How do you cry for a life not fully lived?

My mother died “unexpectedly” on December 21st last year.

I say “unexpectedly” in quotation marks because honestly she had been wanting to die or trying to die, or at the very least had been trying to be sick enough to die, but then survive, for my whole life.

I haven’t yet cried at her passing because it feels like she left so long ago, she was so un-present for most of my life, especially past 1980 when my father died. I think when he died she felt disposed of again, as she was when she was just two and her mother died. Her stepmother not only didn’t want her, but was cruel to her, to the point that Mama’s older brothers and sisters, themselves still children, finally took her out of that situation. I would love to find that stepmother now, and just watch who she is and how she is now, but she is long dead, I’m sure. I would love to have had a word or two–or three–with her before she went.

And I would love to ask my Granddaddy about that time, too, but I only knew him as an old man who had a debilitating stroke at 65, at which time I imagine the evil stepmother left him, unless he had the good sense to leave her earlier; when I knew him, he lived alone in a nursing home and I loved him so. I imagine as an adult, I might have asked him, “How did you let this happen?” but as a child, I found in him a soulmate, someone who delighted in small things, as I did, someone who rehabilitated himself after his stroke by making potholders on one of those red metal child’s looms, and selling them “two for two bits,” at the cemetery every family weekend, much to my mother’s mortification.

Rumor has it that Mama’s stepmother was a nurse in the state mental institution in my hometown and used to take my mother to work with her – as a small child – and leave her in locked wards with patients while she worked.

My mother had a hard life. She had the look of a child thrown away; the letters I have that she wrote to her father, my beloved Granddaddy who traveled selling insurance and surely couldn’t have known what his new wife was doing, are heartbreaking. He had no money for a doll for her Christmas gift, and suggested that it was more important for a child who had nothing to get that doll. So she was motherless and doll-less too.

Until her sister took her in. Newly married, along with her young husband, she took in this little red-headed waif of a girl. We knew Sissy’s husband as Papa (pronounced Paw Paw). Sissy and Papa because our grandparents once Mama married the man of her dreams – my father – and started her own family. And yet, for her whole life, Mama couldn’t shake the feeling of being discarded, especially after Daddy died when she wasn’t yet 50, and I grew to know as an adult that we make up for that in many different ways, don’t we? Some of us with food, with recklessness, with impulsive and destructive relationships, with an inability to move forward, and more. We are constantly filling the hole we feel.

In Mama’s case, she determined that she needed attention, and the best way to get it was to be sick, and so she was–her whole life was a series of surgeries and weeks in traction and illnesses that none of us could see, but felt the impact from. Little did she know that she could have gotten all the attention she needed by being well. We tried telling her that, but she didn’t believe us, or the requirement in her DNA was so deeply coded that she couldn’t believe it, or didn’t care.

Ten or twelve years ago, a friend and I had a six-hour drive to the coast of Oregon, and talked about the similarities in our two mothers. “By the time my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer,” he said quietly at one point, looking out at the sea, “no one believed her, and no one cared.” We rode in silence for a good long while.

And I felt the sudden shock of recognition in that car. That was exactly it. Crying wolf, and wolf, and wolf, and in the process getting addicted to pain medications, and after all the best efforts to save her, it became clear that I could not save her, I could only save myself or be pulled down with her, which I was over the years, which I was, in ways I am still not willing to admit to myself.

Not even finding Christian-based therapists helped. Not even confronting her pill-popping doctors helped. Not staging a demonstration at her pharmacy with reams of her prescriptions printed out in tiny print helped. Not even admitting her to the psych ward at the hospital helped. None of it helped. Over decades, it didn’t help.

We drove by an apartment building once while out for a Sunday drive, and I could hear her talking to herself in the back seat, where she sat alone, Emma in the front seat with me. “That looks like a nice place,” she said. “Maybe I could be happy there.” I looked at her in the rear view mirror and saw the side of her face as she looked out the window at the apartment buildings. And then after a pause, while I listened, I heard the small coda, “No, I couldn’t be happy anywhere.”

It was so hard to watch this for so long; at some point, you have to look away to keep your eyes on the road ahead.