To my Mother

“Sister Heroine” Beth Hart (2010)

“It’s gonna be a dark cold December

With shaking lilies in the yard

And your sweet face I will remember

How I’m gonna miss your stubborn heart

So forgive me for my weakness

I guess my faith is a little stoned

The angels cried on a Friday

The day that God walked you home

So goodbye Sister heroine

I’ll remember everything, I love you

Goodbye white trash beauty Queen

Your crooked heart and your beat up

Dreams, I love you

It hurts to laugh here without you

A piece inside of us is gone

Mama tries to smile too

Ain’t never seen that woman try so hard

No more working Alvarado

No more liars, tramps or thieves

Your skin and bones don’t cast no shadow

On an empty bed in Motel Six

So goodbye Sister heroine

I’ll remember everything, I love you

Goodbye white trash beauty Queen

Your crooked heart and your beat up

Dreams, I love you

We all threw roses at your feet

While you burned our crosses in the street

So if you’re looking down on me

I love you..”

“It’s gonna be a dark cold December

I’m surprised it was August, I thought you’d will yourself to die on my birthday. 

With shaking lilies in the yard

Funeral lilies, just to spite you. I may even get them tattooed for you.

And your sweet face I will remember

The photo of you, before we were born, where you looked happy. It stays on my desk, to remind me there was a time where you may have been genuinely happy. 

How I’m gonna miss your stubborn heart

I’ll miss how much you loved when your brain made sense that something was worth loving. 

So forgive me for my weakness

My weakness of wanting you, even when you clearly didn’t want me. 

I guess my faith is a little stoned

Stoned, but not abandoned. I know I walk in my faith strongly, something you showed me how to do. 

The angels cried on a Friday

The Monday, when you drew your final breath, who knows how. 

The day that God walked you home

I can only go on if I believe you’re truly with God, in his light and feeling relief from your sorrow. 

So goodbye Sister heroine

So goodbye Mama, one of the strongest women I ever knew.

I’ll remember everything, I love you

I’ll remember the good and the bad, and I’ll love you. 

Goodbye white trash beauty Queen

Goodbye to the woman who believed in the theory of her worth, but could never grasp it. 

Your crooked heart and your beat up Dreams

Your heart was battered before I ever got to meet you, but I loved when you’d spring into action, even knowing you’d give up half way through and go back to bed. 

I love you

I love you more than people think I should.

It hurts to laugh here without you

It feels sacreligous, to laugh when you had nothing to laugh about. 

A piece inside of us is gone

How sad that that piece died before you did, a whole lifetime you missed. 

Mama tries to smile too

She’s the most graceful human I’ve ever known, missing you but at peace that your suffering is over. 

Ain’t never seen that woman try so hard

She’s trying like hell, and she’s doing it beautifully. 

No more working Alvarado

No more begging and working to keep up with your pain, your body should have only ever belonged to you. 

No more liars, tramps or thieves

I’m so sorry you were ever used, taken and beaten, your innocence destroyed.

Your skin and bones don’t cast no shadow

I can’t get the image from my head, your bosy lying there in that bed, gone and cold. 

On an empty bed in Motel Six

How many motel rooms did we collectively see, how many cheap paintings did we focus on to get through the worst moments of our lives? 

So goodbye Sister heroine

Goodbye Ma, sister, daughter, grandmother. 

I’ll remember everything, I love you

In a few generations, the best of you will have died with your children, and the stories of your worst parts will be all the legacy you’ll have left. 

Goodbye white trash beauty Queen

Goodbye Ma, and rest easy. Know that your good is in me, and I’ll carry it through to the end of my days. 

Your crooked heart and your beat up Dreams, 

Your crooked heart was all you had to show in the end, all you had left. Your dreams must’ve felt heavy and too much to keep carrying. I know now that you died with Daddy, and what was left was a shadow.

I love you

I love you so much. I love the woman who loved me, who I rarely saw, but always knew was there. 

We all threw roses at your feet

There will be no roses, no funeral, no obituary. You’ll have died and the world will go on without you. 

While you burned our crosses in the street

I hope God opened his arms, and that you’re sitting with Daddy and all of our loved ones, rocking on Grammy’s porch, smoking and drinking and having a laugh. 

So if you’re looking down on me

So if you’re looking down on me, I think you were brilliant, and funny, and so fucking intelligent. I always felt I was in your shadow, waiting to be as smart as you. If you’re looking down, cover me in your shadow and keep my babies safe. 

I love you..”

I love you Ma. I love you, and I always did. I tried to tell myself I could stop, but I know now I never did and never will. I love all the best of you, and I will lay the rest under the next full moon. I love you Ma, goodbye. 

To my mother,

I long considered that you deserved warm words, “no need to talk ill of the dead” like you’d often say. And then I thought of Anna Lamott, quoted “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.”  I wish I could tell the story better, but it happened, and we deserved better. 

