Strawberry Dust

Losing My Mom to Mental Illness

Trigger Warning: Mental Illness/Suicide

About a year ago I had a dream that my mom died. In the dream, I was wandering the desert trying to find the mental hospital I knew she’d been at but when I got there, it was abandoned, everyone was gone. A friend came up beside me and said, “I’m so sorry. Your mom passed away”. I fell to my knees and sobbed, “I thought I had more time”.

I woke up once again filled with an aching dread that simmered at the back of my mind at all times. It had been two years since I’d sent my mom a letter saying I couldn’t take her phone calls anymore, eight years since I’d last seen her face, nine years since she moved out right before my high school graduation. I laid awake in a cold sweat, tear-streaked over a nightmare I hadn’t had in a while but was all too familiar. I rolled over and cried. Cried because there was no good choice for me to make: keep my mom in my life at arm's length or close the door on her completely. I was paralyzed with fear, doubt, guilt, regret, anger, and sadness too deep to define.

My mom suffered from severe Bipolar Depression; something that developed around the time that I was born and progressively got worse as my younger sister and I got older. For most of my childhood, I didn’t have an explanation for the way my mom occasionally behaved. I just knew that she got mad very easily and that a sense of security only came from time spent with my dad. I wanted so badly to feel safe with her…I still do.

It wasn’t until I was 14 years old that everything came to light. My dad had just been diagnosed with Guillian Barre, an autoimmune disease that can leave you paralyzed for weeks or months. It was a long road to a diagnosis and my mom was strong through it all until she wasn’t. It was countless nights of my dad sleeping in a chair because his back hurt in any other position, not being able to make it up the stairs, not being able to be the only sense of safety I knew. I remember being surprised by my mom’s strength, surprised by the comfort I found in her in the face of my dad being sick for the first time. I remember my mom waking me up at 5 in the morning one day, the only light coming from the hallway, and her telling me, “We called an ambulance but it’s okay, it’s just to get him in to see a doctor faster”. After that, my dad was admitted to the hospital for several weeks, finally with a clear diagnosis and a treatment plan but still a very long road to full recovery. And that’s when my mom just…shattered. She fell into a state of depression I’d never seen before, filled with days laying on the couch, mugs full of liquor, and a complete dissociation from reality. I fumbled my way through school and track practice in a fog, wondering how spring had the audacity to unfurl so beautifully when it was still a raging storm of chaos in my house.

My dad was discharged from the hospital but moved into my grandparents’ (his parents’) side of our two-family house so he could sleep on their pullout couch and not have to use the stairs. My sister moved in with him to keep him company and escape the constant rain cloud that loomed over my mom. My grandma cleaned out a room for me on her side of the house but I couldn’t move, as painful as it was…I couldn’t leave my mom. My dad, still using a cane as he regained his full ability to walk again, took her to therapists, psychiatrists, anything to rebalance the chemicals that had run wild in her brain. I only remember her saying two things over and over again during that time period: “I’m going to go lay down” and “I love you”. The “I love you”s hurt the most. She would say it as if she hadn’t just heard me say it back. She would say it like she was hoping the response would be what could save her from her own mind but my reply never fully landed. All the words she couldn’t hear just added to the rain cloud above her head, hanging heavy in the air.

It was the day after Mother’s Day, May 12, 2008. I was 14 and a freshman, getting myself ready to go to school. My dad and my sister were still living next door and I was in our kitchen eating Special K Red Berries cereal, excited I’d gotten to the end of the bag where I could dump all of the freeze-dried strawberry dust that had collected at the bottom of the box all over my cereal. Suddenly I heard a crash upstairs and ran to find my mom on the floor of the bathroom. She was slumped over and slurring her words and not making any sense. I pulled her into a sitting position and ran to get my dad.

“Mama fell in the bathroom and she can’t get up and I don’t know what’s wrong!”. My dad and my sister, who was 10 years old at the time, ran over to our side of the house and up to the bathroom where my mom was still on the floor. I went to my room and grabbed my iPod and headphones and knelt in front of my sister and said, “Put these on and play your favorite songs as loud as you want in your room…and don’t come out”. My dad told me to find her bottle of antidepressants. I ran downstairs and grabbed a pill bottle I found on the counter.

“I found it!” I shouted. My dad came halfway down the stairs and asked when it had been filled.

“Um..um...I can’t find…Oh! Friday! This past Friday…but it’s empty!”

“How many are supposed to be in it?”

“I don’t know! I can’t find that on the bottle!” I threw the bottle to my dad, he quickly turned it over in his hands but couldn’t find the pill count either and threw it back to me. I turned it again and again and then saw “Qty: 100"…circled in sharpie.

“Daddy…she took 100 pills”

We called 911. The paramedics came and carefully led my mom down the stairs as she began to sob while still slurring her words.

