The death of my mother killed the friend I used to be

I used to be the best friend a woman could ask for. Now, I’m struggling to remember who that person even was.

by: E.B. Johnson

Tomorrow, marks two years since the death of my mother. She died at home — alone — in her bed and surrounded by the children that never disappointed her: her pets. She was 63 years old and the strongest woman that ever lived. I feel her death as keenly today as I did two years ago. To me, she dies every day and it’s a state of living that has destroyed who I was.

While my mother was alive she was my closest friend and confidante. Though I moved more than six hours away she never failed to answer my call, never failed to message me back. She was the kind of mother that would stand beside her children no matter what, and I tested that theory on more than one occasion.

The day my mother died is one I will never forget. It was a Sunday and I had been struggling all day to get in touch with her. I was going though a bad time with my health and was waiting for a surgery that was going to change my life. After more than 6 hours of reaching out with no response, I knew the worst was coming. It didn’t prepare me for my brother’s phone call, however, or the words, “We lost mom last night.”

We lost mom last night.

It might as well have been “You’re dead. You’re dead and everything you once knew is dead and everything you are and could ever be are dead too.” It might as well have been my fugue.

Losing your mother is a loss that is harder to bear than any other. Our mothers are the first reflection we get of ourselves and it is often the best reflection we ever find. Our mothers see us as we are — alongside what they wish us to be — and have the capability to understand our stories and our faults with the kind of acceptance and understanding that is hard to find in this “cancel-culture” world.

The grief of my mother’s death was overwhelming and all-consuming. For days, I struggled to eat or sleep or do anything but cry. I thought I knew what it would be like to grieve (my mother had, after all, been seriously ill for more than ten years) — but I had no idea.

I also had no idea of the division her death would create between me and the world I thought I understood.

The day my mother died, I died with her and so did the friend I used to be.

The death of a parent puts you on the other side of a veil that separates you from the people that knew you in your “before life”. There is something about the grief that is so raw, so brutally and horrifically transforming that it strips away every aspect of your core beliefs, values and behaviors and leaves you standing naked and wiped clean. Call it a tabula rasa of sorts.

Before I lost my mother, I believe I was the kind of girlfriend other girls only dreamed about. I loved my friends deeply, honestly and without abandon. No matter how shitty they were or how self-obsessed, I was there for them; a dumping ground for their endless drama, a steam shovel for all the emotions they were too lazy to deal with themselves.

When my mother was gone, this girl disappeared. She became separated from the people she had once loved by the reality of who they were and who she was becoming.

The new person who rose from the ashes of my mother’s cremation was not the same one who was willing to be a sacrificial dumping ground for the hurt and bleeding people she had chosen to surround herself with.

When my mother was gone and I was left wounded and seeking help, I realized there was none to be had save for the help I could offer myself. My friends could not understand this new person, not from any real fault of their own, but because they had no depth of pain, no knowledge of what it was to be riven from the compass that kept you pointing in the right direction.

Depression to hand, I stopped calling, I stopped messaging. I stopped putting all the effort and all the energy I had been pouring desperately into my friendships. I realized that the love I had been chasing had been right in front of me all along.

When my calls stopped so did their’s and with them my sense of belonging to anyone other than myself. As freeing as it was heartbreaking, it is still a fact that I’m learning to adjust to ’til this day.

The death of my mother changed the friend that I was and it changed everything that I ever thought I was or wanted to be.

So, tomorrow I’ll write a letter and sit down to a meal of chicken and dumplings and remember the woman that raised me. I’ll strive to remember the woman that she wanted me to be even as a raise a glass to the woman that she was.

I’ll raise another glass, though. A smaller one, in a darker hue. This one I’ll raise for myself and the death of the woman that used to love the ones that she called “friend”. Maybe I’ll find that girl again one day while I’m meandering down this road called life. Maybe she’s still there waiting to be dug up.

Who knows? All I know is my mother is gone and no one else will ever love me the same, no matter how hard or long I look throughout this whole universe. That love is gone forever and there’s no getting it back.