It's been over a month since we buried my mother. I'm not proud to admit it, but it's taken me all this time to even think of writing something about the experience of her dying and her funeral. In recent years especially, I've become aware of how much anger at her I've carried for most of my life. And I want to tell you what's happened to that anger and how my relationship with her has been changed.
My mother was many things, but chief among them was the fact that she had a major problem with alcohol much of her adult life, and she regularly practiced the attitudes and behaviors that go with that problem. What her last day on earth and the experience of her wake and funeral taught me was this: however true the alcohol piece was about her life, it didn't define her and my response to it doesn't have to be the main fact of our relationship. I can't tell you how liberating it feels to say that.
Somewhere in my young childhood, alcohol and other chemicals began to become a major way for my mother to cope with what she called her "nerves." She herself had grown up with alcohol problems being a major part of her extended family life. The social life of lower middle class Boston suburban families often revolved around occasions when alcohol was at the center of things. When we moved to Milton into our first single family home, my father re-did the basement in knotty pine, including a carefully designed home bar for parties -- and there were plenty of parties. Every day, as time went on, the excuse of a party was not needed for my mother to consume enough alcohol to pass out (or "fall asleep" as we euphemized) every night. The run ups to those moments were some of the worst hours of my life. Sarcasm. Loud fights. Outrageous demands. Habits and and occurences too embarrassing to risk friends visiting -- I learned to get out of the house as soon and as often as I could. What I carried out of the house was my own mostly buried anger and a huge chip on my shoulder I didn't even have a clue was there.
When I began to live more away from Boston, starting with my college years, I was unconsciously fleeing chaos, pain, rage and a boatload of sadness and grief over what had gone down in my family home that I didn't have a clue as to how to deal with or even that I needed to deal with. Not surprisingly, I developed my own disordered relationship with alcohol and cut my own swath of chaos, internal and external. Just a few years after my mother entered an often rocky relationship with recovery, I began my own recovery journey to deal with my very own alcohol problem.
Years of recovery, therapy and painful acceptance of my own flaws led me to a place where my anger surfaced and made me very impatient with my mother. And then something shifted. On the last day of her life, my mother was aware and troubled enough to ask my sister and I, "Was I a good mother?" with such genuine and sincere regret that we could only answer, "Yes, you were." She smiled hesitantly, and visibly relaxed. That moment opened me to be able to hear the wonderful things my children and others said about my mother as the wake and funeral unfolded. Her gifts of warmth, humor, hospitality and fierce loyalty to her own became crystal clear.
Dr. Ira Byock, end of life specialist, quotes theologian Paul Tillich:
"Forgiveness presupposes remembering. And it creates a forgetting, not in the natural way we forget yesterday's weather, but in the way of the great "in spite of" that says: I forget although I remember. Without this kind of forgetting no human relationship can endure healthily."
(THE FOUR THINGS THAT MATTER MOST: A Book About Living)
Thanks be to God for Margaret Agnes Lawless. Her legacy lives on in the lives of the people she shaped and touched, especially her children, grandchildren and friends. We remember. And we forget. Go with God, Mother.
