Eventual title goes here
I don’t know where to begin with this, so I’m just going to start writing, which is half of the battle, innit? My mother is no longer among the living, and had conflicting views of life after death, so this, and I, are what remains. That’s … a lot. And egotistical. Of course, she lives on in anyone who seeks this out, who remembers her, the multitude of lives and people that she’s touched, and more than any biography, that’s where any text written about my mother deserves to begin.
My mother had a personality. My goodness, did she have a personality. This, more than anything, is her defining characteristic, trait, and legacy. She was boisterous, she was loud, she was unapologetic for who she was, opinionated, and with a deep sense of right and wrong. She could be judgmental and moralistic, she could be selfish; she was deeply loving and loyal. She had little time for titles, rank, or position, and accorded it absolutely no respect, which marks a deep contrast to both my father and I. Her personality in general at times was a large contrast to our personalities, and this was absolutely a good thing, as she made us both better people for it. Where my father and I would accept minor injustices or transgression on ourselves, my mother would not hesitate to strongly advocate for herself or us. I would hope, we likewise tried to corral the world into being able to contend with her force of personality, which absolutely filled a room, and rooms adjacent.
Where, with the page on my father, I had started with a bit of biographical background, as I had had some time to wrestle with (still ongoing, mind) the loss of him, losing my mother is still a soul-jarring shock to me. I think I can’t help but be somewhat more subjective with my framing of all this here, as my relationship with my mother had facets simply not applicable or relevant to my corresponding relationship with my dad.
I express this repeatedly in any context where it arises, but I was lucky to be raised by both of my parents. My parents were married in the early 1980s, in New York City, and I was born in 1991. My parents had traditional views on family and marriage, and so I was accorded the luxury of my mother being hands on in raising me, insofar as that was possible along with her working to supplement the wages of my father. As we lived in New York, a lot of my early memories is of accompanying her to varying places in that city, and as she couldn’t drive, of using mass transit to get there. This is somewhat unrelated, but I actually have a fond memory of my father’s car (a 1995 Plymouth Voyager! It was purple!) being impounded, and our having to take mass transit home. My dad drove everywhere; I think it’s my only memory of using mass transit with him. I very vividly remember trying to convince him to take either the Q41 or Q8 bus from Sutphin Boulevard, which he did not do, instead opting to take the E train to the Jamaica-Van Wyck exit and WALKING from there to our 127th street home. I know this means nothing to someone not from this very particular geographic area, but there were several better routes to have possibly been taken and I so clearly remember wishing my mother were with us to advocate alternate routing. But, my father had a duty to get us home safely and not be lost due to potential misdirection from me, and given that context, it was fine. But talking about my mother reminded me of that incident, haha.
Transit aside, my mother, though, was never opposed to grabbing a taxi, and I can remember being downright annoying in my complaints of having to walk or catch a bus as opposed to her getting a taxi for us everywhere. In the third grade, I do fondly remember my teacher remarking on this, letting me know that this was a spoilt trait of mine, but it was one that my mother indulged, and honestly thinking back, for both our sakes.
And the reason this came up in the third grade? My mother had gotten off of work early and simply decided to sign me out. I loved that, and this was something that my mother would do intermittently throughout my early education. Simply show up to school during an afternoon and bring me home because she loved me and my company. I loved the randomness of it, and loved that she did that.
Around my elementary school years was when the 9/11 attacks occurred, during which my mother was working. She used to recount having to cross the Williamsburg Bridge on foot, as mass transit service was irregular/semi-interrupted on that day. I was a student at PS 161 in Queens at the time, which was a minor story in itself! Our school in particular had students progressively being signed out early that day, with a general gag order in place, even when we knew something was wrong. By late afternoon, we were assigned a substitute teacher, and she mentioned the attacks, corroborated by a classmate of ours. By 3 PM, the students remaining were placed into the auditorium, held until they could be personally picked up. My mother, on being able to do so, came and retrieved me; we were let out via a side door. That was an event. She expressed regret that she couldn’t come for me earlier, and I had just simply remarked that it must’ve been such a hassle to get to my school from where she was. We sat around watching CBS until my father came home. What a day.
By the time I had started high school, my mother had quit the labor force. This was both due to an increasing lack of mobility on her part, and the desire to be around to raise me. On my urging, she started playing World of Warcraft, which was still a major cultural phenomena at the time; a hobby she’d maintain long after I had stopped playing, for the rest of her life. She even had me build a PC for her in 2017.
