on the death of one parent and the premature grieving of another

a milestone year

I had big writing plans for this month, and a lot of half-formed thoughts I’d been scribbling in my notes app since last year. May is an emotionally heavy month, and this May is especially loaded: ten years since the last time I saw my dad alive, and two years since my mom was diagnosed with an incurable cancer. I like reflecting and I like oversharing and I’m kind of obsessed with anniversaries of significant dates, and I thought it would be nice to commemorate this milestone year by writing an essay about it. Then May happened, and I didn’t write much at all. I’m still tied up in my anniversary idea and my brain has latched onto the concept that the post needs to go out in May—it is crucial that it’s still May—so I’m writing this at 7pm on May 31 and the post is going to go out on May 31, too.

My mom has been in the hospital twice this month, which is why none of the writing happened. Both times were unplanned: ER trips, the first at 8pm and the second at 4pm, the latter so bad that a nurse from her cancer clinic called the ambulance for us and stayed on the line with me as I waited for the trucks to arrive. The ER is a strange place in that it seems to make my brain-to-mouth filter dissolve, some combination of fear and desperation, and both times this month I’ve kind of lost my temper with the staff, something I have previously been both too polite and too introverted to do. But this time it was almost midnight and I was still sitting on a hard plastic chair in a tiny, stupid ER room surrounded by a bunch of medical staff who didn’t know anything about my mom’s cancer and weren’t being responsive when I asked them to just talk to the oncologist on call, and then I broke down crying in the middle of losing my temper with the doctor and weepingly apologized for being a bitch, even though I was still really mad at her. The next day I woke up after four hours of sleep, still feeling embarrassed about it, and also my mom was still in the hospital.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. My mom was supposed to have better responses to her treatments, first of all—she’s on her fourth treatment line in two years, which is kind of abysmally bad for her diagnosis, and I’m constantly worried about how fast she’s going to run out of treatment lines to try—but she was never supposed to have cancer at all, either. I’m sure everybody who knows somebody with cancer says that, but I still can’t get over it. My mom was the strongest, most independent person I knew, and watching her deteriorate has been the most difficult experience of my life. It doesn’t feel fair. It doesn’t feel real. Sometimes I look at her and I think to myself, I miss my mom. I want my mom back. Sometimes I think about Ada Limón’s poem “What Is Handed Down”:

It’s selfish, I know, but I want to be
the fixer now. Show me how you did it, all those years,
took something that needed repair and repaired it.

I am a person who struggles in periods of flux and uncertainty. I want to know everything about what is happening all the time. I want definite, concrete answers, and I’ve landed in a reality where nobody knows anything for sure, not even her oncologist team. My therapist says I need to learn to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty, but I don’t think I’m cut out for that level of inner peace. I think I am physically, emotionally incapable of it. I think I’ve forgotten how to be a normal person, because every day I wake up and I just feel anxious. Sometimes I can distract myself for a while—an hour, half of a day—but the anxiety always comes crawling back. I’m grieving more for my mom now than I ever did for my dad, even though she is still alive and he is already dead.

My dad died of a combined alcohol and prescription drug overdose when I was nineteen years old. It was probably an accident, which has always seemed worse to me, somehow, than if he had done it on purpose. I didn’t cry when I found out he was gone: I mechanically ate the dinner I had already cooked while the TV droned on in the background, a Tide commercial about getting blueberry stains out of t-shirts, and then I went to my room and lay face-down on my bed and listened to Leslie Cheung’s Leslie ‘89 from start to finish.

In Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, three sisters visit the hospital morgue to view their deceased father’s body:

What are we doing here, she thought, and then looked back at the body—understood the body as somehow distinct from her father, yet felt little about her father’s technical absence from the room. This lack was not a new sensation. How, she wondered, was one supposed to grieve an absence when that absence was familiar? What, she wondered, was grief without a clear departure to regret?

