My mother died. We hadn’t spoken in a year.

You can't know the depth of your healing until you’re confronted by something that would have otherwise destroyed you.

My mother died in the early morning hours of June 3rd, one day shy of the one year anniversary of the last time I saw and spoke to her.

Just a few days before, I’d written a sentence that has echoed in my head since: In her garden oasis, my mother taught me how to survive her. I never imagined she’d be gone soon after.

It’s still surreal. How could my Mother be gone? How could she have died? She was larger than life. No one has hurt me the way she did. And no one’s love did I yearn for the way I did hers.

She was a complicated woman, had endured so much trauma, she never got over what happened to her. I knew this from a young age. I knew when her eyes went dark when she got angry. I knew when she stared at me with a loathing that made me want to curl into myself. She gave me that same glare the last time I saw her.

She was enraged that I didn’t do what she wanted me to, that I dared to defy her. It didn’t matter that I am a woman in her late 40s, 30+ years out of her home. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t done anything to warrant her aggression. When I saw her glaring, her upper lip curled, eye brows a straight like, I felt that familiar fear from childhood, a sinking hole in my chest. That look was usually followed by a yank of my long hair that left my neck aching for days, a heavy open palm brought down hard on my arm, back, leg, face. She didn’t care where it landed, the point is that it hurt me and made me stop whatever it was I was doing that had riled her up. And there were words that accompanied those beatings. Words I won’t repeat here but I hear loud and clear in my head. Words no mother  should ever say to her daughter.

But I’m not a little girl anymore. I shook my head. I said, “No! Don’t look at me like that.” The force that came out of me surprised me. She yelled, through gritted teeth, “You better respect me, Vanessa.”

“ I’m a 46 year old woman,” I said matter of factly as I walked away. Those were the last words we spoke to one another. To be clear, giving your parents, anyone really, a clear boundary on how to treat you is not disrespect.

That December, she sent me pasteles with my aunt. Ma was famous for her pasteles, all her food, really. She was an excellent cook. I remember watching her as a kid, Super KQ, the Spanish language station back in the day, blasting from her tiny radio. She was so comfortable in the kitchen. She hummed. She danced. She made magic.

When I texted her to say thank you, she didn’t respond. I didn’t expect her to.

The journey to confronting my mother wound

When my brother, my Superman Juan Carlos, died in 2013, I reeled into the darkest place of my life. I still remember the day I decided to live. It was fall. The leaves of the trees of my beloved Inwood Hill Park were bright red, yellow and orange. The ground was littered with them and at dusk, the canopy glowed. The forest had that winter is coming smell—damp, earthy, the musky-sweet smell of decay. At that point I knew that grief could take me out, it was so dark, so rageful, so fuckin sad. I didn’t see a way out and that terrified me.

It was late. My daughter, who was then nine years old, was already asleep in her bedroom. I went in to check on her, like I did every night, and still do when she’s home. I pulled the covers up under her chin, knowing they’d be at her feet by morning. She’s done this since she was a baby—kick her covers off no matter the temperature in the room. As a newborn, she  hated to be swaddled despite what the nurse insisted. She’d scream bloody murder until I unraveled her. (How I discovered that is a story for another time.)

I ran the back of my hand softly over her cheek and thought of my mother. We hadn’t spoken in weeks. She was doing what she’d been doing for years: punishing me by denying me her love. At that point I thought she was punishing me for surviving. For not being the one who died. I stared at my daughter, whispered: “You can’t leave her. I can’t leave you.” That’s when I picked up a chair and sat in my grief. I had to let it destroy me to bring me back to life.

Part of that journey entailed reading anything and everything I could find about grief. How people dealt with it. What they wrote. How they wrote. I read Rachel Carson’s Nox, an elegy for her brother, released in 2010. Nox (Latin for night) is not a poetry collection in the ordinary sense, but a box containing a single long sheet of paper folded like a concertina. The weight of the book startled me as did it’s complicated form—a collection of quotes, definitions, translations, letter-fragments, pieces of poetry, photographs, paintings, scribbles, and drawings. Them being on one single piece of paper that you unfold as you read, mirrored the complexity and relentlessness of grief, how seemingly endless it is, and weirdly connected to so much. And the heft of it felt like a metaphor for the unbearable weight of grief.

