My mom died on March 24, 1998, just 6 weeks after she turned 35. On March 13 of this year, I turned one day older than my mom when she died. (A while back, Meaghan found an online calculator and figured it out for me so I could celebrate my day of freedom.) From that day forward, I’d be living on borrowed time, or at least that’s how it felt.
13 has always been a lucky number for me—even as a little kid, I wanted to subvert an unlucky number and claim it as my own. It’s also the age I had just turned when she died. So my freedom day being Friday the 13th felt meaningful, even magical. March 13 was the day that the real panic of the pandemic really hit home. It had officially sunk in around New York. Last year, I thought about doing something between March 13 and March 24, to really close the chapter on my fear of 35. I had no idea I’d be jobless and that a virus with symptoms very close to what killed my mom would be keeping me indoors, isolated and thinking too much about my breath.
My mom had gone to the doctor and found out she had pneumonia a couple days before she died overnight. The pneumonia meant her lungs filled with fluid, and that’s the detail I always remember about the cause of death. It’s the detail I think about when I think about her last minutes, and the detail that haunts me when I think about finding her. When she had gotten home from the doctor, I asked her if she was going to die and she laughed and said, “No.” So I know very well that things happen, that young people die, that there’s no way to say “no” to death. From a very young age, that knowledge shaped how I thought about life and related to people. It’s made me really insanely intense, but it’s also given me perspective. “You only live once” was something I’ve been telling myself since before Drake was on Degrassi. It’s hard not to reflect on the timing of a virus that makes it hard to breathe, hitting New York hard while I work through a big step of my grief. I keep feeling short of breath and having to meditate. I keep thinking about what a joke it would be for the universe to kill me now, how you really can’t write that stuff.
In a world where this virus didn’t exist, I’d be thinking about how I am older than my mom in every pic of her that I have (and I don’t have nearly enough). I’d be thinking about how I’m forging new ground, and that this aging thing is all new territory. I’d be wondering how it will feel to be older than my mom forever. I’d be thinking about her body and her weight and how the work I’m doing is meant to heal all that, for her and for me and all the way down the roots of the family tree. But I’m thinking about other things. Like how our systems are broken, how every human should be guaranteed equal care and protection, how I don’t know what the world will look like in a year, how I want to keep my family safe, how I can’t pay my bills. It’s impossible to answer all the questions we have during this. How we handle everything has changed, even if temporarily, even for something as core to us as deep grief. The only thing we can do is breathe.
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