I try to remember her hands. They were younger than mine are now. I imagine her long fingers and yellow, uneven and unpolished fingernails. Or had her nails fallen out? I am eight, about to turn nine; she will be dead in two weeks. Today is Mother’s Day and I am allowed to stay home alone with her while everyone else goes to church. I am to be her helper, so I carry a basket up from downstairs. I set it on her bed. She is sitting up.
I know this is meant to be our day, our time; it is the first and last time I will be alone with her in this house. But I don’t want to be here. Within weeks, she has transformed from my mother into a ghost, a skeleton; no hair, scarves covering her head. I know I am supposed to want to be with her on this day, but how can I want that? To be with a dying woman, my disappearing mother, whom I resent. It is too much. “What are you doing?”, I want to scream. “What do you expect me to do now, here without you?”
With those hands, she lifts two socks from the basket, as if scooping water. Here is how you fold laundry, she says. My dad’s black work socks, gold stitching at the toe, hang loosely in her palms.
I want to know how to fold the two socks into a ball that stays put, a kind of magic trick, which, to me, is the only interesting thing about this task. She understands. She holds the two socks together; I see her hands, limp, no muscle. She can’t do it, she gives up, leans back against her pillow, closes her eyes – the relief of giving in to insurmountable pain.
There is a moment in Maestro, the film about Leonard Bernstein, in which his wife, played by Carey Mulligan, finds out she has breast cancer. She is dying. This turn in the film surprised me. My reaction was sharp and total, as if on cue. I was in tears, undone. It was a side story: Bernstein was the genius; the sadness of his wife’s death was there to reveal more about him, his ultimate dedication to her, the wife he failed in so many ways. For me, though, the side story was the story and had me looking squarely at the truest thing about me – that my mother’s death from breast cancer when I was a child was the thing that broke me. But I no longer believe that, for how can something break before it is whole? That is the key to childhood loss: it is nothing like losing your mother when you are an adult, when you have a self. I had no self, nothing to break, and so the breaking became the self. I built a personality around never having to feel that way again. It was a relief to know that it did start somewhere, my disaster.
In the years that followed my mother’s death, while my classmates made gifts for Mother’s Day, a teacher, a nun, Sister Somebody, would come around to ask me: “Do you have a special aunt?” I have many loving aunts, but it is an absurd question, because there isn’t a direct comparison, an analogue to a mother. The suggestion was a reminder of my very bad luck, my carelessness, so early in my life. Not long ago, I heard the poet Victoria Chang say of her mother’s death: “I don’t need to get over it. It’s always with me, not a shadow, but the thing itself.”
Maestro is just one article in my collection of books, plays and poems that makes up a practice of finding my grief reflected back to me in art. There are other films: Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander; James L Brooks’ Terms of Endearment. I am a collector, too, of data. I found a statistic noting that parental loss before the age of 17 was the most devastating and the most predictive of adult depression, suicidal ideation and suicide. The study’s author, the sociologist Lynn Davidman, suggested this was especially true for a mother-daughter relationship.
I try to find comfort in such statistics. Is collecting data a way to protect myself in reverse? Or is it a way to prepare myself for the case against me, to defend my sorrow and my years of not getting over it and not moving on, as if facts will protect me or make up for what has gone or what is done? Imagining the counterfactual of early parental loss is a waste of time. You become who you are around your loss and the loss becomes a gift; you come to love who you are and the life you get to have; and you know it is inextricable from the loss, the forever wound.
Long before my son was born, I dreamed of him. I knew with some certainty that the comfort of this dream was the knowledge that something of what I had lost would be returned to me. Of course, being a child is not the same as having a child and being a mother is not having a mother; I know the damage caused by those who conflate the two, making their kids their confidante, friend or even parent. No, what returned when my son was born was an idea of the purest love, the ability to love a child devotedly and unconditionally, which I could do because my mother had done it for me. That was in me – she was in me. I did not know her for very long and it would be a shock to meet her now; she would be so unlike the person she has become for me in her absence. But this return was visceral, the closest I would come to having her back.