But I get ahead of myself! We eventually move to the midwest, Ohio, and on my attaining both a license and car (thanks, dad!); I can’t begin to write how many different places and trips that we went on. A story she was really fond of was us being chased by a parking lot attendant on foot while I just drove away, unaware, and her laughing happily after the fact. I tend to take corners in a somewhat spirited way and she’d exaggerate being thrown around in her seat. She used to call spirited acceleration “digging ginger” and we’ve been joking about “digging ginger” for over a decade, now. She cajoled my dad into purchasing a ‘14 Lexus ES for us at one point, and she was truly fond of yelling “Toyota build it with 270 horsepowah, nah!?” since at one point I think I sincerely told her: “Toyota built it with 270 horsepower; I’m gunna use 270 horsepower!”
We’d go to restaurants together! For Black Friday in 2013, we went to MicroCenter, where I bought an i7-4770k which she was very amused by my having to wait in a line for almost an hour to get. We’d go to Jungle Jim’s international market almost every Friday. We’d go to Columbus all of the time; we even went back to New York together in my dad’s car once, just so she could buy some fish that isn’t available here. When I first started driving, I’d drop her off at the door of places and wait for her in the parking lot to pick her up. Later, her mobility declined severely, so I would assemble/disassemble her wheelchair (or later still, mobility scooter), and accompany her to these places.
Her mobility was a major issue in her life for as long as I was around, and only got worse as time progressed. What made this severely worse was a rollover accident that my parents and I were in during a blizzard in—I don’t even remember the year at this point. 2006, I want to say? [1] She had a surgery not long after, and not long after that, this poor lady would be wheelchair bound for the rest of her life.
This had a marked effect on the trajectory of the lives of all involved. My mother’s health progressively declined, and I can’t even begin recount the amount of hospitalizations and surgeries she endured towards the end of her life. Her decline was not rapid like my father’s was. Honestly, on writing this, I can say that she had a resilience, a determination to live, a love for life, and the loss of my father was just… immense. My father and I both believed that we would outlive her, as morbid as it is to put it in writing, and the fact that we lost him first? I’m still, well, honestly, inconsolable over the loss of him. To lose her so shortly after him? I can’t even write a proper record of her like I attempted to do with my dad; this is more of a journal entry that I’m deciding to publish at this point, to have my perspective of her on the record, as… nobody else has my perspective of her, especially later in life when we weren’t surrounded by family.
My mother loved food; there’s truly an uncountable number of times that I’ve either taken her out to eat, or picked up food so she could eat while playing Warcraft. She loved some daytime soaps; she continued watching The Young & the Restless from my early childhood until her last days. She enjoyed Billy Joel, Elton John, (she really loved Candle in the Wind) and of all things, country music.
One of the ways that she displayed her absolute love and adoration for me without having to say it is that she sincerely tried to understand me. She took effort and time to try to engage me on my hobbies and interests, when they weren’t even her own; she talked to me enough to where she would ask me pertinent questions. For example, I have a passion for politics and political issues; every day during the presidency of Donald Trump, she would engage me about the headlines that he would make. She would ask me about the video games I played, and as I have a fondness for RPGs, tease me about being underleveled, whether it was the case or not. I’m a bit of a weeb at heart; she’d come wheel up and watch anime with me. Or if I were playing a visual novel, she’d play Warcraft in a room over and laugh at various lines of dialogue. She used to PvP, and I’d ask her how her battlegrounds were going; she always would complain that Blizzard was biased in favor of the Horde. If she couldn’t complete a quest, she’d yell at me until I would come and do it for her. She sometimes tried to Youtube how to complete things that she had difficulty with in game and would beckon me to observe. She did her daily quests and, oh god, you know, one of the things she would say was “One day me’a guh dead-gone an’ leff you, Kussie!” [2] and this turned out to be true. Until writing this, I …. I haven’t realized, she really …. She’s gone, and her Warcraft character is never going to be played again. *sighs*
Speaking of English dialects, she lived in the United States for decades—decades man, I tell ya, and she never lost the dialect. My father by marked contrast spoke English with no dialect whatsoever. I can’t even say that it’s an education thing, but more that it goes back to my mother’s force of personality; she simply didn’t care if people didn’t understand her spoken English. And this was actually a common occurrence, especially after we moved to Ohio. My father and I would tease her, would try to explain to her that people simply couldn’t understand her, or just translated for her, but she never did bother to adopt a standard form of spoken English.
Her force of personality was something to behold, actually getting around to it. She was loud, as I mentioned at the start, and unapologetic. Everyone who met her remembered her, and she would befriend seemingly anyone (who could understand her, at least), striking up conversations with absolutely anyone. She was indifferent in this way, but in a good way. Many times, my father and I would leave her unattended, and then find her simply by following her voice. I remember us dropping her off at a big box store once, and being able to hear her from the parking lot! We both just looked at each other and laughed, but it fit her so well.