I didn’t even really miss my dad until my mom’s cancer diagnosis. He had already been missing from my life, both emotionally and physically, for so many years that the immediate aftermath of his death wasn’t grief but logistics, the blurry rush of banks and lawyers and realtors and estate sale agents. It’s only been in the deluge of diognostics and procedures and chemotherapy appointments and my mom’s increasingly poor health that I’ve regularly begun to think, I want my dad. I wish my dad were here. I was twenty-eight when my mom was diagnosed with cancer—an adult, a full-grown person who should theoretically be able to navigate the rest of her life without a parent there to watch over her. But the past two years have increasingly made me feel like a child in my helplessness, in my realization that my mom is my anchor to the rest of the world, and especially in my isolation of managing her care alone. I want another adult to give me a hug and sit with me in waiting rooms and help me make decisions and sometimes, maybe, make the decisions for me; an adult not to tell me that everything will be okay, but to tell me that I’m not alone. I don’t know if this qualifies as missing my dad. I think I might be missing an ideal of him, a version of him that didn’t actually exist, or mourning the possibility of him. He didn’t see me graduate with my bachelor’s degree, get accepted to grad school, begin my career, buy a car, develop tastes and interests that will follow me for the rest of my life. Sometimes I’m startled into the realization that I’ve become someone he might not recognize. Most of the time, though, thinking about grief just means thinking about losing my mom, a certainty still resting on an uncharted future coordinate, and thinking about that makes me spiral down into a bottomless well of agony: waiting for the knife to fall, not knowing when it will strike but knowing it’s there: above me, hovering and waiting.

It’s been two years for my mom, now, and every passing month feels like a sliver working its way under my skin. Ten years, on average, minus two years. Ten years, on average, minus two years and one month. Over and over. Every day. Another month slipping by. A countdown, always ticking in the back of my mind, and no way to turn it off.

The truth is, I spend a lot of time thinking about death.

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The Romans (like the Greeks before them) had a literary genre dedicated to offering solace to those affected by loss: the consolatio, literally the “consolation.” A consolatio could be a poem or a treatise or a speech or a letter; it was meant to guide the greiving and ease the pain of a close death. “Arguments commonly employed include the following: all are born mortal; death is an escape from the evils of life; time heals all griefs; the deceased was only ‘lent’—be grateful for having possessed him or her. Normally grief [was] regarded as natural and legitimate, though not to be indulged in.”¹

Although it was a genre of its own, the word consolatio now is often associated with Cicero, whose daughter Tullia died in 45 BCE. She was just over thirty years old and, by every account, the light of his life—unsually for a man of his era, his letters show a clear preference for her over his son. Consumed by grief, he tore through every consolatio and bereavement-focused book he could find, and then, when that wasn’t enough, he wrote his own.² What need is there to say anything of my treatise On Consolation? he said later. For it is the source of very great comfort to me and will, I think, be of much help to others.³

In the consolatio itself, he wrote:

But if ever any living creature ought to have been consecrated, surely it was she; if the offspring of Cadmus or Amphitryon or Tyndareus deserved to be raised to heaven by fame, for her the same honor ought certainly be declared. And this I will indeed do, and I shall consecrate you, the best, the most learned of women, placed with the approval of immortal gods themselves among their company, in the estimation of all mortals.⁴

Cicero’s consolatio is a lost work. A handful of fragments have been preserved as quotes by other Latin authors, but the piece in its entirety is gone. Unless an extant copy turns up somewhere, buried under ash in Herculaneum or under sand in Egypt, we’ll never know what it said. Part of me thinks this is beautifully poetic, an ouroboros of a thing—something written to address loss, now lost itself—but the other half is bitterly resentful. I don’t think Cicero’s consolatio would fix me, just like nothing he read was able to fix him. But I would have liked the possibility, the shiny little scrap of hope that somehow he would be able to reach through time and say exactly what I’ll need to hear.

It’s the only consolatio we know of that was written as a salve for its author’s own grief.

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1. From the “consolation” entry by J. H. D. Scourford in the Oxford Classical Dictionary.

2. Tullia died in February and Cicero’s consolatio was released into the world later that same year, so let it not be said that grief is a guaranteed killer of creativity.

3. Not my translation of De Divinatione, but from Loeb.

4. Translation from Spencer Cole. Cicero is talking about apotheosis, “the glorification of a subject to divine levels”—ie, deification. He became obsessed with finding the perfect plot of land to build a shrine for Tullia, but we do not know for sure whether he ever carried out these plans.