“I’m coming with you to the hospital,” I said to my dad as he stood there in a moment of shock before jumping into action. My sister stayed with my grandma and my dad and I drove to the hospital where my mom was crying and hooked up to machines I couldn’t make sense of. Her cheeks had broken out in these small, freckle-like red dots and all I could think was that it looked like the strawberry dust on my cereal. I sat next to her while my dad called family members. I don’t even think she knew I was there.

She was admitted into a mental hospital for a week after the suicide attempt. I didn’t want to visit her, I didn’t want to look at her. I couldn’t get the image of her in the hospital out of my mind. My sister, my dad, and I finally visited her towards the end of her week there and she seemed okay. She actually looked okay. The day she came home, the cherry blossom tree in our front yard was shedding its petals in the wind, the sun was shining, and we had a family dinner on my grandparents’ side of the house. My grandpa, who was in the late stages of Alzheimer's, was in good spirits, my dad was walking okay, my grandma and my sister were cracking jokes, and my mom was happy. I wanted so badly for that to be the conclusion to that awful chapter of our lives. I wanted to write a book about the experience now that we made it to the other side. But it wasn’t the end of the story, it was the start to a very different one.

The next three years of high school saw the rest of what Bipolar depression had to offer. Manic episodes that resulted in clothes being thrown out the window at 1 am, police being called, and a car ride “intervention” my mom imposed (after a particularly rough fight I’d had with a friend) where she told me she didn’t know if she could love me. Depressive episodes complete with Christmas Eves alone with my mom because I felt too guilty to leave her and go to the family party, having friends drop me off after a Drama Club rehearsal and saying, “Is that your mom?” as we pull up to the house and see my mom passed out in the minivan parked out front, the steering wheel covered in fast food grease and her breath reeking of liquor. The moments of normalcy and balanced medication that mostly ruled my childhood had become fewer and further between. Home had become a place that filled me with a sick dread.

My senior year of high school saw more enormous swings into manic and depressive episodes, this time without the buffer of “normal” in between. I was assistant director for our Fall play and spending as much time away from home as I could. My dad and my sister had moved back in with my grandma next door, my grandfather had passed away two years prior so my grandma needed the company and my dad and sister needed the space from my mom. But even after everything that had happened, I stayed on our side of the house again, right in the eye of the storm with my mom. I was so mad at her and so frustrated but I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving her to sleep there alone.

It was tech week, the week leading up to opening night for the play, and I ran home to grab food from my grandma’s side. My dad came up to me in her kitchen and said, “So I asked your mom for a divorce”. I grabbed a few snacks and said, “Okay” and headed back to the school for several more dry runs of the play. I don’t know if I was numb or in shock or just so exhausted by everything but that was the only response I could give. I went back to school as if nothing had happened. The following March, my mom moved to Cape Cod to live with her sister in the house her parents had passed down to them. I was away that day at a different school for Drama Fest. I performed in our play, won an award, and then cried in an empty classroom while everyone watched the rest of the performances. All I could feel was an aching sadness, a little bit of relief, and then a tidal wave of guilt over that speck of relief.

I saw my mom two more times after that, once for my high school graduation two months after she moved out, and once during winter break of my freshman year of college when I needed to drive down the cape with my dad and my grandma to have her sign something over to my dad. My heart was in my throat the whole ride there, not knowing if I wanted to see her. I stayed in the car with my grandma, having decided I definitely did not want to see her, but she ran out of the house to hug me. She looked terrible and I could tell she’d been drinking. I shook the whole ride home.

For the next six years, I talked to her on the phone occasionally. She called once a week at 7 am. Sometimes I would pick up but most of the time I would let it go to voicemail. She never sounded normal again. She was stuck in suspended animation, in a state of depression that left her saying “I love you” in a way that made my stomach turn, like everything in the world relied on my reply which fell on deaf ears the minute I said it back. I remember hoping beyond hope that she would swing back into a manic state again. I wanted to fight, I wanted to yell about everything I never got to yell about. I wanted a screaming match I was finally ready for. I wanted an apology. I wanted normal. I wanted my mom back.

For six years I talked to her on the phone even after my sister stopped, even after friends, family, and therapists told me I didn’t have to. “I’ll feel guilty if I don’t,” was always my reply. But my heart was breaking every time I answered her calls. My heart broke a little every time I let my guard down and I’d try to tell her more about my life, more than the 2–3 minutes she allowed before abruptly bringing the conversation to an end. I wanted her to talk to me, to ask more, to respond to what I was saying beyond “That’s nice honey…well I’ll call again next week…I love you”. I finally got the courage to stop breaking my own heart every week in 2018 when I wrote her a letter. I told her that I truly wanted nothing but the best for her, that I wanted her to get better, but that I needed space, I needed to not take her calls anymore.