My mother suffered from diabetes, sometimes controlled, sometimes not, and she was warned for years that her kidney function was declining and could eventually lead to dialysis. This came to pass; she eventually was put on dialysis, which again changed the lives of our household unit. She took it in good humor, but hated having to go to it three times a week, which for the majority of it, was Mon/Weds/Fri. I remember the very first time that I took her to take dialysis, I had wanted to stay with her for the duration of it, as I would imagine that she would be bored! But no, I wasn’t allowed to, and so I would drop her off and pick her back up. This continued for quite a while, until she started receiving transit to/from.
Eventually, the state declared that her needs were above the capabilities of my father and me to provide for. There was an incident, this was almost comical at the time as I feared its possibility and it ended up occurring; we had a wheelchair on our second floor, and my father was assisting her upstairs while I hauled the wheelchair downstairs. So I had this wheelchair in my hands, my mother was on a stair-chair, about maybe three or four steps above ground level, and my father was on the steps behind her. She fell out of her chair and went tumbling down, fracturing her hip and taking my father down with her, while I was still near the top of the stairs. We did eventually get her upstairs, but as the pain from this fracture was so severe, she requested to be hospitalized. In one of her statements, she claimed that my father pushed her down the stairs. To begin, this was absolutely untrue. One of my mother’s less savory traits was that she did sometimes have a tendency towards deception, manipulation, or outright lying. [3], [4], [5] She would later claim that she never made this claim to anyone, but the damage from that was already done.
The day after she returned home from the hospital, the state declared my father and I unfit, and she was sent to a nursing home against her will, where she’d remain for over a year until her death. I used to visit her there almost daily! And the people there were awesome and friendly. But she did place herself into the situation where she had to be held there against her will. There were many times when I’d visit her and she’d ask me to just wheel her out so we could go visit places like we used to when she was ‘free’. I would’ve loved nothing more, but she couldn’t leave the building with me unless her guardian issued permission for such an extravagance. Such an extravagance was never allowed. Ah, my mother would be furious at me for not complying with her requests, in these instances I would sometimes just walk away and come back in a minute or two.
I say all of this, but the woman did love me more than anything else in the world. She cared about my wellbeing, and particularly worried about me after my father died. She wanted the best for me, she would ask about me even in the direst of circumstances for her, and she expected for me to be involved in her care, regardless of who or whatever would stand in her way. There were many instances of her being hospitalized, of my showing up barely hours later as soon as I was informed, and being told by nurses of her wanting to know where I was.
I don’t know where else to take this. My father died in January 2023, and this ruined us both. The day my dad was to be cremated, she wasn’t allowed to go due to contracting Covid-19. I pushed the button for his burning and she was not there to witness it. The last time she had spoken to him would’ve been two or three days before his death; we had visited her together. Her loss was compounded by a traffic accident while being transported to dialysis a few weeks later. She stopped eating regularly, and a few days before her death, I honestly couldn’t recognize her. I walked past the woman and didn’t even realize it was her, she had literally wasted away to such a degree. [6] I mentioned this to my coworkers; one in particular, who I never really properly expressed my gratitude for in a way that is meaningful, tried his best to tell me to utilize any support that I might need, that I had support. It’s a kindness that I… I find it difficult to express in words how deeply it meant.
She was always fairly close to her family, keeping up with them via phone calls, and staying abreast of news and events. And I’ve received more support than I deserve from that quarter, as well. But, there it is. I’ve written this on the 24th of October, 2023. When I had set out to write this, I wanted some sort of memorialization to my mom here, as I occupied a unique position in her life, and have some perspective that no one else does. She, with my dad, raised me. I am their only child. I just, unlike with my dad, who I practically sanctify in my telling of him; I had a truly complex relationship with my mom. I loved her, she loved me, and our interactions were so intense…it’s a void that I … *sighs* I miss them both, deeply. I miss the conversations, I miss their presence, their perspectives, I miss them interacting with each other. They were funny! They were literally an old married couple. My mom would yell about, or agitate for something, and my dad would go out of his way to indulge her, even when he wasn’t able to. My mom would sometimes get angry at me ‘taking his side’, and I would be like “this guy spoilt you; you’ve been princessed by him.” And far more than me, who chose to take a very active role in her caretaking, my dad did spoil her. He would tolerate her yelling, her, honestly, sometimes abuse. He had a passivity about it which I didn’t share. I think it offended me that she seemingly took it for granted. [7] I would yell back at my mother when she started—this goes against my nature somewhat, but it also was that I wasn’t going to tolerate being verbally abused. I don’t know. I don’t regret it, because we did argue, and sometimes those arguments were real. But I never had a relationship with my mother where I deferred to her simply because she was my mother. I was judged for this while she was alive, but those judging me weren’t the ones hauling her in a wheelchair up garage steps like my father and I would do, sometimes together, sometimes independently. The ones who wanted me to be docile while being subject to her yelling weren’t the ones who took her the bathroom and helped change diapers. My dad is the only one who has any right to judge my relationship with her, and to be honest… he had a fairly unique coping mechanism himself, the legend. He’d reprimand me gently, saying something like “that’s how she is… you know what she gets like” (and in turn, I would sometimes have to remind him of that when she turned her ire on him), and just fix drinks for us. He or I would situate her with using the bathroom and provide her some food, and then watch Youtube downstairs together. It was… unique. It was … weird, and sometimes unhealthy, but it was happy. I miss it. I truly do, and writing it, I can’t fathom that it’s gone.
