My mother died, of suicide, on the 18th March 2016. This post was written during the days before her funeral.
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A week after my mother died, I read an article by the single, career-focused, forty-something daughter of a regretful housewife, exploring the generational ebb and flow of female priorities and choices. For these two women, the dichotomy was clear: family versus career - cultural expectations as they entered adulthood leading each woman down a different path.
This is far from my own experience, but I am keenly aware that my life has not paralleled my mother's. She was the first in her family to go to university; I am studying for my BSc in my thirties. I was born - the first of four - to a pair of married, mortgaged 27 year olds; I gave birth to my only child in my chaotic teens. So, while I certainly found the article enjoyable and thought-provoking, it did not resonate with me in the same way it surely would have with many of my generation.
What has stayed with me though, looping through my mind in the days since, are the words of Gloria Steinem (from this recording of Desert Island Discs), quoted by the author: “I suspect, like many women, I'm living the unlived life of my mother”.
The unlived life of my mother. My mother's unlived life, left behind, unwanted. Not figuratively, but literally. The life that my mother elected, irreversibly, to cease to live.
I find myself, now, drowning in my mother's unlived life. It hangs in the air of her home, syrup-thick, filling the space where she is not. I open the wardrobe of clothes she will never wear again, and more spills out, drenching me in spent possibilities and tears. I am cooking in her kitchen, sleeping in her bed. I am running her errands, fulfilling her responsibilities. Hers, not mine. Although inheritance and circumstance dictates that they now are. I open my eyes in the morning to her favourite photograph of my recently dead father. Am I crying her tears for him, or are they mine?
The boundaries are blurring.
But can I live her life, and at the same time my own?
