Death Becomes Oil, Part 2: Mother/Daughter Gunk

November 24, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

Plus or minus fifty years of reading, writing, thinking, (and watching movies) on the meaning of life, and death, yet I add up to inexactitude when faced with the actuality of failing, paralyzed, tumor-ridden bodies, then subsequently, with their cremated, ashy remains, those of my mother’s on October 4, and of my-15-year-cat-friend Spot’s on August 3, both of this year.

Weird or inappropriate that I place my mom and my cat within the same prozac-free paragraph? A comment on 21st C. American “personal” lives? Or on something else I’m too stupid to think up? Who knows why these two deaths together have sucked me into what has been maybe a not-so-sweeping-or-fearless inventory of my pensive past, and my present.

My cat Spot adopted me one night when I was carrying groceries, sola, up to my apartment. A month later she gave birth to four kittens, for which I found homes, before I took her to live with me in New York. She was there for me through the mean-street Brooklyn years, until I brought her back to Cali, still trying to scrape together a backyard or some such corner in the sun where we might have found a form of our own happiness. I didn’t manage to make that happen in time for Spotty, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t blame me for it; I’m pretty sure she loved me in spite of my failings, in her sweet cat-sized-brain way. Human love is more complicated, isn’t it?

I hear my mom calling me to breakfast, to dinner; I hear myself calling back, I’ll be right there. Not a great example of how the young take their received worlds for granted, but can any mother ever be adequately appreciated? Even “bad” mothers give us birth, even “bad” mothers make all of life’s joyful moments possible, and “good” mothers make life’s suffering probable, for which fact neither agonizing questions, nor thank yous, suffice.

I think I was a disappointment to my mom. I turned out differently from her plans for me; I lived far from any of those ways she imagined. We were essentially incomprehensible to each other. In some ways my cat knew me better, in some ways my cat was a better friend (hence my comparison, perhaps); but I’m pretty sure my mother and I felt the same feelings for each other that would have come with a knowing friendship; had we been similar in temperment and in inclination, we might have met life’s perplexing Qs with some really Big Shoes of our own - hell, we might have become friggin’ Dear Abbey or Ann Landers! Or whichever one it was who had a daugher take over the philosophizing where she left off - or was it a daughter-in-law?

That last question, I think I can find the answer to that one, if I cared to do so. It’s the one about the cat’s last breath, and how I felt her gone, right away; the one which made me wonder what she was in the first place, and how I knew, felt, that whatever she was, just wasn’t anymore, and never would be again; it’s the one about some of my mom’s last words to me, the ones I could understand, the ones when she thanked me for doing some chores for her that needed doing, and for doing some personal things for her that made her more comfortable; it’s the ones about knowing afterwards that, that would be the last time I would see her, and how I was so surprised by her thanks to me over the phone, that I didn’t know what to say, only later realizing that the thing to have said would have been, mom, thank you; it’s how I didn’t know that then, and all the other times I didn’t know the really simple answers for the really simple questions I had; those are the ones that bother me.

I wish my mom were still here, so that I could ask her if I’d ever have the answers I need to the questions that might tell me how to act in the future, or if this is even a reasonable request from “life.” And if my mother couldn’t have responded to my “strange” queries, or if I would never have asked her them anyway, it would be comforting to think I still could.

My mom always asked about my cat; she loved animals, too.

I wish Spot were here, so that I could call her to me, and hug her in my confused human way; even if she couldn’t hug me back, even if she didn’t want to, it would be comforting to think she could, the way a human being might.

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