On Christmas Eve, I arrange the carrot sticks on half of my mother-in-law’s narrow scalloped dish, stack pale ribs of celery on the other side.
Last time.
The phrase echoes through me every few seconds—last time, last time—as I nestle large black olives into the curves around the edge of the dish, drape whole green onions over the top, balance some radishes in between. As I add a couple of ice cubes to keep everything cool and crisp.
Last time, last time, last time.
This has been my job at my mother-in-law’s for the last twenty Christmas Eves: arranging the crudités into an intricate vegetable Jenga. It always feels like serious work. It always feels like art. Like love.
Last time.
I am leaving my husband on New Year’s Day. The new house is rented, the boxes half packed. The beginning of a trial separation I know in my heart will be permanent. Everyone knows, but no one says a word—not my husband’s mother or sisters or their significant others; not our kids, not my husband. Certainly not me. Christmas Eve goes on—my mother -in -law dumps the clear plastic tub of oysters and their brine into a copper pot along with some cream; she rubs the usual garlic clove along the inside of the salad bowl, takes the wide loaves of moist, dense, delicious bread—the batter of which she whips with a spoon rather than kneads—from the oven.
Last time. Last time. Last time. Last time.
My mother-in law has become more of a mother to me than my own, especially in the fourteen years since my daughter’s birth, when my mom’s delusions first surfaced. I watch her pour a glass of white wine, her jet black Louise Brooks hair falling forward into her face, and love her so fiercely, so desperately, my chest aches. I waited so long to ask for a separation partly because I didn’t want to separate from her.
Last time.
She usually makes a pot of Christmas borscht to accommodate me, her Russian Jewish vegetarian daughter in law, but this year, she’s made split pea. It bubbles and snaps on the stove next to the oyster stew. “I thought I’d try something new,” she says, but I imagine it’s her way of starting to pull away from me, to loosen me from her heart.
After dinner (last time) and buttery jam-filled cookies (last time) and the distributing of presents under the tinsel-dripping tree (last time), the instruments come out. My husband’s family is a musical one; their gatherings often involve guitars and piano, sometimes fiddle and accordion. The usual carols are played, along with some bluegrass songs that give them a chance to harmonize; then the grownups retreat to the kitchen to clean up, and my seventeen-year-old son starts to strum Belle and Sebastian.
I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I had never heard of Belle and Sebastian until I saw the movie High Fidelity, and then I thought they were a made-up band, a fictional excuse for Jack Black to lose his shit. It wasn’t until my kids became fans that I realized they were an actual group. If it weren’t for my kids, I’d probably still be listening to Prince and the Talking Heads on a near exclusive basis.
I help wash the gold-trimmed stemware my mother-in-law inherited from her mother, almost the exact same set my mom inherited from hers. I find myself violently gripping each goblet, and I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t want to let them go or because I want to crush them with my hands.
My son launches into “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying.” The song sounds so peppy but the lyrics slay me, even though I don’t catch most of them, just the title phrase and “You’re so naive” and “I always cry at endings.” That’s enough. I set down the glass, tear off my yellow rubber gloves, run to my mother-in-law’s TV room and wail. Deep subterranean sounds that rip through me and seem to last for hours. No one comes in to check on me, no one asks if I’m okay after I finally emerge, embarrassed, my eyes completely red. They all love me, but not enough to forgive what I’m about to do. When we’re walking to the car, though, my husband’s older sister pulls me aside and gestures to her leopard print coat. “I bought this for myself when I knew I had to leave my ex,” she says, then wraps her arms around me. I start to cry all over again, tears matting the fake fur.
I always cry at endings.
*
The first weeks of the separation, I feel like I’m falling through space. Our shared circle of friends has tightened around my husband and I am careening out of orbit, into someplace vast and dark and cold. I have taken to crying at night in huge, jagged sobs that make my face fall asleep, make my body disappear.
“I think you’re going crazy,” my daughter tells me, “I think you’re going crazy like your mom.” It feels like the most hurtful thing someone could say, but I see her concern and wonder if she’s right. Still, when I catch myself in the mirror, I am surprised at how the whites of my eyes look—clearer and brighter than I’ve ever seen them.
A friend leaves a ritual-in-a-bag on my doorstep. I am to cast a circle of salt, put a figure eight made of ribbon in the center, my name in one loop, my husband’s in the other. I am to eat a blood orange, taste the sour and sweet together on my tongue. I am to take the scissors and cut the eight in half, severing what I thought would be infinite. I sob some more, but feel the release of it, the light creeping back, as I wish each newly separate circle well.