I found  Cheryl Strayed’s “Heroin/e” after falling in love with her 2012 memoir Wild. I wanted to read everything she’d ever written. Google led me to her famous essay published in The Sun, “The Love of My Life,” but it was her essay “Heroin/e” that shook me.

“It is perhaps the greatest misperception of the death of a loved one: that it will end there, that death itself will be the largest blow. No one told me that in the wake of that grief other grief’s would ensue.”

When I first read these lines, I stopped, closed my eyes, took a deep, open mouthed breath before opening my eyes again. I looked around my red walled room (a friend once described it “a womb”), stared down at the picture of my brother on my desk, then turned back to my computer. I highlighted the excerpt and kept reading. Over the next few days, I read the essay at least five times. I’ve since sent the essay to numerous friends and  have taught it countless times.

It wasn’t just the grief Strayed describes that caught me. It was how that grief led to her spiraling into reckless behavior, including becoming addicted to heroine. I thought of my brother… When had he first taken that first snort of smack? When had he picked up that needle?

Later, I read “On the Edge: Grief”, a transcript of Judith Butler’s talk during the 2014 PEN World Voices Festival.

Speaking from rage does not always let us see how rage carries sorrow and covers it over, so I cannot do it well, at least not this evening. How often is sorrow effectively shouted down by rage? How does it happen that sorrow can bring about the collapse of rage? Is there something to be learned about the sources of non-violence from this particular power of grief to deflate rage of its destructiveness?

Anne Carson asks, “Why does tragedy exist?” and then answers:

Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief. Ask a headhunter why he cuts off human heads. He’ll say that rage impels him and rage is born of grief. The act of severing and tossing away the victim’s head enables him to throw away all of his bereavements. Perhaps you think this does not apply to you. Yet you recall the day your wife, driving you to your mother’s funeral, turned left instead of right at the intersection and you had to scream at her so loud other drivers turned to look. When you tore her head off and threw it out the window they nodded, changed gears, drove away.

The grief is unbearable, and from that unbearability, one kills, a killing that produces more grief. Have we yet figured out exactly how this works, the transition from unbearable grief to uncontrollable rage and destructiveness? Perhaps grief is imagined to end with violence, as if grief itself could be killed. Can we perhaps find one of the sources of non-violence in the capacity to grieve, to stay with the unbearable loss without converting it into destruction? If we could bear our grief, would we be less inclined to strike back or strike out? And if the grief is unbearable, is there another way to live with it that is not the same as bearing it? We know the contours of this terrible circle—destroying to stop the unbearable grief, to bring an end to the unbearable, only to then redouble that loss by destroying again. Perhaps that destructive act is a way of announcing that what is unbearable is now someone else’s problem, not mine: here, you take this unbearable thing, now it belongs to you. But has anyone ever stopped grieving by devastating another’s life? What is the fantasy, the conceit, at work in such an act? Perhaps the wager is that this I, in destroying, suddenly becomes pure action, finally rid of passivity and injurability, finally, that is, for a passing moment. Or perhaps in destroying, one insists that the rest of the world become mired in one’s own sense of devastation. If the world is unlivable without those one has lost, perhaps there emerges a despairing form of egalitarianism according to which everyone should suffer this devastation. The destructive acts born of unbearable grief are perhaps premised on the thought that with this loss everything is already destroyed, so destroying becomes a redundancy, a ratification of what has already happened. But perhaps there is an effort to bring grief to a full stop through taking aim at the world in which such grief is possible, rolling over into a form of destructiveness that furiously proliferates more loss, wantonly distributing the unbearable.

I thought of my mother. I’d never considered that her rage was rooted in grief. Grief over my brother’s death and the griefs that death conjured, including the grief over how he came into this world…

I thought of my brother, the grief he internalized, how heroine became his sword that he stabbed into himself over and over for fifteen years, with drugs that eventually killed him.

