A friend texted me this morning. Her mother died yesterday.
And my heart broke.
Relationships with family are rarely simple. Each person is not just a familiar presence but also occupies an important role. Mother is an archetype that embodies unconscious longing, needs, and wishes.
Take my mom, for instance. She is more than a personality who independently operates; who has a past, unique tastes, interests, and hobbies. Though she is fully present as herself to me, she represents an infinity of moments, hopes, and expectations.
She is my mom, a word loaded with obligations and presumptions. Like all of us, some areas of which she’s done well and others not so good.
It is Hope that there will be a future that allows us to live with the inadequacies of these relationships.
Death is not just losing the presence of someone we loved or wanted to love; it brings a closing to the relationship. It shuts the door for any possibility of what we wish could be.
My friend’s mother had not been the kind of parent she needed. There were many holes and gaps in their relationship. Too often, my friend mothered more than she was mothered.
She didn’t just lose a person she knew well; she also lost the hope for the relationship-that-could-have-been. Now gone are her dreams of being daughter-loved with someone she’d wanted to have loved better.
Her grief will be complicated as she mourns on multiple levels: for what was, what is, and what should have been and never will be.
Yesterday, death closed the door on all those possibilities with a painful finality.
Today, my friend texted to tell me her mother had died. In those few words, I heard all the things left unsaid about what she’d lost; and my heart broke.
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Previously Published on medium
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