Mother’s Day in Heaven
By: Coco Lily
Tags: Caregiving, Death, Grief, Mothers Day, Moms

Today is Mother’s Day, and my mother has departed from this realm. I cried myself to sleep in her bed last night and woke up in tears with a broken heart. We come into the world by way of our mother’s womb. It feels like my guts have been ripped out, and a huge part of me just died.

Everyone keeps saying she’s in a better place. My mom was battling a rare and aggressive form of cancer attacking her biliary ducts and was given 2–6 months to live exactly 6 months ago. She also had Parkinson’s, which had recently progressed very rapidly. Then there was the herniated disc, osteoporosis, severe scoliosis, but she was recovering from spinal surgery, which had helped to relieve most of the pain that was causing her entire right side to be immobile. So yes, she has been released from the sufferings of her physical reality, trapped in pain. My mom must be in a better place.

What everyone seems to forget or dismiss is how I’m not in a better place. Yesterday felt like the worst day of my life. My world is shattered beyond belief.

Papa’s funeral at home in 1989 — this photo of my matriarchal warrior holding me in our garden represents the strength, resilience, beauty, and grace she carried along with her deepest sorrows.

People don’t realize how much death affects those who are still alive. Death kills the living more than it hurts the dearly departed. I thought losing someone I love last year was the most tragic thing I’ve had to experience. I thought I had befriended grief and learned to sit and even dance in its shadows for the past year, but every love and loss is uniquely one-of-a-kind. I thought I was as prepared as I could have been, but even when I was, I wasn’t. How could you ever be ready to lose the single most important person in your life? My mom was my everything. Our relationship was complex, difficult yet beautifully driven by tremendous love and guilt.

Even when I was given a deadline for my mother’s life, I chose not to believe it. I remained hopeful because that hope gave me the strength to carry on. I did everything in my power to fight for her life. I’ve spent the past year and a half trying to keep her alive and well. It feels like I just lost the biggest battle of my life, which was actually her life. Even though she needed me more in the end, it feels like my lifeline has been cut off.

Being in survival mode for so long, I don’t even know what to do with myself right now. My fight-or-flight has been deactivated. I feel defeated and completely depleted. After putting so much of my life and freedom on hold to take care of her, I thought I wasn’t going to have any regrets, and yet I’m drowning myself in them as I mourn.

I regret not taking this quarter off but instead loading up on even more classes and workshops. It was foolish of me to try and rush through grad school when I had just started. I desperately wanted my mom to witness me graduate again when in reality, she will see me walk with my Masters regardless. She’ll even have a better view from above now that she’s in a better place, right? And then she’ll probably say, “How about that PhD though?”

I regret not feeding her whatever she craved when the end of her life was near. I was just thinking she deserved a treat day or weekend, but she didn’t care to wake up again for her cheat day. I regret not buying her that karaoke machine she didn’t ask for because I selfishly wanted to hear her sing. She used to sing so gorgeously while also using those same vocal cords to nag me endlessly until the bitter end. She was right. I miss her nagging already. She had retreated away from friends because she didn’t want to deal with all their questions and concerns. She hated the idea of people pitying her and seeing her in this state. It broke my heart to see her turn into a shell of a human, cutting off her own voice and hiding her presence from the world. Still, I also empathized with how uncomfortable and resistant she was to vulnerability.

My mother was a very proud woman, rightfully so. Before her health declined, she was so alive and vibrant. By the time she retired, she was still an active volunteer in our community. She was all over the place and always helping others. She was tiny and somewhat terrifying, hard on the outside with tenderness beaming from the inside. My mother will always be the strongest person I know. When I think about how she spent her last two years lying in bed buried in her own thoughts while holding it all in, it just rips me apart — so much agony all around with nowhere to go, no way to process or release. I wish I had found a way to help her relieve those 75 years of repression and all her emotional baggage. I hope her soul can travel lightly with ease into the next dimension without carrying so much weight from this world.

My biggest regret is not crawling into bed to hold her tight when she was shivering the night before passing away. She said she was freezing and told me her chest was hurting. “I think the tumor is going to kill me.” My mom must have known. She must have been so scared. I should have held her as tight as I could for the rest of her time. If only I knew it would be the last. But instead, I wrapped multiple blankets around her, tucked in a heating pad, and stormed out of her room sobbing.

I had hit my breaking point. I had hit my wall long ago, but I just kept charging through. I broke down that night before she died. I didn’t know how much more I could take, how much longer I could keep doing this. Maybe she felt it and knew I was on the verge of crumbling, so it was her time to go, to release me of my duties, to unburden the weight of her degenerating body in retrograde.