My brother Carlos was my Superman. No one had ever loved me the way he did, relentlessly with no conditions or requirements. He was my first best friend and confidante, so losing him did something to me that I have never come back from.

The loss was exacerbated by my mother’s behavior. In her grief, she pushed me away. Those last few months of my brother’s life, I’d fooled myself to believe that maybe we could finally have a functional relationship. We took turns caring for him, taking him to appointments, visiting him and taking him food when he was hospitalized. But that all went to shit when my brother died. Her grief was cruel, angry, like she resented me for living.

All the reading I did gave me language for something I didn’t yet understand—my brother’s death had unleashed griefs I’d been carrying, and they came rushing at me with a vigor that made me crumble. The most profound grief that emerged was  over my antagonistic relationship with my mother.

I did what I’ve always done. I turned to literature. I wanted to understand what it was I was enduring. I needed to know that I wasn’t alone. I was looking for a way to survive. That’s how I found the term “mother wound” and the research around it.

But this mother wound work was initially just for me. I couldn’t be the only one who had a fraught relationship with their mother. It was in the journey that I found the term that describes what I am and have been for a long long time: unmothered. And, thus began the journey to what’s become my life’s work: Writing the Mother Wound.

I’ve been thinking about this hard now, in a deeply reflective way. I knew I’d done a great deal of healing but the depth of it has been made even more evident this past month since my mother’s death

I am without a doubt heartbroken. I am deeply grieving. But I am not destroyed. I know I will survive this. I know because of the healing I’ve done around my mother wound, but as with most healing, you don’t, can’t take in the depth of the healing, how long it’s shadow reaches, until you’re confronted by something that would have otherwise destroyed you.

If this had happened ten years ago, I would have been fucked up beyond repair. I’m not being hyperbolic. Healing this wound is ongoing, yes, but I have made some incredible strides. When I stood up to my mother the last time I saw her, demanding that she not treat me with such cruelty, I was 46 and finally believed, knew, that I didn’t deserve that. I can’t begin to describe what it took for me to see and accept that—years of therapy, writing, study, hiking, movement, gardening, breaking the cycle with my daughter. I had to do deliberate, relentless work. That work hasn’t stopped and will continue for a lifetime. That’s how deep the wound runs. It’s what my memoir is about: how my relationship with my mother shaped and permeated every  relationship I’ve had, especially my relationship with myself.

I look back at the woman I was who set out on this journey to discover my mother wound, to understand how my behavior and so many of decisions were shaped by my relationship with my mother. I thought for so long that I was working to forgive her. I know now that what I was searching for was how to forgive myself. I’m still working on being gentle with the Vanessa I was who treated herself terribly, treated other people badly, in turn (insert Anne Carson quote here on why tragedy exists)…the Vanessa who accepted terrible treatment from others, who sought out people that were like my mother and relationships that mirrored ours. I’ve long said if there was an emotionally unavailable person within  50 miles of me, I was going to find them and make them love me. Dios mío, the ways I’ve broken my own heart have been devastating. But I was repeating what I believed: that this is what I deserved. I didn’t see myself as worthy of tender, gentle, supportive, I gotchu love. I didn’t just do this in romantic relationships. I did this with friendships too. It was a cycle I was reliving that I’d learned in childhood when the one person who was supposed to love me unconditionally couldn’t, wouldn’t.

My therapist put it like this: when you’re a child, mother is the world. So if something is wrong with mother, if mother isn’t present or is abusive, unkind, a child can’t handle that. If something is wrong with mother, what does that say about the world? So we internalize it. We think there’s something wrong with us. And that’s how I started the cycle of: maybe if I do that she’ll love me, maybe if I do this… and I did that again and again throughout my life. I did things, said things, accepted things subconsciously thinking: maybe this will make them love me. Of course it didn’t work. I was seeking out mirrors of ma. It’s cliché but no less true: what I had to do was find in myself what I was looking for in others. I had to learn to love myself, be gentle with myself, be kind.