She kept calling but I blocked her number, and her voicemails piled up in a blocked messages folder on my phone. And then I had that nightmare where I was met with an abandoned mental hospital and the realization that it was too late to change anything. I finally picked up one of her calls in June 2020. She sounded further away than she’d ever sounded before. I told her about my life, my move from Boston to San Francisco, and back again to Boston. I told her about my job and my friends and my hobbies. And then there was a moment where neither of us said anything.

“Mama…I had a really awful dream that you died.”

“Oh honey I’m okay”

“Are you okay? Are you really okay?”

“Yes I’m okay”

“What have you been up to? Do you go to the lake near the house?”

“Oh…I haven’t been to the lake in a while”

“You should go. You should go for your birthday”

“Yeah, maybe I’ll do that. I’m so glad you picked up, honey. Can I call you again for my birthday?”

“Um yes…yeah you can”

“Okay honey I love you”

“I love you too, Mama”

I felt so raw after that phone call. I felt like all of the work I had done to fill the hole she left behind start to crack a little. I wasn’t ready to re-open that wound. I just needed more time.

Two weeks ago I got the call I had been dreading for 10 years. “I have some sad news…your mom died…she passed away in her sleep… we don’t really know what happened…she hadn’t been taking care of herself…”

I fell to the floor and sobbed. “No no no no I thought I had more time!” I screamed and cried and buried my head in my hands as my brain tried to comprehend that this was real, this wasn’t a bad dream, I wasn’t going to wake up from this. I cried all the way to my sister’s apartment, I cried in my dad’s arms once he got there. I cried for everything we never got to fix, for all of the hope I’d been holding tight to…permanently slipping out of my grasp. I cried so hard I broke out in these red, freckle-like dots around my cheeks and my eyes that I’d never experienced before. Strawberry dust, I thought. This story was supposed to have a different ending.

I had been wanting to tell this story for a long time now. To connect with others over estrangement due to mental illness. I had finally begun to navigate life with the weight of that estrangement, it was painful but familiar, woven into the fabric of my story. I thought I had more time to write the ending, to heal from my wounds of those teenage years, and build a new relationship with someone I no longer needed but could choose to have in my life. I wanted that time.

Nothing can prepare you for losing a parent, no matter the circumstances. It’s the strangest feeling, to know that your childhood has been over for a while now but to still be gutted to realize that this is it, all the parenting you’ve ever received from that person is all you’ll ever have. It’s really truly over. And although my mom had taken root in a place in my mind surrounded by the broken things, the sharp edges of traumatic experiences, I’ve now been flooded with the good memories, the ones I didn’t even realize I had. My mom teaching me how to blow dry my hair, how to put on mascara. My mom being the only one of my family members to not scream at me when I almost killed us all on Route 1 while I had my permit and made a very bad judgment call over the car’s ability to speed up for a short on-ramp. My mom taking me prom dress shopping and then fighting for a refund after the dress ripped right down my ass in the middle of the dance floor. My mom putting on a LeAnn Rimes concert on TV and rubbing my head when I was 4 years old, throwing up my entire body weight. My mom showing me a collection of smooth rocks she’d collected and painted tiny beautiful landscapes on. My mom using the same perfume stick for all her date nights with my dad, getting ready while I sat on their bed and watched her curl her hair. My mom reading me the book Sam’s Sandwich while I sat on her lap and her scaring the absolute crap out of me with the page about the spider…her laugh was so contagious.

Hindsight is an awful kind of clarity. My mom was a funny, complicated, loving, and tormented soul. At 27 years old, all I want now is the chance to know her as an adult. All I want is to know her without needing her because needing someone who is unable to care for themselves and manage a monster of a disease is a pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

Losing my mom has unearthed ten years of grief, ten years of hope with no place to land, ten years of guilt, and a lifetime of what-ifs. What if I never sent her that letter…what if I’d kept taking her calls….what if I tried harder when she was here…what if she could’ve managed her medication…what if what if what if. I keep looking for a book or article or inspirational quote that’s going to soften this pain. The only quote I like is by Nora McInerny: “We don’t ‘move on’ from grief. We move forward with it”. I had never liked the choices I had before: keep my mom in my life at arm’s length or close the door on her completely. But moving forward without a choice at all has been a shocking punch to the gut.

That’s all there is now, though. Moving forward. Letting go of the weight of the estrangement, letting go of everything that was left unsaid. Moving forward with the task of navigating a new kind of grief. Letting the good moments back in, to wash and heal the wounds of traumas replayed like a broken record. Letting all of the memories back in, to paint a more complete picture of the woman who raised me and attempt to fill the space where she once stood.