Motherloss and Mascara

A funny thing happened when my mom died.

“For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet.” -Jacqueline Woodson

I encountered this line in Jacqueline Woodson’s beautiful novel, Another Brooklyn, in the bath (where I do my best reading) and felt a great spiritual shudder. This was in 2016. My mother indeed wasn’t dead yet, but I lived in a state of fear that I’d get the call any moment. I thought I understood something of grief because I’d lived a grieving life since as far back as I can remember—grief over the living—which is the best way I can describe loving someone whose life is colored by addiction. But still, I feared deeply what the ultimate grief would be like, the capital-G-grief of an actually dead mother. I suspected these were two very different things. In that bathtub I was on borrowed time, but still, had time nonetheless. I was not naive to the fact that despite my pain, this was a gift.

I was right to suspect the two griefs would feel different. My mother died last September, so it’s been about a year since I crossed over from motherless-in-theory to actually motherless. I was no longer in the “for a long time” part of Woodson’s line. And once my mother was dead and I could no longer call her, or hear her voice, or listen to her relay a story or a memory, or just hear her let me know that she loved me, which she did frequently, or receive her long, wild texts, or worry worry worry about her safety, her health, her last drinking binge…I found myself researching tubing mascaras.