I’m still working on this. I sometimes say things to myself that if anyone ever said to me, I’d knock them out with a straight right to the temple. I said earlier that this journey is ongoing, it is a lifetime.

Today I understand myself in a whole new way because of the choices I made ten years ago. And I understand my mother in a whole new way. And though I’m sad, and I still break out in tears at least once a day, I know I will survive this. I know because my mother taught me how.

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In late June, I headed to Southern California to teach a memoir workshop in the San Jacinto Mountains, about two and a half hours outside of LA. My mother had been dead three weeks when I left. I landed on June 24th, the 10th anniversary of my brother’s death. I was exhausted from travel, but something called me to the woods. There was a trail right by my cabin that the driver had pointed out to me. I listened to the pull and started climbing. The beginning was a steep climb on soil that was sandy and slippery. I patted myself on the shoulder for bringing my hiking sneakers with me. Just then, a hummingbird swooped in front of me and stopped to stare. I smiled, “Hi, bro.” Of course I had to come into the forest, my brother hadn’t yet visited via a hummingbird, as he does every year on this day. Soon, there were hummingbirds all around me.

I spent the following week teaching, attending craft talks (including one I facilitated) and going to readings (including mine at the end of that week). Somehow in that busy schedule I made time almost every day to hike into the pristine pine forests to cry, laugh and be with the trees and the hummingbirds. I felt cradled by those woods. It was exactly what I needed after my loss.

I thought of my mother and how she instilled in me this love for nature, in her garden and our trips to Highland and Forest Parks, our family trips to Rockaway Beach that took days to prepare for—trips to Western Beef to get vegetables, bags of chips, bottles of water, juice and soda, and meat that mom seasoned with her homemade sofrito.

Before my mother’s death I’d been on a roll, working on three epistles at once, but her death brought a silence that paralyzed me. Days into my trip, my memoir returned while hiking in the mountains. Of course the epistle that called to me was the one to my mother titled In Search of My Mother’s Garden.

Dear Ma, 

I was all of four years old but I remember when we moved into that first floor apartment on Palmetto Street in Bushwick, Brooklyn in the spring of 1980. The same apartment I grew up in. The apartment you never left. That was the year Reagan was elected and rap music, then a new music genre, rose out of the Bronx onto the national stage with Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight. And they summer a heat wave scorched the city. You didn’t let any of that stop you. 

I watched you standing by the window one morning, surveying the backyard, coffee in hand, the steam fogged the glass. There were piles of trash and the makeshift barriers that separated ours from the surrounding yards were made of plywood, clumsily nailed together and falling apart so there were gaping holes in spots. My eyes landed on the tree in the far left corner of the yard.

Days later, you climbed out the window and went to work, sweeping up the years of garbage, bags that smelled of something dead or dying, cracked flower pots, a fork with twisted tongs; and threw it all over the dilapidated fence into the junk yard next door which was already piled high with trash. It was one of the many rubble strewn lots that dotted our neighborhood back then.

I tiptoed past you and stood at the foot of the tree; I’d learn later it was a plum tree. A past resident had painted the trunk a dull salmon color. I picked at the chipping paint, pulling some trunk with it, patted the tree and whispered, “Hi. I’m Vanessa.” I was scrawny, a wee thing really, but already unstoppable. Years later I overheard you tell someone: “Vanessa was always big. Even when she was little, she was big.”

I started grappling up the trunk, scraping my legs and hands, peeling the pleather off my sneakers. At one point, a sharp branch stabbed into my side. I winced but kept climbing. You screamed at me to get down, “Te vas a dar un mal golpe, machua!” But I wasn’t bothered by being called a tomboy. I saw nothing wrong with doing things girls weren’t “supposed to” do. Who made those rules anyway? You cut your eyes at me while I kept climbing. “No vengas llorando cuando te rompas el pescuezo, oiste?!” It took me weeks, but I didn’t give up, and neither did you. 