What I could not know was the new understanding of my loss that would accompany that joy. “The pain in life defines the joy,” wrote Tennessee Williams, so the reverse must be true. For in each stage of my son’s life – and most acutely when he reached the ages I was during my mom’s illness and her death – there have been regular reminders of a child’s developmental needs, of all the ways a child needs a mother. I understand through this the devastation of a little body having the primary caregiver taken away, eliminating the truest safe space for a child – what my mom was for me and what I am now for my son. I have also learned that no one could love this child as I do. Even in my most catastrophic imaginings (I have never been sick), I see myself as a witness to my son’s vulnerability. My great tragedy has become my great fear.
Perhaps every parent who has experienced early parental loss lives with that fear always at the edge of consciousness, the hypervigilance of trauma. I know this is no good for a child; the legacy of my mother’s death could be a heightened anxiety passed on. So, for the 16 years of my son’s life, I have kept myself apart from that space of disintegration. Within the deep joy of raising my child, I have learned what my mother must have felt when she realised she was going to die before her children could live without her.
Without admitting it to myself, everything I did in those years of mothering was an attempt to distance myself from that brokenness, because my son needed me fixed. Joan Didion’s idea of the “vortex effect” has always seemed the perfect way to describe it: the sudden collapsing of time, the way grief can suck you out of the present and return you to its grip, whether you are folding a sock or watching a movie about Leonard Bernstein.
As my son neared the age I was when my mom became sick, I would catch glimpses of his fragility, then see myself as a girl and find myself whispering to the God I still needed. I may no longer be Catholic, but that need remains. If I don’t believe in prayers, I do believe in language. I will do anything to give him what I didn’t have. I will do anything to stay alive so that he can live. I knew then that he wouldn’t survive my death. I knew this because I didn’t survive my mother’s death. But around that shattering, I became a person.
Like many writers, I collect memories. I have favourites that I return to, that I write and rewrite: her hands, or her voice, or her exhaustion. And, in writing it, the memory becomes something else, a fiction, a memory of a memory, as though writing it will create a different reality.
I write about my mom on the edge of my bed, saying prayers. How she hated (or so she told us) the prayer of her girlhood Catholic training: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” That scared her as a girl, she said, that she might die before she woke. Why would they put that idea in the mind of a child? “They” were the Catholic church, which had informed her life. Maybe she didn’t say this, but she made it clear: we weren’t to believe that prayer; we should not inherit that particular fear. You can only keep so many fears from your children, but she knew which mattered.
So, here I am with my son each night before bed, saying our secular prayers. We create our own prayer of gratitude without my Catholic punishing God, but it is a ritual nonetheless. I want him held, as my body is, in the rhythm of the words. I want him to fall asleep without fear, I want for him what my mom wanted for me.
And then my own private prayer: please let me live to get my son to a certain age. That age has gone up – let’s get him to 16 or 18; now 30 would be good, or 40. Let me see him as an adult. Let me see him move on.
I have never taught my son how to fold laundry and certainly not how to roll socks into a ball. Life as an adult and as a mother is often an endless series of small tasks, and folding laundry is one I have come to enjoy – the simplicity of it, particularly after sitting at a desk all day and trying to write a chapter or an essay. How simple and finite it feels to fold a shirt. How unlike writing a paragraph.
I am a decade older than my mom lived to be, and so are my hands. Folding laundry, I slow down; I feel each muscle, I remember how fragile we all are and how lucky I am. I imagine her, too, my mother, myself, the sadness of not being able to teach her girl all the necessary things.
Every time I see my son reach some adult marker, a milestone of separation, I feel a kind of relief. Yes, it hurts to lose the little boy, but it is a relief that he is his own person now. We will never be ready to say goodbye, but he can do his own laundry.
Committed: A Memoir of Finding Meaning in Madness by Suzanne Scanlon is published on 25 April by John Murray (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
In the UK, the youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on freephone 0800 068 4141, or email pat@papyrus-uk.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988, or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.