Alone

I am hard on myself.  I am my own worst critic and made it a habit of beating myself up daily.  There were countless days when I was growing up I allowed others opinions and criticisms of me to form how I viewed myself.  My sense of self was skewed.  I think the little of bit balance (of positive to negate some of the negative) came from my mother.  No matter what I did, or where we were in life at any particular time, she always tried to hammer home with me how beautiful and smart I was.  Mom told me I could be anything I wanted to be and what anyone else thought of me did not matter.  I think I believed it for a while.  It became harder to convince myself once my mom had died. 

I was seven weeks shy of my twenty-third birthday when my mother died.  I arrived home to my apartment around 2am after a marathon workday of my full-time job then six hours babysitting.  Back then I only had a landline and an answering machine.  That makes me sound so old….Anyhow when I arrived home and saw nine messages on my answering machine, I knew.  My mother was in a nursing facility a few blocks from my apartment so I had access to her.  I was her power of attorney and nothing could be done without my authorization, apparently that included moving her corpse. The first three messages were nurses from the facility telling me to call as soon as I could.  The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh messages were my older sister blathering hysterically into the phone.  The final two messages were the nurses again.  No one said she was dead, but I knew she was.  I guess it was against policy to announce someone’s death on an answering machine.

I grabbed my keys and ran the five blocks to the nursing home.  I pounded on the locked door until someone answered.  “I’m Angela Matrozza and I’m here about my mother, Dorothy.”  An orderly let me in and led me to the nurse’s station.  I kept walking, making a b-line for my mom’s room.  The nurses tried to stop me, but I wasn’t having it.  I suppose someone wanted to prepare me for what I was about to see. 

I entered my mother’s room to find my sister sitting by her bed crying, dramatically and hysterically as she usually did.  Mom was blue.  She was still mildly warm and a little bloated.  She was lying in her bed on her back and the small cylindrical tube protruding from her throat where her tracheotomy line connected was taped.  Her hair was pulled back into a long white ponytail.  Mom was a hairdresser and stopped coloring and styling her hair when she was no longer able to lift her arms to do it.  I would brush her hair and pull it back into a bun for her when I would visit her, which was just about daily.  Her hair was a bit tattered because I had not done it in two days.  I was supposed to visit her the day before but she told me to rest up for my long workdays. “You don’t have to be here everyday, Angela,” she’d tell me.  “You are allowed to have a life”. I told her I’d come visit her Friday, which would have been tomorrow had she lived to see it.

My sister called my Uncle (mom’s brother) because no one could get a hold of me.  He and my Aunt shortly arrived after I did to find me lying in bed next to my mom stroking her hair.  I think I felt bad it was messy and at the same time I was amazed that it was still so soft.

I vaguely remember the brief conversation between my Uncle and me. I told them which funeral home to contact to come and retrieve her.  I had to make the call because I was the only one authorized to do so.  I stayed there until the guys from the funeral home arrived and wanted to watch as they gathered mom together but my Uncle wouldn’t let me.  Which I thought was kinda funny since I’d seen so much worse. 

Funerals are for the living, not the dead.  It’s this morbid ritualistic sense of closure that we need to put ourselves through to say goodbye.  Funerals were not mom’s thing and I knew what she wanted when the time had come.  Well, that time being now I needed to assert myself and complete the task at hand.  I made very few concessions to my siblings.  The only battle I really did lose was to have her casket open during two days of viewing.  I got to see her alone beforehand to be sure she looked like herself.  My mother had given me this lovely silk pale pink long nightgown and robe set. She told me its what she wanted to be cremated in.  “No sense in torching good clothes” She’d say with a chuckle. 

After two days of viewing, a little sibling drama, and finishing all the plans I was spent.  Emotionally and mentally.  True to form I held it together until the very end.  I wasn’t someone who liked to emote, especially in front of others and certainly not in public. But on the second day after the service, which was done there at the funeral home, (my mother was not a churchgoing woman), people filed by the casket and me to say their final goodbyes and pay their respects.  I sat at the head of my mother’s casket in a single lonely chair.  I suppose because most of my life it had been her and I, and there just wasn’t anywhere else at the time that seemed appropriate for me to be.  My brother and sister were with their families and melted into the crowd of people.  I felt like I was sitting alone on this island with my dead mother. 