You weren’t the Martha Stewart type of gardener with a sun hat and apron. You worked in a sofrito stained nightgown or a t-shirt and shorts. You found an old shovel and took to tilling the soil, using your right leg to push the shovel into the ground to bring up the dark soil and squirming earthworms. When the earth wouldn’t give, you got on all fours and used your hands. Then you went out and bought the seeds. When you laid them out on the kitchen, I saw that each packet had a picture of the potential inside: peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, squash, herbs like peppermint, cilantro and rosemary, flowers like geraniums and sunflowers. You handled the seeds with a tenderness I envied.

I can still see you now, your hands in the soil, the dirt is caked in the creases and under your fingernails. You stand, raise your face to the sun, close your eyes, your lips curl into a toothless smile. You inhale so deep, I watch the air swell your belly and climb back out. A satisfied sigh. It’s the most content I ever saw you.

It was in that yard that I first heard the song of a bird I don’t remember ever seeing, but every day I heard it’s croon, so I started to imitate it through the gap in my teeth. Years later, I’d learn it was the song of a male red cardinal. 

By mid-summer, we had a lush garden, and I’d learned how to climb the plum tree. The sunflowers grew so tall and heavy, you tied them to the fence to keep them upright. We ate from the bounty of that yard every day—diced tomato and cucumber salad, meat dripping with sofrito made with your peppers, cilantro and recao. It was from my perch on a branch that I watched your joy when she first saw evidence of baby tomatoes and eggplants.

I was in my forties and a mother myself when you revealed how you learned to garden. Up until then, your stories of your childhood in Honduras were of hunger and suffering. We were poor, but I didn’t know the hunger you spoke of. 

Your face grew wistful and nostalgic, the way it does when you spoke of abuelita Tinita, who was your grandmother but you always said “ella fue mi madre.” You lived in the campo outside of La Ceiba, where Tinita taught you to toil the earth, growing enough to eat and sell. You laughed when you spoke of abuelita’s stubborn mule. Whenever he was tired, he sat and refused to move no matter how Tinita slapped his ass to get him moving. Once, he sat in the middle of the river you were crossing. Tinita had to unload the goods he was carrying, and you sat at the river’s edge for hours until the donkey decided to move again. Your eyes welled and you blinked hard a few times. “Ahi siempre tuvimos de comer.” In the city the land was scarce, so abuelita couldn’t plant enough to feed you. “Ahi sufrimos,” you said, “pasamos hambre.” When I asked why you moved to the city, you shrugged. That’s where your mother and the work was. 

The next summer, I started climbing into the junkyard next door when you weren’t looking. Piled high with old tires, license plates with sharp, curled edges, lumber with rusted nails jutting out, an occasional needle, cables, wires, rats, feral cats, rubble. Shrubs and trees pushed up through all that trash, and at the height of the summer, the foliage grew so thick that if I looked at the right angle, I could almost forget where I was. It was a jungle to my five-year-old eyes. The mounds were ancient structures built into the ground. Somehow the dark magic within had been unleashed, and I was called there, the female Indiana Jones, to save the world from its wrath. (Don’t just me, I was 5 and didn’t know this was colonialist trash.) 

It was in that garden and that junkyard that I became fascinated with the earth’s fauna and flora; all things green and squirmy. There began my fascination with trees. It was also there, in my plum tree,  that I became a writer.

I read a longer excerpt of the letter (complete with images projected onto a screen) at my reading. You can view it here.

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I started watching the Netflix limited series From Scratch when I got back home. (Did I tell you I’m an emotional cutter?) In a scene, Lino, a Sicilian chef, explains to his love Amy why Florence is a center of art and architecture: since it’s in a valley, it’s vulnerable to attacks. The people reasoned that if the city looked wealthy, potential attackers would think twice because a wealthy town must have a big army. Lino says: “Beauty can provide safety.”

I think that’s why I write about the trauma I’ve experienced in my life, my heartbreaks, my relationship with my mother, my childhood in Bushwick, my struggles in white America, the grief over losing my brother…. It’s why I wrote this piece and why I’m sharing it with you all—because in making something beautiful out of my pain, I have created a safe space for myself in the world.

May this space continue to offer me grace and comfort as I navigate this new grief and all the griefs it will conjure.

Hold fast, fam. I love you.

~V