Shells

//This first piece, "Shells," was my inaugural piece in [|Hawaii Women's Journal]. I had written a draft of this essay a year before, after I saw some ducks stroll across campus. It turned into a powerful and cathartic piece about losing my mother--and letting her go.//

Shells When Mom died, I moved quickly. I went to Bank of Hawaii to settle her assets, canceled her Macy’s card, and packed up her extensive show collection for charity. I cleaned out the childhood home that she had so generously left me, renovated it, and moved in. I wrote dozens of thank you cards, organized endless tangles of jewelry, and cleaned out the safety deposit box. I got things done.

Each “first” without my mother was predictably painful: Mother’s Day, Christmas, her birthday, and my own passed with the expected grief and tears. However, I surprised myself each time—there was a lack of sharpness to the pain. I would cry for a few minutes and then suddenly stop, the desire to cut the cake or hang ornaments overtaking the grief. I took this as a sign: things were getting better. I was moving on. I was showing a strength that would have made my mother proud. One morning at school, I ventured out to procure some much-needed coffee before having to teach my next class. Out of the corner of my eye, across from our chapel, I spied an unusual sight: two ducks in the middle of the center courtyard. One, brown with lovely mottled feathers, and the other, black-brown with a brilliant streak of green, waddled for a while across the dew-damp lake of grass and settled themselves down in the shade of a staircase of about thirty yards away.

As I stood and sipped, a student revealed that the female had laid eggs in the bushes by the counseling office. I wandered over. There, sure enough, nestled among the greenery at the base of a tree, lay three small eggs.

I looked back across the courtyard at the ducks, who calmly surveyed the scene. Why are they so far from their children? I thought. Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep close? You never knew what kind of harm a wayward ninth grader could do.

It was clear, however, that Mom and Dad Duck knew what they were doing. They sat comfortably against one another, angled toward the eggs. There was no panicked beating of wings or worried squawking, only patient waiting.

My eyes suddenly burned with hot tears as I thought of my mother, who, despite a penchant for her own kind of squawking (in high pitched Tagalog, no less), could easily break me with a calm, yet piercing stare.

I soon learned that the passing of the first year without her would not be the end of grief. On Mother’s Day of 2009, a year and a half after she died, I sat in front of Neiman Marcus on the bench where she and I would regularly meet and cried with a ferocity that emptied me. I remember shaking uncontrollably, wanting desperately for her to appear on the bench beside me.

The months that followed proved to be among the most difficult of my life. The sadness of each “first” was overshadowed by the grave realization of each “second.” The dull ache of the previous year’s holidays was replaced by the searing pain of a new reality: now, my mother was really, truly gone. I became depressed. I could not sleep. I suffered myriad physical problems related to my stress. My body, mind, and heart broke down.

I could not understand it. I had been so proud of the strength I had displayed the year before. I thought I had moved through my grief. Why was I falling apart now?

It took time for me to comprehend what I thought was an emotional backslide. Those months were so completely filled with every kind of pain that it was nearly impossible for me to function, much less navigate my grief. I lumbered on through life and work, surviving on the hope that all of this would somehow work itself out.

I spoke to Mom often—usually while sitting on that bench outside of Neiman Marcus. I asked her why everything was tumbling down around me, and more importantly why she, in her heavenly place, did not do anything to stop it.

It was a selfish question, I know. It was only a euphemism for what I really wanted to ask her: Why had she left me? And what was I supposed to do now?

A couple of months ago I was standing in the kitchen. It was the only room in the house I had left exactly as it had been when Mom lived here. The once eggshell-painted cabinets had faded to a dull grey and the metallic gold drawer pulls were tarnished from thirty years of use. I had avoided renovating this piece of the house; it was, in my mind, still my mother’s domain. Due to my chronic clumsiness and lack of common sense (I once attempted to fry Shake and Bake), my mother had, with the frenzied shaking of a wooden spoon, banned me from the kitchen. Now in her absence, I inhaled, expecting to smell her chorizo fried rice—but I didn’t.

The weight of that particular moment will always be with me. It had finally sunk in: my mother had moved on. I now had a chance to do the same. However, I wasn’t sure I should.

It was a huge epiphany: the pain of that second year was not only about my mother leaving me but also my guilt. I had wanted to move forward, to be free of pain, to forget, but that’s not what a good daughter would have done. A good daughter would have grieved even harder.

But that’s no way to live, and it’s certainly not the kind of life my mother would have wanted for me. I decided then and there to take a step forward. The next day I painted the cabinets bright red and installed brushed nickel pulls.

As I cross the threshold of a third year without my mother, I find myself healed in a myriad of ways. I know now that I needed to grieve in whatever way was necessary and that to demand a timeline for it was unrealistic. The first year without her was about closing her door, and the second year was about the much more painful process of opening mine. I’ve come to understand that my mother’s transition was and is a reflection of my own: we both let go of one life to start another. The trick was negotiating the space in between.

I also now understand why those ducks sat so far from their eggs. It wasn’t that they wanted to leave them—and, indeed, they never really did. They simply went to a place where they could watch their children come into the world under their own power.

Their children needed to break their own shells.