her friend and oncologist, who I was barely able to look in the eyes. One hand holding onto my mom, the other furiously trying to jot down every single medical term: metastasised, small nodule, chemotherapy, radiation, oncology, survival rate — none of this made sense, so I tried to make sense of it by collecting these words. If I collected enough, they would give themselves away as clues that could be solved. We could survive this together if we knew enough, did enough research, were strong enough, loved fiercely and held on to each other for every moment that was possible. So we made these moments, we really made them, count.

Back in NYC, I started grasping for every moment I could to make my mom proud of me. I said yes to every project that I had even the slightest interest in, because it was an opportunity for me to explore so many of the sides of myself as a musician that were unfamiliar and this was so exciting. I was hesitant to call my mom, which was everyday, to tell her anything other than good news. I wanted things to be good for me, so that they would be good for her.

Next to the small hill, past the commercial parking lot and medical supplies and through a small clearing past a thin layer of branches, there is a small creek. It is here, that I peel away at grief.

It’s almost impossible to imagine that the neighbours are playing basketball six blocks away. Out here, there is nothing but the rushing and ebbing of the creek, almost like a pulse, thickening into streams before it flows into something bigger: an ecosystem.

***

At your feet, there are hundreds of speckled rocks — a constellation of rough liquifying stars. You once read that when Cheryl Strayed lost her mom to cancer, she found, in the far reaches of her mother’s closet, a glass jar of stones. That jar was special — Cheryl, her brother, and sister, gave every one to their mother,

“pressing into her hands, as our mother’s palms are the receptacle for every last thing [we thought] worth saving”.

These tiny beautiful things. Everywhere, but sometimes hidden in the far reaches of ourselves.

I picked up a stone, no larger than two fingers- and yet even in this meaningless rock with no history and stories and no more memories and no mom — I felt her presence in the brightness of her love — to know that the things that are unbreakable, this love, has no timeline. I whispered,

“Goodbye,

妈妈”

and tossed it into the creek, hearing a “PLONK” before it sank. With it, a ripple bloomed, making the weeds tremble, some swaying and a little more lopsided. I watched the ripple carry itself, until it reached beyond a point of recognition: a flicker.

***

So how do you lose your mother? By believing that nothing ever truly dies. If our loved ones must leave us, we must continue to learn from them by continuing to live with more kindness and intention. You lose her by being ready to let her go, to let anything and anyone go at any moment. You learn to lose by accepting that they were never yours in the first place, but that you were so, so, lucky, to have shared a point of time with them. You learn to lose and your life is on the upswing and you learn to love someone new and you feel the nectars of sweet chance at feeling whole again, and then you forget one day, and some other days, and a month passes and you’re still trying to forget that you lost her. And then you get back up, just like your mother taught you. There is no other way but to love even more deeply, to let your loss run wild and let it rip you into anguish and let it heal you.

When I lost my mother, I had lost part of myself that will never be the same. But she taught me to keep my heart as open as my ambition, and to always return from every setback, just a little bit stronger and braver than before.

She keeps teaching me.