New circles form. Love rushes in. Life enters the space blasted open by all that crying. I find out I’m pregnant at forty-one, nineteen years since my first pregnancy. I find myself saying, “I do.”
*
I rest in bed with my two-day-old son, and listen to my sister and my new husband whisper in the hallway outside the closed door. I can’t make out what they’re saying, but I know it has to do with my mom. They are trying to keep her away from me, to keep me and the baby in a protective bubble inside the room where he was born. I nuzzle my nose against his new head and breathe in his raw, sweet scent.
My mom has had delusional “episodes,” as my family has taken to calling them—undiagnosed, untreated—on and off for almost sixteen years now, but nothing like this. When she picked my sister up at the airport the day before, she had a flannel nightgown wrapped around her nose and mouth, a barrier against the poison she thought was coming through the vents. A Jack in the Box cup full of pee in the cup holder that she planned to have tested to see what drugs my dad had sprayed at her from his cell phone. When she held the baby for the first time yesterday and he immediately fell asleep, she was sure she had gassed him from the fumes lingering on her clothes.
My older kids come to meet their baby brother, and I venture out of the dim bedroom to have dinner with them, the table covered with aluminum take-out containers full of red-sauce-heavy pasta delivered by the local pizza place. My mom is still wearing the same purple turtleneck and black pants she had on yesterday, and looks disheveled and sweaty; disconcerting, as she normally takes great pains with her appearance. Her eyes look different than usual, too, beady and dark. After we eat, she corners my 19 year old and tells him she’ll give him $100 dollars to drive her to her friend’s house in Carlsbad, an hour and a half away. She doesn’t tell him she’s scared to take her own car because she thinks it’s being followed by numerous Middle Eastern men. She doesn’t tell him she’s been driving as if she’s in The Bourne Identity to escape them. He agrees—he has to study for an exam, but who wouldn’t want a quick $100? When my mom goes to the bathroom, my sister and husband swoop in to give him the scoop. His face drops.
“I’m sorry, Nana,” he says when she returns. “If we leave now, I won’t be back until 11, and I have a lot of homework.”
My mom immediately charges toward my sister. “Sabotage!” she yells, one arm in the air as if she’s rattling a saber. My husband steps in between them.
“We’re going to a hotel,” he says firmly. He had taken her to a hotel three nights ago after she showed up at our house unexpectedly, a cushion from an outdoor chaise under her arm so she could sleep on our floor, and she and I got into a shouting match. I went into labor a few hours later. “You can’t come into my house and talk to people like that.” My husband’s face and voice both sharpen; I’ve never seen him like this before. The papa bear in him rising up, protecting his clan. It’s both terrifying and exhilarating.
My mom grabs my sister’s batik scarf, the one she bought during a trip to Sausalito with an ex-boyfriend many years ago, and throws it over her head.
“You don’t know how dangerous this is for me,” she says, her entire face covered, then races out the door into a world where she thinks she’s being chased and drugged and conspired against.
For a moment, we’re all silent. It’s as if she’s pulled all the oxygen out of the house behind her. “Fuuuck,” I say under my breath, not a word that often comes through me. We all stare at each other, eyebrows raised, reeling. Then my son points to my arms and says, “Look! A baby!” and everyone laughs and the oxygen whooshes back in.
The rest of the night feels like a party. The kids start messing with instruments. My son puts on my daughter’s blue Snuggie and looks like some sort of crazed monk as he plays guitar, swaying wildly in his chair. My sister and I sit side by side on the piano bench, laughing so hard, I’m worried the stitches in my perineum will pop. Then he starts to play “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying” and she and I turn to each other and burst into tears.
“What if that’s the last image we ever have of her?” I ask and we fall into each other, the baby nestled between us.
A few days later, we get a call from the coroner’s office.
A car crash, I first imagine, as I watch my sister on the phone, color and emotion streaming across her face like a time-lapse film. But no, I learn, as she drops to her knees, as she crawls around the room, as I stumble after her, crazy wails ripping through my throat—our mom had hanged herself in a parking garage.
*
For weeks, I can’t get the Belle and Sebastian song out of my head. I still only know those three lines “Get me away from here, I’m dying,” “You’re so naïve,” “I always cry at endings,” but they’re enough. They stiffen the hair on the back of my neck, send cold rivers of adrenalin down my arms, tighten my chest. They take me straight into my mother’s desperation, my poor mom with my sister’s scarf over her head, the scarf that was among the clothes in the paper bag from the coroner’s office, the things she had been wearing when she died. I had wondered if it was what she used to hang herself until I saw the electrical cord listed on her death certificate.
Get me away from here, I’m dying. I’m dying. I’m dying.
*
The baby looks into my eyes with the wise, direct gaze he’s had since he was born. “He was brought here to be a healer,” a friend said shortly after his birth, and it feels true. It feels like he is the reason for my painful separation and divorce, like he came when he did to help me get through this monstrous grief, to ground me with a pure and simple love. I don’t want him to feel that responsibility his whole life, to be his mother’s healer, but for now, I’ll take it. “You’re so naive,” the song warns me, and maybe I am. I always cry at endings. I cry at beginnings, too. I lift my shirt and he latches on and I am all tears and milk and sweet deep ache, alive with the mothers I’ve lost.
***
Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.
63 responses
This is so beautiful.
oh. wow. Amazing story, amazing writing, stunning.
One of the most brilliant and wonderful pieces I’ve read in ages! Brava!
So, so moving.
Shit. That’s stupid good.
I can’t remember the last time I teared up after reading an essay. Great, if difficult, work. Hope it helps salve the pain. Thanks Gayle.
terrifying. exhilarating. cuts me to pieces with its pure honesty. i just learned today of an old friend who shot his children, then himself. i am jagged and broken, and reading this pierces my bleeding heart. wonderful writing, gayle.
Chills, chills up my spine.
Breathless over here.
What a beautiful essay, touching and real and true. Thank you.
Stunning piece. I’m so moved. I wish you all the best with love, healing and creativity.
I honor “last time last time last time” so truthfully told…
Divorce’s many facets are rarely addressed so candidly.
Thank you!
Wonderfully honest.
Beautiful. Honest. Brave. Lovely, lovely work, Gayle.
Such a powerful story. All the beginnings and endings wound up together with joy and hope and laughter. Thank you for sharing such an honest slice of life.
This is such a beautifully wrought essay and the subject matter is so close to home for me. I just want to print the words out and rub them all over my body.
Just so beautiful and painful and wonderful. My guts are somewhere outside my body, but I don’t mind a bit.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.
Grasping that great sadness exists side by side with great sorrow has been one of the most important lessons of my life. What a gift that I should stumble upon this extraordinary piece on an otherwise ordinary day when my heart again so desperately needed to be remind of it. Bravo!
So strange to feel so grateful to you for making me feel so sad. “Amen” to all the comments above, though I’d more likely chew the words and swallow them.
So beautiful — you’ve made old themes new and transcendent.
Such power of a multitude of emotions evoked in these words–in surprising and heart-wrenching ways.
This is extraordinary, Gayle. Thank you.
Thank you.
Gayle, this is so very beautiful. Eloquent, brave, and poignant. My heart is with you.
This was simply beautiful.
I remember all those times far too well, and words can’t say how painful it was for those of us who love you. Thank you for writing about these most painful personal times, I know it will help people. People need to know that others survive these things and they can too, that life can still be rich and good despite our losses. Life is so much better when we feel safe enough to talk about our feelings about the losses we all experience. I’m so glad you are writing about this, difficult as it is to do. I love you and your whole family without end. There is no “last time” to that…
Stunning and amazing, Gayle, the gifts life hands us all tangled up, leaving us to unravel.
Deep ache and yet moving on with life. Yes, and thank you for the reminder. Crafted so beautifully.
Gayle, your writing is always such a sensual and loving meditation. Thank you!
I am better for reading this. Thank you.
What a beautiful and touching essay. Thank you for sharing such a tender part of yourself with us, Gayle.
It is healing having this out in the world.
Thank you, Gayle. Beautifully written.
Thank you for sharing such personal moments. There’s something in each of your stories so many can relate to. It’s truly a brave thing to do with such an amazing gift, your writing.
My heart aches for all you have gone through and for the stregth you have.
Gayle, Your words give me the hope necessary to move forward through difficult times. The poetic beauty you craft to convey some some not-so-beautiful moments is magical. I believe you are the healer for so many of us and I feel blessed to know you.
I feel like I was just choked, like my breath was stolen from me – a wild fist reached down through my mouth and into my gut and stole the oxygen from my lungs. Wow! Thank you for sharing this.
This is perfectly written and incredibly moving and important and beautiful. I can’t wait to read other things you’ve written, you’re speaking my language, lady.
This is remarkable. Your words are so honest, so beautiful. Such soulful telling of truth is rare. This was a gift to read. Thank You.
Thank you all so much for your beautiful, generous, outpouring of support. I am overwhelmed and deeply, deeply grateful. It was scary to send this story out into the world; thank you for receiving it with such open hearts.
This is breath taking, so beautiful tragic and inspiring. I feel as if you have reached into the secret place deep in my soul and released a sigh. Thank you.
Terrible, beautiful, awful and amazing. Sending you love, Gayle.
I have a song like this in my life. It is also a very poppy song, though with happy lyrics. I think you’ve captured that feeling of having a not-easily-explained totem of your loss, and even stranger, one that might play on the radio or come out of a loved one’s guitar.
Thanks for writing this!
People with mental illness, especially in an acute psychotic break as your mother seemed to be having, aren’t responsible for their actions. They believe that they’re being followed by Middle Eastern men, or space aliens, or the Mafia. It’s their reality, annoying as it may be, and they need intervention, a 72 hour psych hold, and meds. Sounds like your mom fell through some very wide cracks. Sad indeed.
Dear Anonymous, we tried, desperately, to get her the help she needed. I didn’t cover the days between when she last saw her and when she died–it’s something I haven’t been able to write about yet–but during that time, we were actively working to do an intervention as she raced around Southern California, trying to escape our help (and then, when intervention was imminent, she found the ultimate escape). We had tried for years. It’s very hard to get help for a person when that person doesn’t believe she needs help (and who, until that final breakdown, was able to convince mental health professionals that she was fine.) I very much appreciate your advocating for those with mental illness, but wish you hadn’t judged my family without knowing the full story.
Incredibly moving story. Thank you so much.
My best friend sent me this. It is so close to what is going on in my life that it’s uncanny. I need to leave my husband of 30 years and start anew. I’m having a hard time telling him as the last thing I want is to hurt him. ” Get me away from here I’m dying” is so appropriate to how I feel. Another parallel is that my mother has dementia and is completely out of her mind (she even believes Arabs are visiting her bedroom) I recently placed her in assisted living after removing her from a horrid existence living with my abusive alcoholic brother. I don’t know how long it will be before she will need to be moved to a lock down care unit.
Thank you for your touching and candid essay. Wishing you peace.
I am inspired to forge on writing my story, by reading yours. thank you for this gift, so beautifully crafted.
First time. First time. First time.
It’s been so worth the wait.
A beautiful piece that broke, then mended my heart.
Thank You
couldn’t imagine a more poignant story to come across right now – so beautiful – just what i needed to hear
I am sure you are forever transformed by sharing your experiences with us and I gladly accept your gift… Thank you….we should all keep discovering that life and love can begin again when one bravely lets go of the past…I hope Kipling was right (and I think he was) when he wrote
‘Everything will be alright in the end. If it’s not alright, it’s not the end.’
You’re so brave and so honest. Thank you.
Wow. What a privilege to read such an exquisitely expressed story of a deeply personal and very grim tragedy.. woven with mercifully counterbalancing elements. Thank god for children, siblings, new love and renewal! In this era of increasingly narcissistic (and badly written) over-sharing, this is a welcome and rare stand-out. Bravo Gayle. Beautiful and brave.
So beautifully written. Just absolutely amazing.
So many strong themes here. One I would love to read your future explorations of: how much we moms use our children to address our own emotional needs, and where the boundaries are for healthy relationships with those we bring into this world.
I read your essay at posted today in The Rumpus and then read this one. Heartbreaking. I love your writing and look forward to reading more essays from you.
I live in Riverside too. 🙂
Heartbreaking and hopeful. Thank you for your honesty.
I should have commented a long time ago. Softly bold, Gayle. Beautiful and inspirational, as always.
haunting and ever lovely
Holy jesus that’s good. Stupid good. Woven together with love and grace and truth, and the shit that so often comes with it. Wow.
It took two and half years, but I found this.
The timing is a little unnerving because I think I’m finally coming to terms with my mother’s mental illness.
You strum chords that painfully resonate.
Gayle, I never saw this before. I am so glad you shared it. So moving, and full of love and pain. You touched my heart with your words.
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