I see you when I look in the mirror. I lean into the mirror the way that you would, when I was young, and still needed supervision in the bath. You’d sit on the sink and tell me “don’t do this when you’re older, it’ll have scars all over your face.” Like most things I watched you do, I picked up the habit, and it became an obsession. Now I see the wrinkles and freckles, scars left by years of chronic picking. I’m not like you, but there are subtle reminders that I didn’t materialize out of no where. There’s other things, my hands for instance. I look down at them, and I see more evidence of years of adventures in the sun. I wear rings like you, and a necklace of charms I’ve collected along the way. I thought of your necklace right away. It had no monetary value, just comprised of cheap lockets you wore to represent the births of most of your children, the ones you told people about. Mine carries significant meaning too. It represents my journey into motherhood, a moment I once groaned in remembrance of having shared with you, now just a funny anecdote at parties. I wear a Mizpah coin, something that practically bound our family. No one needed to talk about it, but we all knew what it meant. I wear the stars and moon, to represent the vastness of the universe, though a small group, like my family, yet still so impactful. And I wear the Virgin Mary, a piece my best friend gave me. It’s amazing that although your faith nearly destroyed you, mine is derived from what you taught me, and it’s the strongest part of me. I know your necklace is lost forever, who even knows if you still had it. You may have pawned it ages ago. 

I knew there would be no obituary, and no funeral. We’d talked about what you wanted for as long I can remember remembering. You made sure we knew exactly what you wanted, and when we weren’t allowed to know anymore, we knew you’d tell the right people. Someone suggested to me recently that the reason you never wanted a funeral was probably because you knew no one would come. It hit me that that may be exactly why, but of all the people you didn’t want there, I promise I’d been the first in line. 

The moment we were informed, I fell to my bedroom floor, and I wailed. I cried like a child who would never feel her mother again. I know that in the grander span of time and space, this is exactly the way it’s meant to be. A child is born, the parent dies, and the child repeats the cycle. I know that it’s also deeply traumatic and tragic, no matter the state of the relationship between child and mother. Maybe this feels more tragic because it happened so awfully. I think it feels tragic because I don’t believe I deserve to feel pain for the death of someone who didn’t want me. How did you tell that story to people? What reasons could you possibly expect people to validate the reasons you abandoned your children?

Even in death, I want to jab at you, and make you hurt with me, but I desperately want my faith to be true, and if I lean into my faith, I can’t possibly believe you deserve any more suffering. In my heart, I know that hell is what we experience here on Earth, and you did enough suffering for life times. 

That’s why I chose this song. I think you would have loved it, I think I love it because it feels influenced by you. I initially interpreted it to be about my inner child, who I’d also identified as being you, like your inner child was my curse to carry and parent and love unconditionally. After all, you passed on your curses to me, and I’d manage to break so many. Of all of your curses, your hurting inner child was the most important one, because if I could find a way to believe in my worth and love, I could believe in your worth and love. That’s what God is Ma. He is me, and you and the universe, and we are all intertwined. I chose this song because it gives me the opportunity to say goodbye to you, to send you off with love and authenticity. I think you craved authenticity, that’s why when you believed in something, you did so with conviction. I wish the fog could have lifted for you, like it has for me. I know in my heart that you were never going to be you again. 

This is it Ma. This is what your life amounted to. There will be no great tales passed through generations, no legacy imparted on your grandchildren. You’ll be a hushed story, all of us grappling with our faith and our indoctrinated belief of how to speak of the dead. 

I was desperate at different moments throughout the past 11 years, and I was like a caged animal trying to escape a cage. I needed to get to you, to convince you of my worth, and to be able to say goodbye and touch you one more time. I felt that so much this week. I needed to get to your body, I needed to see you and touch your skin, and reconnect one last time. I realized halfway through the week that I’d never receive that opportunity, and something in me died. Maybe it was you. Maybe you moved on, knowing I’d survive this trauma too. I desperately want to believe your suffering has ended, and you received enlightenment immediately. I hope you’re there with Daddy, and our friends and relatives. I hope you’re taking a moment while the rest of us stay here, trying to figure out the best way to get to you again. I believed that when Daddy died, and maybe it was a childish coping skill, but it’s still in me, and I’m choosing to take it. It’s been debated if it was even fair that you died in your sleep. I thought that was unreal for a moment too, but where else might have you been? You surely hadn’t been to a doctor in well over a year, but you knew it was coming. You knew you were dying, and you laid in your filthy bed, and died with nothing, and no dignity. I think that it sounds fair, when you take perspective. You did your very best to destroy us. You didn’t win. You just lost out on the right to be a part of a beautiful family. I know you didn’t believe you deserved us, but I sure wish you’d known. 

In the end, addiction had ravaged you of you. We knew you had lost your core long before you died, and we mourned that quietly, and away from you. What little of your good that remains in each of us, will be ok. We’re all going to be ok. We’ve survived the hell of your creation, and we’ve all flourished despite it. We’ll all have snippets, moments frozen in time. For me it’ll be the bathroom sink during bath time. Or sitting at your knee on a hot summer night, none of us sleeping, and you telling us random history facts. None of them will be moments of affection or “real” love, but those were the moments I felt most loved. They say that when you aren’t fed love froma spoon, you learn to lick it off of knives, and that’s exactly what it was like growing up with you as my mother. I learned pretty early on that you would never be a soft place to land, so I’d have to how to recognize love when it was offered. I did, and so did the rest of us. We talk about those moments sometimes. We share war stories too. Alcohol shows up in all the stories. It shows up in most of my stories too. It will forever, another curse you handed down. Like many things, I did what I could to avoid being like you. When Drew suggested my drinking was resembling yours, I poured everything down the drain just to be sure I never became what you had. How ironic that it was your birthday. Maybe God intended it that way. Celebrating my sobriety on your birthday gives me a reason to celebrate you. 

Goodbye Ma, I wish I’d been able to tell you before, I love you. 

This is the most beautiful photo of you that I’ve ever seen. I know it’s not the best, but it shows you as happy as I could ever imagine you to be. I also know you loved a good hat, and this one must’ve made you feel super confident.