Grace: Healing Mother Loss
By Teresa Currivan
This is the healing one.
That winter of ‘84/85, I remember being home from school for the winter break and visiting my mom in the hospital. I hated it there — we had to drive there, find parking, take an elevator, hear her roommate breathing loudly through many bandages, (“Girls, don’t ever get plastic surgery,” my mom warned us,”) and there was so limited time. You can’t get comfortable in a hospital room the way you can at home.
That spring at home, she asked us all to come down to the kitchen. I remember it was one of those Indian summer days and the sun was setting and it was all orange and glowy. My dad had this house built — their dream house — finally — and from our kitchen and out the large living room windows high on this hill, you could see out over the Sunset District to the Pacific Ocean — and today there was an orange ball just sitting there in the sky — shining into our kitchen, matching precisely the color of my mom’s robe, and the vinyl covering on our kitchen chairs.
She told us she was going to die.
I don’t remember her words, but she was very matter of fact and intentional. In hindsight, this was the biggest gift she could have ever given me. She was direct. And clear. She was also a nurse — a hospice nurse. And I knew she was right.
I went up to my room and had my anger — I can’t remember at what. It’s like I needed to punch something and all there was was air. I hated how she always did everything right. She had to be all hospice-nursy about all this shit. After today I could no longer pretend. I hated her rightness so much. Goddamit, I really did. I don’t even get to be mad at her. And Dad too. The Funeral Director and the Hospice Nurse. They weren’t going to mess this up for us. Goddamit. I had no one to blame.
So that summer I drove my mom to her radiation appointments, sometimes in my sister’s brown Pinto that Opa gave her. I can still remember the smell of that car — a mix of old car and my Grandpa — Opa — who would outlive his daughter by many years.
It was socked in with fog that entire summer — appropriately a San Francisco summer that felt like winter. My mom was up and about until precisely the day after my oldest sister’s wedding. She held out, wig and all, until late in the reception when she began to need more help.
So I got to be with her in her own room — my parents’ very comfy king-sized bed, with the pink electric blanket that was beyond pilly, snuggled up next to her hospital bed, and I could lay there and hold her hand. Once, when she had been mostly sleeping, I had fallen asleep too and woke up to her hand squeezing mine. This wouldn’t have happened in the hospital and I knew it. Even then, I was grateful for that.
When the time came, on October 4th, 1985, two weeks before my 19th birthday, my dad had previously called us all home — from school — from married life — my three sisters and I, and so when she died, he only had to wake us up early in the morning. We were all together — standing around her bed — my dad holding her hand tenderly — cupped, as though he were holding a sweet little bird. Kissing her hand. I couldn’t help focusing on her forearm that I was standing nearest. It was thin and slightly freckled — so much like mine. I touched it and it felt cold. I can’t remember her face. People dying always have their mouths slightly open. My mom would have wanted me to remember her beauty. And so I have. Not long after, I had a dream where she was all in flowing white, and we were by a beautiful pool of water. And she was her beautiful self again.
After writing this piece, I cried a bit. It was a release. And then, as I lay on my bedroom floor, late that night, in my mind’s eye, I saw Mary. Mother Mary. Not clearly because it was her being I was “seeing.” I was surrounded by the most beautiful light blue I have ever felt. The color was throughout my entire body. It was embracing me, it was throughout all of my being, and it was simply Grace.
The funeral was top notch — which is to be expected, given our family business. It was one of the last funerals given by Currivan’s Chapel of the Sunset.
©2021 Teresa Currivan