I also have no idea how I’m going to go back and edit this, if ever. I might just leave this up as a memorial to my own mental state at this point in time, because this truly is just a glorified journal entry at this point. But I suppose I’m done. My mother was awesome, even if I’ve spent maybe half of this recounting issues. I’ve mentioned for example that we used to go out a lot; I mean, man, those hours truly added up. Just time in the car with one another, hundreds if not approaching thousands of hours, just in travel time. It’s been written that losing someone that has marked your life so deeply is literally losing a part of yourself. [8] I do acutely feel a sense of loss, a void, a, I don’t know.
One last thing before I end this. My mother used to remark about the seeming futility of life. She’d lament that people have to go through the life stages, of being children and going to school, working for a lifetime, raising a family, and dying. This was a point that she came back to a lot. And now her life is over. She didn’t know what to make of the afterlife; she was Catholic, at least as far as I knew, but I might have been a ‘bad’ influence in taking the solace and comfort that belief in an afterlife brings away from her, simply due to my own beliefs on the matter.
I don’t know. I would like to end this on a positive, uplifting note, honestly. That task might be above my capabilities; she loved me more than anything in this life, and I loved her back. This rambling wall of text, and my continued existence is what I have to offer her legacy, I suppose.
I likewise don’t know if anyone is going to actually read through this. I ended up writing it primarily for myself rather than an audience, or maybe, I wanted to get these thoughts in writing before the passage of time skewed my perceptions on the matter. Whatever the case may be, if anyone’s made it through this and wants to submit anything about her life, I shall add it verbatim on request. Photographs, thoughts, what have you. Simply email me, and it shall be arranged. I suppose at some point I should write more about her early life, but heaven knows this has gone on long enough!
[1] See here for photographs of that event.
[2] I do not know of any convention to transcribe this spoken dialect of English into writing.
[4] See 3. To my discredit, I will freely admit here that there is a part of me that is relieved that she didn’t die at home like my father. I can very easily see myself as being framed as responsible for her death if she had died at home; I have absolutely no doubt that I would have been scapegoated, blamed, and possibly prosecuted if she had had the ‘luxury’ of dying at home, something which didn’t occur with my father.
[5] I recall one example as a teenager where she wanted to get me up from a chair, and instead of simply just asking me to get up, she fabricated a story where my father insulted me for sitting, phrased in a way that plausibly could have been said by him. I was so angry, I got up, and was angry at my father needlessly for, I don’t even remember how long. It took years before my father and I finally reached an accord where we agreed not to believe anything she said about the other unless we talked to each other first. I really should have gotten there with him years earlier, but also, Christ, the man was grown, he shouldn’t have waited for my adulthood for ME to bring up that conversation with him. I love him, but, c’mon dad…
[6] Photographs are attached here, although I do warn that she does look visibly unwell.
[7] She did not take it for granted. She was deeply grateful, she just didn’t express it in the way that my dad and I would. Where my dad and I both absolutely would be humbled and display it to anyone performing kindness for us, my mother would sometimes demand it, not even bothering to frame her demands as a request, something foreign to us. But my mother would be the first to lament that she was in a position where she required the level of care that she did. She would be the first to praise all that we did for her. It … was a complex dynamic, there.
[8] “After decades of being together, a virtual other exists in the neocortex such that we can anticipate every step of what our lover will say and do. Our neocortical patterns are filled with the thoughts and patterns that reflect who they are. When we lose that person, we literally lose part of ourselves. This is not just a metaphor—all of the vast pattern recognizers that are filled with the patterns reflecting the person we love suddenly change their nature. Although they can be considered a precious way to keep that person alive within ourselves, the vast neocortical patterns of a lost loved one turn suddenly from triggers of delight to triggers of mourning.” Kurzweil, Ray. 2012. How to Create a Mind. New York: Viking Penguin. pp. 119-120.
Have photos of her:
