It Took Losing My Mother to Finally Know Her

I wrote this several years ago and posted it on Integral Options Cafe in 2005. I thought it might be a good time to reshare this post, in honor of sons and mothers who struggle to know each other as people, and maybe as encouragement to change that, if at all possible.

When I posted this piece, my mother's uterine cancer had just returned and metastasized into her whole abdomen and into her brain. A few days later, on August 24 of 2005, I sat beside her in a hospice as her breathing slowed and then stopped. A quiet end to a painful life. 

Here is a picture of me from back in 2003, give or take, about 36 years old. Unfortunately, I have no pictures of my mother scanned into this computer.

Getting to Know Ruth

Three years ago, my mother was diagnosed with uterine cancer. The doctors thought it was terminal. Somehow, she recovered from the surgery, the chemo, and the radiation and lived for two+ years in remission. But uterine cancer nearly always returns, and so it has. My mother is in a morphine-induced coma to ease her pain. She will likely never awaken.

When she was first diagnosed, I wrote the following entry in my journal – a confession of sorts, as well as a tribute to the woman who raised me as best she could. She lasted three years longer than anyone thought possible, long enough to lose her daughter and to see her son find himself as a man.


Getting to Know Ruth
5.25.02

For thirty-five years, my life until this very moment, my mother has been a non-person to me. Obviously, I knew she was human, had a history before my birth, and possessed her own hopes and fears. But I never really saw or experienced her as a real person, a complete human being. She was my mother, a collection of feelings and memories that I had accumulated over these thirty-five years.

A few nights ago, however, I found out she has cancer, very serious cancer. She has been sick for almost a month, but now it is official: uterine cancer, maybe more that will be discovered in surgery. But the surgery will have to wait until they can control some blood clotting that might kill her during a surgical procedure.

She told me she is tired, that after seventy-two years -- very difficult, challenging, painful years -- she is ready to die.

For the first time in my life, my experience of her shifted. It wasn’t the first time that I was in a care-taking role with her (for several years after my father died, when I was 13, I was the adult in the house), so the shift has to be something else. After a lot of tears, a few hours of writing in my journal, and listening to Lou Reed’s Magic and Loss, I began to clearly see my mother for the first time -- to see her life, her struggles, her loves, all from a place outside my own needs and fears.

My mother has become a person, a person whom I love very much, a person whom I hardly know, a person who is dying.

*****

My mother was born in February, 1930, along with a fraternal twin brother. When she was conceived, the world seemed to offer unlimited potential. There were jobs, and it was easy to support a family of five, even for the children of German immigrants at a time when Germans were not trusted after the First World War.

Then the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. Big cities like Chicago – where my mother's family settled – were hit hard. Jobs of any kind became scarce. Suddenly it was next to impossible to support a family of five. My grandfather took any work he could get, but still, there was often only enough food for one meager meal each day. Sugar cubes were given to satisfy the hunger of crying children. The struggle to feed the family went on for several years. My mother and her brother developed rickets, a deficiency illness caused by a lack of calcium and vitamin D. My mother and her brother were severely malnourished at an age when proper nutrition determines normal physical and intellectual development.

As a result of this malnutrition, my mother, like her brother, did not experience normal intellectual growth. Her IQ scores would likely test in the range of 70 to 80. By most standards, she is developmentally disabled. She has had difficulty living independently during those years when she was not living with her mother or married.

*****

I was thirteen when my father died. By that time I had been identified as “talented and gifted” and placed in advanced classes in school. It was difficult for a strong-willed and precocious child to grow up with a challenged parent as primary caregiver.

When my father died, I was the one who took care of the funeral arrangements, the insurance policy, the government pension my mother would receive, and all the other financial decisions. I continued to perform most of the money-related tasks for two or three years. However, within six months of my father’s death, I was smoking pot regularly, drinking whenever possible, and beginning to show a lot of unconscious anger. 

Emotionally, I was completely shut down, using chemicals to stay numb. My straight A grades began to decline. I was in pain and needed a strong mother to comfort me, but she was in too much pain of her own, too lost to be able to help my sister or me. She was diagnosed with depression and put on medications that made her sleep a lot, although the sleeping is also part of the depression.

Over the next several years, I became a daily drug user and was arrested for alcohol possession, vandalism, and growing my own marijuana. Grace alone kept me out of jail or the morgue for the better part of my teen years. The times I was locked up only made me angrier and more determined to feel nothing.

During those years, my relationship with my mother was terrible. I was incapable of seeing how much pain she was in, how lost she felt, how much she needed my love and support. However, as I became increasingly lost in a haze of smoke, drink, and pills, she learned to pay the bills on her own, got a driver’s license for the first time in her life, and found the strength to call the police when she found my little pot-growing operation. I was sixteen and completely out of control.

Although I knew my mother was different from other mothers, even when I was young, it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I truly became aware of the reality. I wasn’t understanding or compassionate. I was angry. I made fun of her in front of my friends. I told her she was stupid. I hurt her in more ways than I can count. And she just kept on loving me and doing her best to keep me alive and healthy.

As I write this, I still feel so much shame for those actions and words. I’ve spent the last 15 years trying to make up for the pain I caused her during those five years when I was acting out every shadow element in my psyche. If I had 100 more years to make amends, it would not be enough.

When I was 19, after hitting my personal bottom, I cleaned up my life and went to college. I studied psychology, literature, and religions. I began to learn a little about why I was so unconscious and confused during my teen years, and pieces of why my mother has had to struggle in her life. Most importantly, I began to learn about powers greater than me in this amazing Universe.

*****

My mother is not like other mothers. She was never able to help me with my homework. She seldom read to me. She was incapable of advising me on whom to go to parties with when I was in middle school and dating was new and awkward. When I began to publish poems after high school, she never asked to read them or showed any interest in my writing. When I was in college, she didn’t ask about my studies, had no awareness of national or international events, and only wanted to know if I was employed.

She isn’t like other mothers. I saw the mothers of my friends turn their backs and walk away from troubled sons and daughters, unable to face their failures as a parent and their children's pain. But my mother never stopped loving me, supporting me, or trying to help me, no matter how awful I became, and I became very awful. Where other mothers might or did give up, she loved me even more.

After 35 years, I am finally able to see that she was gifted in ways I could not understand earlier in my life. She has an amazing heart, a capacity to love that my mind can barely grasp. I didn’t have the mother I wanted, but I had the mother I needed. To get to where I am now in my life, I had to go through the pain and confusion of my youth, and I didn’t need someone to guide me through it, I just needed someone to love me no matter how lost I found myself. If I had been guided through those difficult experiences, without the pain, there would have been no learning, no understanding, and no wisdom gained from the experience of finding my own way through the dark places within me.

I would not wish my teen years on anyone, but those experiences are what allow me to sit here now and write these words. If I hadn't been so out of control, my mother may have never found the strength to take control of her own life and learn to be as independent as she became. Again, we get what we need, not what we want.

So, now she is dying. This comes at a time when my life is in a liminal space between who I was and who I will become, a self-chosen disruption of the course my life was following. In the middle of all this, my mother is diagnosed with cancer.

Odd as it may sound, the timing for this to happen in my life could not be better. I am in a unique position in my life to change the way I see the world, to change the meta-narrative of my life, to re-open my heart in ways I have been too frightened to do in the past. For the first time in my life I am on the path of self-discovery and healing. It makes all the difference.

From this place in my life, I have learned to step back from myself, to see through the eyes of my observer self, or Witness. Through those eyes I see my mother as a person. I can see her struggles, her fears, her joys, her successes. I see her weaknesses and her strengths. I see her not as my mother, but as wonderful human being who has survived 72 painful, challenging years while holding onto the love in her heart. I see a woman who is not capable of knowing how extraordinary she is. I see a woman who inspires me to open my heart and learn to love in the same selfless way she has loved others for her entire life.

I am blessed to come to see my mother as the human being she is, not just as my mother. I have been given a chance to know her in ways I could never imagine before. I want to learn how she was able to love others so easily, despite being told she was not like everyone else and being treated as deficient.

My mother is not like other mothers. For however much time she has left, I want to learn about her fears, her joys, her life. I want to know the person who is named Ruth. 

R.I.P., Ruth Sophie Harryman, born Ruth Sophie Koenig.

The Fear of Impermanence

The following is a quote from Tibetan Buddhist teacher Sogyal Rinpoche on the fear of impermanence we all carry with us. Often we can successfully keep that awareness buried and out of awareness, but when it does surface - through experiences of loss, death, and the like - we can glimpse our own impermanence and experience that fear. But Sogyal Rinpoche argues that this awareness can also be our best friend if we are willing to hold that space and gently look behind the appearance of impermanence.

Glimpse of the Day, October 14, 2011


The fear that impermanence awakens in us, that nothing is real and nothing lasts, is, we come to discover, our greatest friend because it drives us to ask: If everything dies and changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances? Is there something in fact we can depend on, that does survive what we call death?


Allowing these questions to occupy us urgently, and reflecting on them, we slowly find ourselves making a profound shift in the way we view everything. We come to uncover in ourselves “something” that we begin to realize lies behind all the changes and deaths of the world.


As this happens, we catch repeated and glowing glimpses of the vast implications behind the truth of impermanence. We come to uncover a depth of peace, joy, and confidence in ourselves that fills us with wonder, and breeds in us gradually a certainty that there is in us “something” that nothing destroys, that nothing alters, and that cannot die.

the image at the top is called "Impermanence," by Sheryl Luxenburg

Perry Garfinkel - Men in Grief Seek Others Who Mourn as They Do

Good article - everyone grieves differently, so it only makes sense that men seek out someone who grieves as they do when they want or need support. Often enough, no matter how much we love our wives, mothers, sisters, or female friends, men need other men in their grief.

Men in Grief Seek Others Who Mourn as They Do

Perry Garfinkel - Veteran journalist
Posted 7/28/11

In 1990, Sam and Gretchen Feldman cashed out on their share of a national chain of men's apparel stores and retired to Martha's Vineyard, Mass. There, they devoted their time to volunteer work and an active social calendar. The following years were golden ones for the Feldmans, but in 2007 Mrs. Feldman learned she had cancer. She died a year later.

The Feldmans had been married 53 years, and Mr. Feldman's grief was palpable to friends who knew him as a buoyant, resilient personality.

"There was a huge hole in my life that no amount of activity could replace," said Mr. Feldman, now 82. "And except for my two daughters, there was no one I could turn to for solace."

There was a local bereavement group for spouses, but Mr. Feldman opted out when he learned it consisted only of women.

"I just didn't think women would relate to my pain," he said. "And, frankly, I come from a generation that feels uncomfortable exposing our sadness and vulnerability to the opposite sex."

The loss of a loved one is a profoundly heartbreaking experience, but it is not the same for everyone. Research increasingly suggests that men and women experience grief in different ways, and the realization has bolstered a nascent movement of bereavement groups geared to men throughout the country. Many of them are affiliated with hospitals and hospice centers.

Concern about reaching men in grief has gained new urgency with shifting demographics. The number of men age 65 and older increased by 21 percent from 2000 to 2010, nearly double the 11.2 percent growth rate for women in that age group, according to census figures. As the gender gap in life span narrows, experts suggest that more men will be facing the loss of loved ones, particularly spouses.

Many will be not be prepared for the experience. The loss of a spouse often is crushing for men physically as well as psychologically. In a 2001 paper published in The Review of General Psychology, psychologists at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands confirmed earlier data showing widowers have a higher incidence of mental and physical illness, disabilities, death and suicide than widows do. While women who lose their husbands often speak of feeling abandoned or deserted, widowers tend to experience the loss "as one of dismemberment, as if they had lost something that kept them organized and whole," Michael Caserta, chairman of the Center for Healthy Aging at the University of Utah, said by e-mail.

The Harvard Bereavement Study, a landmark late 1960s investigation of spousal loss, found that widowers experienced the death of a wife as a multifaceted tragedy, a loss of protection, support and comfort that left many at sea. The men in the study relied heavily on their wives to manage their domestic lives, from household chores to raising their children, the researchers noted.

The grief of men is compounded, Dr. Caserta added, by the fact that so many have been reluctant to directly address real feelings of deep sadness; until recently, men were expected to be emotionally controlled and inexpressive. Simply persuading grief-stricken men to attend a bereavement group is still no small challenge.

"While there's strong indication that grief therapy helps men, historically men generally don't join groups," Phyllis Silverman, a grief researcher and an author of Widower: When Men Are Left Alone, said in a telephone interview.

There are also differences in the length of time men grieve, compared with women, and how long it takes to move on. An old axiom that "women mourn, men replace" turns out to be untrue.

"It used to be thought that men grieve acutely and heal more quickly, and that women grieve chronically over a longer time period," said George A. Bonanno, a clinical psychology professor at Columbia University in New York.

But now, Dr. Bonanno said, many researchers believe that grief follows a more complex pattern in both men and women.

"No matter what sex, we oscillate between positive and negative emotions, between waves of sadness about the loss and hope for the future," he said in a telephone interview. "This can be frustrating for men, who often seek the 'quick-fix' approach."

Sherry Schachter, director of bereavement services at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx and a grief specialist for 25 years, said in a telephone interview: "While women grieve intuitively, open to expressing their feelings, men are 'instrumental' grievers. They're not comfortable with talking about their feelings, and they prefer to do things to cope."

In a men's group she has run for the last few years, she said, "I never ask, 'How do you feel?' Rather, I ask, 'What did you do?' "

In some cases, what men are doing is taking grief counseling into their own hands. Mr. Feldman started a biweekly bereavement group for widowers on Martha's Vineyard, and two years ago spearheaded the Men's Bereavement Network, a nonprofit organization seeking to establish and support grief groups for men nationwide. The network is helping to establish bereavement groups for men in places as diverse as DePere, Wis.; Clearwater, Fla.; and Danvers, Mass.

At a recent peer-led gathering of the Martha's Vineyard group begun by Mr. Feldman, eight men in their late 40s to late 80s sat around the dining room table at the home of the session leader, Foster Greene. Dr. George Cohn, a local psychiatrist, sat alongside, for the most part a silent observer.

A retired fisherman, at 85 one of the older members of the group, spoke in a low voice, looking mostly into his coffee cup. His wife of 54 years died in 2010.

"I don't know about you guys," he said, quickly glancing around the table of men, "but for me it gets harder, not easier." The other men nodded.

Later Dr. Cohn said, "Sometimes that's all a man wants or needs -- a sympathetic ear."

Originally published in The New York Times

Tags: Consciousness, Coping, Grief, Husbands, Widowers, Coping With Grief, Widower, Men in Grief, Seeking, Others Who Mourn as They Do, Perry Garfinkel, men, grief, mourning, death, loss, bereavement

We Had to Euthanize Maggie This Morning

Maggie was our family, our child - she was seven years old (give or take, she was a rescue).

We had to end her suffering this morning - she had rapidly gone downhill in the last ten days. Her eyes were so sad, she could not eat, she could barely drink, and movement looked agonizing. She had lost 8 lbs in that short period. We had ruled out valley fever and several other things. It was probably cancer.

We couldn't bear to keep her alive for our benefit - she was suffering, and it broke our hearts. Euthanasia was the only humane choice - all things are impermanent, and fighting that would not have been fair to her.

I keep using present tense verbs and having to change them - it doesn't feel real yet.

I've been with death my whole life - pets, people, friends, farm animals, my immediate family. In 2005 my sister and mother died in the same summer. I watched my mother's quick decline with ovarian cancer that came out of remission (after my sister died) and filled her whole body. I wasn't there when my father died of his 5th heart attack when I was 13.

This hurts worse than any of the other ones.

I'm not sure why - maybe because Maggie loved us without conditions, no matter what kind of mood we were in or whatever - she loved me/us, always, faithfully.

Or maybe because I am more present to my feelings than I have ever been before. I couldn't stop the tears and sobs as we held her and the shot was administered. Yet even while experiencing my own pain and loss I could comfort Jami and hold her . . . . Is this what it means to be a man with access to his heart?

And I can't stop the tears as I write this.

Yes, she was a dog, a pet -- but she was our family. The house feels so empty without her getting into things, demanding we pet her . . . .

I know that being able to feel this loss so deeply is a sign of all the work I have done, especially around death and loss - work to have access to my feelings, to not suppress suffering and pain . . . . and it sucks to hurt so much.

Tags: masculinity, death, loss, grief, Maggie, pets, family, emotions, suffering, impermanence, dogs