Today is the anniversary of my mother’s death. It has been 29 years to the day since she died. Every Halloween when neighborhood children go house to house to get candy, I sit at home and mourn the loss of my mother.
It happened almost three decades ago, so the wound is not new. But the wound is still there. I have written often about this unhappy anniversary.
So this anniversary is 29. That is notable only because next year is the clean round number of 30. That will be a moment. Thirty years. Wow.
Earlier this year my Uncle Bill finally died. He had been suffering for years from Alzheimer’s so his death was equal parts bitterly sad and equal parts a clear relief. He had been so sick and so miserable, and he lived longer with a terminal illness than was expected. His death has been long anticipated, and towards the end he did not even know who he was. That is no way to live. Uncle Bill made it to 83. A similar thing happened back in October of 2020 with my stepmother who finally succumbed after a long and grinding struggle with breast cancer. She was 80-years old. Her last few months were also miserable.
As I was driving back from my uncle’s funeral in the Bay Area last March I felt some of the old feelings of death and darkness coming back. This will take a bit of explanation: I paid for my last semesters at UCLA by working in the Trauma Center there, and God knows what kind of misery and injury I did not see there. Toddlers pulled out of pools, horrible burn victims, suicide attempts, gunshot wounds, heart attacks, and a profusion of auto accidents – they all came to that Los Angeles emergency room, and I had my eyes wide open and paid close attention. I got a good whiff of death and devastation watching people of all ages die from trauma or otherwise – sometimes right in front of me. I would come home from work and stare at the ceiling and try to process what I had just seen. Sleep came slowly on such nights. There I was with eyes wide open in the dark with adrenaline coursing through my veins. My years in the emergency room was an education itself, although I remain unsure if it was a positive or negative one. Probably both. Yes, both.
After that I went to work near downtown Los Angeles as a public school teacher in a middle school – still the hardest thing I have ever done. Those are some of the worst schools in the country, and there I was as a beginning teacher. That was also a dark time, surrounded by so much poverty, chaos, violence, dysfunction, and illiteracy (or near-illiteracy). Over three decades later with so much more experience and success in the classroom, I am unsure if I would do any better now in a setting like Berendo Middle School than I did then. Any middle school teacher in the public schools of Houston, Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC, or Los Angeles is almost doomed to frustration and failure.
Then as I wrapped up my LAUSD employment, my mother fell sick with stage-4 lung cancer. There I was as an inner city school teacher watching my mom macerate and die in front of my eyes. In young adulthood it seemed I encountered difficulty in almost every corner of my life. My mom’s terminal illness took me by surprise. I sort of took my mom for granted, but when she seemed to shrivel up from chemotherapy and finally die skeleton-like I was overwhelmed. For some 14 months the process dragged on painfully and inexorably, and everyone knew where it would end. It was bleak, bleak. As she was dying every cell of my body seemed to remember the skin-to-skin contact I had as a child with my mommy, and the loss was a full-body physical experience; it rocked my world. The aftermath was of the scorched earth variety: the taste of ashes in my mouth. I wasn’t taking my mom for granted anymore.
In the months after she died several close relatives told me they thought I was “clinically depressed.” A few urged me to seek therapy and anti-depressants. I disagreed. I said I was “in mourning.” I chose to sit with my sadness while seeking to excise it by exercising, and in this way I eventually worked through it and moved on to the next stage of my life. Time and patience, those two most powerful wedges, combined with staying active and exercising, would break me out of my funk. Resilience over time and sweating under the sun would be my cure, not a doctor’s ministrations and SSRI drugs. I would write about my feelings on my personal webpage, not talk about them with a therapist. It worked for me.
But last March when I was returning from my uncle’s funeral, I found myself going back to that black place of death and depression from early adulthood. That year or so in 1997 after my mom died…. wow, I was in a hole. It was dark. Coincidentally the movie “The English Patient” came out at that time, and it became sort of a lightning rod for my feelings at the time – sadness, suffering, loss, death. Darkness, despair. In my car returning south on the 101 Freeway from the Bay Area the YouTube Music App brought me the following two tracks “Dark Nights” and “Read Me to Sleep” from Gabriel Yared’s excellent soundtrack of that movie. It is amazing how music or smells can conjure up a moment from the past back so vividly, and the music just brought me back to that dark place: feelings of black sadness about the unending loss of death which awaits you, me, and everyone. I can go down that hole and embrace that despairing feeling. And here I have to admit something: a not inconsiderable part of me likes the darkness.
It did not feel good. You are looking death in the face – the final enormity of the thing – examining the contours of what it looks and feels like, and the effect can be mesmerizing, and not entirely unpleasant. It is like how predatory snakes supposedly hypnotize terrified birds into inaction before they attack and devour them. My mom, my stepmom, my buddy Chris, two uncles… and my dad relatively soon, too. Everybody. Death comes for us all, sooner or later. Death, mighty and dreadful, who rides on a pale horse…
Enough.
It seems an indulgence to go down that hole again. Yes, an indulgence. Someday I would look my own mortality in the face; I will have a deathday then, as surely as I have a birthday now. But I have a job and family today. I have obligations and responsibilities. I will attend to those first. So I will turn my face away from the darkness for now. Why would I let the bitterness of suffering and death suck out all the joy and happiness which also exists in the world? My mom would not want that for me. If she could talk to me from beyond the grave, she would wish me to embrace the wonderful experiences the living world had to offer before I joined her in the land of the dead; I am sure of this. I agree with her. And so I will live my life unafraid of my eventual death. I will live in the present as happily as possible. As Jorge Luis Borges lamented about his own life, “He cometido el peor pecado que uno puede cometer: no he sido feliz.” I have committed the worst crime a person can commit: I have been unhappy. No, I will not let that happen. Nope.
But Halloween is an exception. I gave out candy to little kids who came to my door tonight, and I did so with a smile on my face. But inside I was mourning. My siblings and father and I exchanged text messages about mom on the anniversary of her death. My dad went to his wife’s grave at the Pacific View Cemetery in Newport Beach, CA and left flowers. 29 years later my dad is still alive, but his health is in decline. The name next to my mother’s on the grave marker is left blank and his name will be engraved there when he dies, and his body will be buried in that same hole with my mom. Here my brother captured that scene in images:
RIP, Margaret Mary Geib.
October 31, 1996.
29 years ago today: we do not forget.
Mother and oldest son, shortly before she died:
