We turned off my mother’s life support on a Friday. I spent the weekend with family and friends in Ottawa, and on Monday I flew home to Whitehorse. I felt strange, fragile, and exhausted all the time. In between long, deep naps, I walked around town feeling like an invisible alien that might, if anyone noticed my presence, fly to pieces at a human touch. But sometimes, unexpectedly, rage, and the energy that came with it, would bubble up through the lethargy, and I would feel a sudden urge to punch another pedestrian as they passed me on the street or to shout in the face of the airport security agent as they scrutinized my boarding pass. It was a terrifying state to be in. I remember praying to whoever might be listening, Whatever this phase is, please let me get through it without landing in jail.
With my worst fear already come to pass, I realized, I had something new to be afraid of. Since early childhood, I had understood the loss of a mother as a life-wrecking event, and now it seemed like that same destruction would be coming for me. Now, I was afraid that I would tear everything down—my career, my friendships, my life. When I wasn’t completely lethargic, I sometimes felt crazy, wild, like anything was possible. The professional climber and filmmaker Jimmy Chin once said, in his film Meru, that he had always promised his mother he wouldn’t die before she did. Once she was gone, he told the camera, there were no longer any limitations on the risks he could take. I felt that same mad freedom now.
I imagined myself taking up ultra-running, channelling all my anger and sadness into grim accomplishment. I imagined myself moving to a beach hut in Thailand, filling the emptiness in my life with full-moon parties and cheap beer and sex with twenty-something European backpackers. “Maybe I’ll go to Afghanistan,” I suggested to a friend over the phone one night, “and become a war correspondent.” “That’s…an option,” she said, sounding worried.
I was worried too. I made myself a promise not to make any major life changes for at least a year. Everything felt so precarious—everything, myself included, seemed so brittle, ready to shatter.
After a week at home, I flew back to Ottawa again, for a previously scheduled visit: a prelude to a work trip to Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. I had debated cancelling, but the trip had been booked for months and, if postponed, would have to be bumped for a full year. As for the extra days in Ottawa, I figured they’d do me more good than continuing to fester in my empty Whitehorse apartment. My dad and stepmom were solicitous; my high school friends brought me quiche; a group of editors at a magazine I wrote for regularly had an edible arrangement delivered to our door. I was still exhausted, and some nights I cried myself to sleep, but mostly I did okay. I functioned.
The exceptions, when they came, were dramatic. One night, three of my old friends took me out for a movie: Magic Mike XXL. A comedy about male strippers on a road trip would ease my mind. Right? But before the movie started, the trailers ran, and I found myself staring up at Meryl Streep on the big screen. In Ricki and the Flash, she played an aging rock star attempting to repair her fraught relationship with an estranged adult daughter. Watching the trailer was like bumbling onto a land mine. By the time Meryl declared that “sometimes a girl just needs her mother,” I was out of my seat and running for the illuminated exit sign and the Cineplex’s long hallway, my fight-or-flight response on full blast. I made it to a washroom, locked myself inside its single stall, and was overcome by the kind of sobbing where you feel like you might suffocate and die. I shook and fought to breathe.
After the storm passed, five or ten minutes later, I unlocked the bathroom door and crept back into the theatre. The strippers stripped, and the rest of the night passed smoothly.
I flew to Greenland. I boarded a small cruise ship, notebooks and camera in hand, ready—I hoped—to work. I met my roommate for the next twelve days, a woman who was on board to celebrate her sixty-fifth birthday, and found myself telling her that my mother had died less than three weeks earlier. I guess I wanted to warn her, to let her know I might not always be the most stable bunkmate. She was understanding. She’d lost her mother at the same age, she told me. She promised to leave the room if I ever wanted solitude to scream or cry or throw things. “You are not yourself right now,” she said.
A couple of nights later, I was spilling my sad story at the ship’s bar. The bartender was a young woman around my age, and she reached over and held my hand hard. When her mother had died, a couple of years earlier, she told me, she’d gained weight. Her hair had fallen out in chunks. She’d had dreams, so many dreams. I needed to go easy on myself, she said.
That night, I dreamed about my mom for the first time since she’d died. In the dream, she called me on the phone. I answered, and we chatted briefly—I don’t remember about what, nothing momentous. And then, as we said our goodbyes and hung up, my dream-self remembered that she was dead, and, in my dream-self’s confusion and fear, I was wrenched awake.
A few nights later, while the ship rocked gently in a sheltered strait somewhere high in the Canadian Arctic archipelago, I dreamed about her again. This one was a nightmare, weirdly reminiscent of the one that had preceded my first seizure, twenty years earlier. This time, I was alone in a roomy, suburban house. In the dream, I knew that it was my mother’s house, although in the waking world, my mom never lived in any such place. I knew, too, that my mom was dead, and that looters were coming to her home to steal all her belongings. In the strange logic of dreams, I accepted that it was my responsibility to protect them.
Again, I moved through dim, shadowy hallways, through a landscape of greys, sensing a hostile presence in our home. But in this dream, I carried a baseball bat, and while I felt afraid—as I had in the childhood nightmare—I didn’t feel so vulnerable now. Instead, I remember a harsh determination, a violent energy surging in my arms and through my body. I was going to show those fuckers. I remember crouching behind a carved banister at the top of the stairs, flexing my hands on the shaft of the wooden bat, prepared to defend the second floor of the strange, empty house with my life. I woke up to a mixture of anger and dread.
Back in Whitehorse after the cruise, I collapsed. For weeks, I hardly left my apartment. I ate delivery Chinese food and frozen meals. I didn’t cook, or exercise, or work. I kept the curtains closed and lay on the futon in my darkened living room, watching season after season of bad television. (“I’ve been self-medicating with police procedurals,” I told my dad during one of our now more frequent phone calls. He answered, “There are worse things you could be self-medicating with.”)
I had begun to worry about him too. I hadn’t really before; he had always seemed so sturdy, so permanent. He didn’t invite my concern the way my mom had. Now I wondered if I would simply substitute my fear of my mother’s death for a fear of losing him instead. Maybe, I thought in my worst moments, life from now on would just be a series of fears and losses and fears, one following the other. Maybe adulthood was just an accumulation of sadnesses.
My grief counsellor asked me if I thought I was becoming fixated on the idea of my dad’s death. I didn’t think so, I said. But I felt raw, and I was afraid that another loss, coming too soon, would push me over some unseen but palpable edge.
In mid-October, three months after my mom’s stroke, I packed up my car and drove south. Movement, I thought, was what I needed to get me off my futon and out of the inertial haze of grief. It took me three days to get to Montana, where I saw some friends, and camped and hiked in Glacier National Park. I drove on to Missoula, and then Livingston, where I stayed in a funny old motel that shook whenever a train rolled by. Then I carried on south, to Yellowstone, and hiked and camped alone there too.
I’d always found spending time in the wilderness to be healing, and I’ve never minded being on my own in the outdoors. But this trip was different. I was too sad, too wrecked, and too tired. I made an effort, but nothing felt good, nothing fed me the way it was supposed to. In Yellowstone, I sat on the side of a bridge and stared down into a rocky gully. I tried to enjoy the view and the quiet, tearing chunks of pita bread into tinier and tinier pieces in my lap. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t soothed by the park. I just kept looking at the drop and thinking, I don’t know how much longer I can be this sad.
I changed my tactics. I drove out of Yellowstone and hundreds of miles east, to a friend’s place in Laramie, Wyoming, where I ate pronghorn tacos and met her friends in a loud cowboy bar. From there, I jumped south to Colorado and another old friend’s place. Alone time, I realized, was not going to help me right now. Unsettled by my own mind and where it had gone as I sat on the bridge, I was desperate for company. I lined up coffees, lunches, and drinks wherever I could. After three months of retreat, other people were my lifeline.
A writing residency in Banff, Alberta, the original excuse for the road trip, was a reprieve. For three weeks, I ate food that was prepared for me, and every day some hidden staff member made my bed. I made friends with my fellow residents and sought out their company for meals and hikes. For the first time, I began to feel like a person again—like a human, made of bone and tissue, instead of the porcelain alien I had felt myself to be for so long, hiding among humanity but secretly different and strange, and always on the brink of being smashed to pieces.
The residency ended, but I didn’t feel ready to return to my futon quite yet. I drove farther south, to Spokane, Klamath Falls, and then Los Angeles, where I met up with two friends and drove out to Joshua Tree National Park. Camping and hiking was safe enough with company. After we got back to the city, I stayed by the beach, soaking up sun, feeling myself heal.
As the time passed, I considered what I knew about my mom’s life. The facts had always made me sad—I’d felt sorry for her, I suppose, from the safety of my own happy existence. But now I saw things differently. I was filled suddenly with overwhelming admiration for her. She had endured so much, and come out of it still so kind and strong, full of love despite all her losses. It was incredible, really, that she had been able to love me so unconditionally, without ever lashing out from her own pain. She had always been afraid that growing up motherless would limit her as a mother to me, but now I realized that her fears were baseless. I wished I had told her how amazing she was. I wished I had appreciated her strength more, instead of dwelling on her sadness.
Recovering wasn’t as easy as a walk on the boardwalk, of course. One night, my friend Jim, my host in Santa Monica, suggested we watch the movie My Neighbor Totoro. I’d never seen it, and his daughter was a fan. But the story of the sick and ailing mother, her children missing her and worrying for her, was too much for me. It was Meryl Streep all over again. I tried to control myself, but the more I tried to stifle my rising sadness, the more I panicked. My heart rate accelerated, my chest tightened, and the little girls’ crying on-screen seemed to reach out and choke me. I gasped out that I needed to stop the movie, trying desperately as I did so not to scare Jim’s child with my outsized reaction. The power of my own grief frightened me, and I worried I might somehow infect her with the terror of loss.
Eventually I turned towards home: friends in Santa Barbara, friends in Seattle, and then the long, lonely drive north again. The days were short and cold, and I took it in easy stages, working my way back to the Yukon just a few hours at a time. I made it home in time for Christmas. I had decided in the summer that I would allow myself to wallow until New Year’s. After that, it would be time to pick myself up again.
Over the months, I’d found a sort of community. As much as I could, I had sought out friends who had also lost a parent well before they reached middle age. (“Welcome to the dead parents club,” one of them deadpanned.) They understood my situation in a way that others didn’t, I felt. They didn’t say things like “We all have to bury our parents eventually,” or “At least it was quick.” And they offered me a way forward: some of them had told me that, as hard as it might be to imagine from the bottom of the well of my grief, I would come out of my sadness eventually, and be a better, stronger, wiser person for it.
I tried to hold on to that promise. I was afraid I would be sad forever; it was hard to imagine being anything but sad ever again. I imagined getting married one day without my mom’s presence in the front row: bittersweet, at best, no matter how happy I might be about my choice of spouse. Childbirth without my mom to talk me through the pain and fear and uncertainty? Unimaginable. One night, talking on the phone to a friend across the country, I said, “I feel like everything in my life will always be at least a little bit sadder now.” She had lost her dad a few years earlier, and she didn’t try to talk me out of the idea. “Yes,” she said. “It will.”
I realized that the future I was contemplating was the one my mother had lived through. She’d been married without a mother or a father in attendance; she’d faced the prospect of childbirth without her mother’s steadying presence. She must have been so scared, I thought. But she’d done it. Her deep sadness had always been inscrutable to me, but now I understood it better. In a strange way, her death had brought us even closer than we’d ever been. A part of her experience that I had never grasped, a crucial element of her life, was accessible to me now. In losing her and grieving for her, I was getting to know her.
Still, as time passed, I realized that my understanding of her sadness would always be imperfect. After all, I had advantages that she never had. By the time I had made it through my first Christmas without her, I knew that in the end I was going to be okay, even if my life was just a little bit sadder. It was like I’d said in a eulogy at her celebration of life: to the very best of her ability, she had never let her sadness touch me. I’d been loved and supported unconditionally by her for more than thirty years, and so I would never really understand the feelings of abandonment and confusion and hurt that laced her own grief over the loss of Janet. I was more resilient than she had been—not just because I was older, or because I wouldn’t be shipped off to a series of boarding schools, or because I still had my dad, but also because she had made me that way.
It turned out that my long-held fear, that in losing her I would be broken in the same ways she had been by Janet’s death, had been misplaced. Even though I missed her every day, I found some peace in that.
Gradually, my fear of a new loss, another death in my life, began to fade. Where at first the threat and the lesson of my mom’s death had seemed to be “You can’t handle this, this will ruin you,” now I knew my own resilience. I had been afraid I would go down that path my grief counsellor had asked me about, that I would develop an unhealthy fixation on the potential deaths of my remaining loved ones. That, having lost my mom, I would live my life in a kind of perpetual cringe, bracing for the next piece of bad news. That fear receded. There would be more sadness in my future, no doubt, but I didn’t dread it in the same way I once had. In the end, my mom’s death had not only brought my fear to fruition, resolving the nightmare by bringing it into being, it had also taught me to be less afraid.
I started the new year feeling sad but newly empowered. I had faced my worst fear, and I had survived.
Soon after, I began to wonder what other fears I might be able to face down. And following the humiliation of my meltdown on the Usual in February, I moved from pondering to determination.
The three main pillars of fear in my life were my seemingly lifelong fear of heights; my terror of driving, more recently acquired after a series of car accidents; and the fear we all carry, to one degree or another, of losing the people we love. That last fear, I figured, I had made a kind of peace with for the time being. But could I cure, or conquer, or overcome, or at least renegotiate my relationship with the other two? It was time to find out.