Even though “I love you” doesn’t exist in our language and our culture belittles it as some trivial American thing, I regret not saying, “I love you” one last time before she closed her eyes, only never to wake up again. Even though I was there, I regret not being right by her side holding her when she took her last breath.

That morning, I heard her breathing heavily from my room. I kept popping in to check on her, but she was still passed out. The past few sleepless nights had been so rough for us, so I left her to rest in peace unknowingly. Then her heavy breathing got quiet and came to a stop. When I came in to check again, her breath was completely gone. Her body was warm yet frozen, and she didn’t respond. Afraid to put my head on her heart, I panicked, trying to find a pulse. I didn’t know if it was a faint one fading away or my wishful imagination.

When I called 911, the operator told me to pull her off the bed and get her body to the ground. It was the heaviest hundred pounds of human flesh I’ve had to carry while I was falling apart. They told me to pump her chest with all my might and not to stop. Those few minutes felt like an eternity as I wept myself to pieces, repeatedly counting 1–4 while doing chest compressions and yelling for my mother’s life.

The paramedics arrived and pronounced her dead. The police had blocked off her room to ask me a bunch of questions. Then I had to wait for the coroner’s office while they tried to get a hold of my mom’s doctor to confirm her illnesses to make sure it matched up with my story, so they can determine that she died a natural death before her body could be released back to me in my own home. A few hours later, the mortuary came and wrapped my mother’s corpse up in a body bag. I clipped a rose in bloom from our garden to send off with her as they wheeled her out of our home into a white van.

I’ve told this story a few times now, and each time feels like I’m reliving a nightmare that keeps retraumatizing me while I am half awake in some twilight zone. It’s not like I found out through a phone call. I just lost my mother right before my eyes after trying to keep her alive through all of this time. The act of trying to resuscitate her even when I already knew in the depths of my consciousness that she was gone is something that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

By nighttime, I was completely exhausted but laid restlessly in her bed listening to a few voice notes I had recorded. I wish there were more. We always want more. To stay on top of all 10 of her doctors and keep tabs on her conditions, I started recording voice notes of our consultations and prognoses while also requesting copies of notes and treatment plans. When I ran out of the three audio recordings of her voice, I started listening to voice notes from her doctors before snapping myself out of it like, “What the fuck am I doing?”

This wasn’t even my mom. These were doctors giving us medical information about what would eventually kill her. My mom was not a collection of her symptoms and sicknesses, and she wouldn’t want to be remembered for any of that. They’re trashed from my phone, and I’m also trying to archive mental images of the frail being that she became flushed with guilt and shame for falling apart and being completely dependent on me. As someone who never admitted to being wrong, she started apologizing to me quite frequently for her unwanted fragilities. I thought her humility would bring me some peace, but I never wanted to hear her say sorry under these circumstances, and it devastated me every day to see her this way.

Every morning I rose from my own death only to serve what felt like her dying. I was cooking healthy, wholesome, nutritious meals only to feed a vegetable of a human vessel, becoming practically paralyzed. I washed and scrubbed her deteriorating meat suit. I lathered her with moisturizing lotion — she still had the silkiest skin, I dressed her, brushed her hair, clipped her nails, and massaged her feet whenever I could. I got to hold her not because we were affectionate like that but because she needed to hold onto me for dear life. If I blinked for a second, she would crumble and fall to the ground. I don’t understand why or at what point in our lives did it become so uncomfortably difficult for us to touch or even be physically close to each other, but in her sickness, we were forced to be together and practice this proximity.

I hadn’t left my mother’s side for more than a couple of hours at a time since November. I knew I desperately needed a break, but I couldn’t even be at ease when I was away from her grocery shopping nearby. I didn’t trust anyone would have the patience and kindness to handle her with tender loving care. I existed in a constant state of fear and anxiety, but I guess I’m just high-functioning and repress well. I got that from my mama. She jerked my heartstrings every time she called out for help at all hours of the day and night. My life revolved around my mom while also trying to get through school and get my business going again. I saw no way out, and her health was only getting worse.

I knew the day that liberates me would also be the same day she frees herself from this world. That’s the reality I’ve had to sit with for quite some time now. Today, I am sitting in that unfortunate reality writing this from her desk and empty room without her. Nothing is freeing about the void I feel in my heart for missing her in my life.

For months, everyone around me was getting worried about my well-being and anticipated me collapsing at any minute from burnout. They pointed out how I wasn’t loving myself enough through this caretaking process, but I would rather sacrifice that love for myself for just a moment than spend the rest of my life hating myself for not doing what I did.

Even on the verge of caving, my moment with her was not enough. We’ll always wish we had more time, but I’ll never regret the time I got to spend with her. I’ll never regret moving home to be with my mom. I got to see her every moment of the day for a year and a half. It was truly my honor to care for her because she trusted me with her life.

I’ll never regret draining my savings to renovate our home. While remodeling her room and living in a construction zone, she slept with me in my bed for almost a month during the holidays and her last birthday. I grew up sleeping in the same bed with my mom after my dad passed away because she rented out all the rooms, including the garage. Our full house turned into our extended family, but it was always her and me against the world. She did everything she could to hold onto this house and raise me on her own.

I’ll never regret starting my business to spread joy to others by sharing our love for coconuts. My mom handed me a cleaver when I was 8 years old and taught me how to chop one. Coconuts perfectly capture who she is as a person. Tough on the outside, sweet on the inside. No problem cutting you to pieces. I’ll never regret how hard I fought to advocate for her health and all the executive decisions I had to make in her best interest, including how we refused to seek aggressive forms of cancer treatment because she might have lived longer but in more pain and discomfort. Then her Parkinson’s would have eventually led to permanent paralysis.

My mother prayed to go peacefully, and even though she struggled in the end, she was able to rest in peace in the comfort of our revived home. I do believe she’s in a better place now, but why couldn’t that better place be here with me in better health? I just miss her so much. There’s so much more life I wanted to live with her. Life can be so unfair and so unkind.

They say time heals, but time doesn’t do anything. It just flies by or stands still. It’s what we do with our time. I’m grateful I got to be with her in her final days, even though I wish I could have done more. That is a huge part of my cultural conditioning and how I was bought up. She taught and tortured me into beating myself up over everything, always striving for more, always trying to do better, and always doing the most, but I will never forget to always try my best. And that is what I did with my mom.

As an only child, I’ve always been independent and have done whatever I wanted for years. Still, deep down, I will forever seek my mother’s approval, which was unattainable until the end. I proved myself beyond being the perfectly flawed yet devoted daughter I was when I got the opportunity to care for her. I hate that it took all this for her to tell me, “I would have never done what you have done for me for my own mother,” which was her indirect way of finally validating me.

Was that all I ever wanted? Was that all I ever needed? I thought it would be this fireworks-kind-of-moment when she said that, but my special moment with her was actually this delicate life we got to share and the life force she’s given me to carry on. Another part of me feels like, “What’s the point to anything now that she’s gone? Who is going to pretend not to be proud of me? Who is going to keep pushing me and telling me I’m not good enough, so I can keep trying?” The truth is, she has always been proud of me. She has always loved me. I’ve always been more than enough and everything beyond her imagination and wildest dreams she had hoped for. Our expressions of love and validation are just culturally different.

What’s the driving force behind anything and everything we do in life? Approval? Applause? Acceptance? Isn’t it all deeply rooted in love, though? Love is why we do what we do. We are born to love and built to fight. Love never dies. You cannot kill it because when you try, it only grows stronger.

Please reach out to your parents and love them a little harder. I understand how complicated our relationship with our parents can be. Even if your relationship with them is strained, disconnected… even if they are no longer here with us, take a moment to honor them and give yourself some extra love. They have always been proud of you whether or not they’ve expressed that.

If you have immigrant parents like my mom and “I love you” isn’t in your vocabulary, then try, “Thank you.” Gratitude is a universal love language they will deeply appreciate. We don’t thank our parents enough for everything they have done.

I never thought I’d be Windex-ing my mother to add her to our ancestor’s altar on Mother’s Day today. I had plans to spend this weekend working from her bedside, specifically on my genogram for my Family Systems class. I wanted to ask her all these questions about her childhood, our family, and ancestors, but she passed away yesterday morning. I feel like all the answers to who she ever was and where I came from are gone.

Last night, I pulled out old albums and flipped through photos of my mom and dad. I cried, picturing the possibility of them reuniting in heaven after all these years. I’ve been pretty self-sufficient for more than half my life and even took care of my mom these later years, but there’s this indescribable feeling of incompleteness and loss of protection that fills my heart when I realize I am my parent's only child and their time capsule they left behind on Earth. I feel like a 34-year-old orphan who lost the keys to my existence, the wind in my sails, and the anchor to my history. Maybe one day in another lifetime or another moment in time in some other cosmic dimension, none of this will matter because we’ll be together all over again.

I hope my parents are this happy to see each other again now. I hope they can both smile down on me, even laugh at my silly, sad life back on Earth. I don’t mind. As long as they’re still looking, I know they will be proud.