Once everyone had cleared out and it was time to take her to the crematorium, I had a final moment with my mom.  My siblings and aunt and uncle were outside.  They had given me the courtesy of privacy in my final moments with mom.  It was quiet.  I remember looking down at her. I bent over and kissed her on the forehead.  I whispered to her that I loved her more than anything and to tell daddy I miss and love him.  I also told her I hoped they were in the same place, perhaps hoping for a reason to chuckle.  To this day I can see that moment in my mind’s eye anytime, as if I had just lived it a second before. 

I had never felt so alone in the universe as I did in that moment.

My father died fifteen years before.  Mom always kept him alive for me. She adored him and never remarried.  His memory was part of our daily lives and it was if I had lost them both, him for the second time. 

The funeral director gently approached and told me it was time.   I reluctantly let go of her hand and stepped away from the casket.  I confirmed that everything on her person was to be removed except her silky pink garments and her wedding ring for the cremation. He assured me that the other pieces would be returned to me promptly.  

I watched him slowly close the casket lid.  Watching the shadow cast over my mother’s face.  When the lid was closed, I dropped to my knees and cried.  I knew it was the last time I’d ever see my mother’s lovely face.  I knew the last person who ever loved me and believed in me unconditionally was gone.  I was alone.  It was the scariest and worst feeling in the world.

As my family and the rest of the world went back to their daily lives and routines, I was plagued by grief.  I quit my job, unplugged my phone and climbed into bed.  I cried.  I cried so hard and so much I threw up.  My bed had become my island. Where I stayed for almost two months. 

The funny thing is.  No one looked for me.  No one called me.  No one came knocking on my door to see how I was.  Which confirmed my beliefs and solidified my loneliness to my core. 

Those dark, lonely, weeks were only interrupted by a few of my friends pounding on my apartment door the afternoon of my birthday.  “Get your ass out of bed!”  “Get a shower!”  “We are going out!”  They yelled at me.  I reluctantly opened my door and they smiled at me as if they were waking me up from a hangover.  I can’t imagine how crappy I looked but I felt like death.  I got up and decided to get cleaned up because I was starving and people were here for me.  Throughout the history of my life it is my friends that have never let me down.  Which is why I treasure them to this day.

My 23^rd birthday, which was captured on film, was a crazy concoction of bars, strip clubs, and diners.  It was the first time I laughed since my mother had died.  For a few hours my loneliness and internal despair had been put aside.  And I was grateful.

Mother’s Day arrived shortly after my birthday, which really sucked.  But I took it as an opportunity to try and be productive, honoring my mother in some way.  I decided it was the perfect day to finally lay mom’s ashes to rest. 

I had been staring at a box on my dresser for months that read on the top, “Remains of Dorothy Iona Matrozza, March, 1997” I couldn’t afford an Urn and even if I could have I wouldn’t have bought one because I did not wish to keep my mother’s ashes forever.  That and they were ridiculously expensive.  I knew everything she wanted, except how to dispose of her goddamn ashes.   Of the entire myriad of things we discussed, THAT would be the one that would have been the most helpful.  I didn’t even thing about it.  I took her to the cemetery where my father was buried, and with the help of a close friend I opened and spilled my mothers ashes into the ground beneath my father’s headstone.  I felt it was where she belonged.  Or at least where I wanted her to belong.

   

Her ashes were pure white and like sand.  I ran my fingers through them imaging the last time I hugged her. The last time I brushed her hair.  The last words we spoke to one another. 

I spent many years longing inside for death.  I was lonely and unhappy all the time.  I wanted to be with my parents.  I wanted to be with the two people who never judged me, never ignored me, and never ever failed me.  Despite my outgoing sociable persona, I was a black hole inside. I spent many years punishing myself for feeling how I felt.  For succumbing to the loneliness.   Hating myself for being guilty of letting her die alone.  It was only when I was actually faced with my own death that I realized what a gift my life and experiences actually are.  I realized I wasn’t alone.  I was loved.  I was of value.  My presence in the world effected lives beyond my own.  And my time here was not done yet.  Not even close.

I think of my mom everyday.  I recall the deep alto in her voice and in her laugh.  Whenever I look down at my own hands, I see hers.  Although I spent many years living in the depths of my grief, I live my life today honoring the woman these two amazing people shaped me into being.  I embrace the relationship I had with my parents as well the impact of losing them.  I continue to do the best I can to make my parents and myself proud.  Every single day.