Nonfiction, Emily Schleiger
It’s a memory that returns to me after she’s passed and then I remember it happened all the time. As a child I reach out to hug my mother, and she turns away, lifting her lit cigarette toward an ashtray on a window ledge. “Just a minute,” she exhales, “I don’t want you to burn yourself.” She takes another drag and I wait my turn for a hug.
The summer before my senior year of high school my boyfriend has just left for college out of state, and Mom and I take a rare mother-daughter shopping trip. Mom buys a backless, sleeveless white blouse.
Later that summer Mom learns that there is a grapefruit-sized tumor on her lung. One-third of her lung has to be removed. She’s in the hospital for a month. Once we know she is going to be okay, I’m angry. At the cigarettes. I try not to be angry with her, too, but I struggle.
In the process of healing, she has an epiphany, a change of perspective that makes clear to her that a life worth living does not involve living with my dad. I’ve had that epiphany years earlier and I’m glad Mom now sees things the same way—one silver lining of an awful summer.
Their divorce is finalized just before I graduate high school. Less than a year after her cancer diagnosis.
Mom dresses for the Mother-Daughter Senior Breakfast and realizes her surgery scar on her back shows through that backless top she’d saved. She’s tired of people in our small town feeling sorry for her and doesn’t know what else to wear. She rips off the top, cries, screams, says she’s not going, and sticks to it. I go alone, sitting by my friend and her mother, forcing half-smiles at the table, and I can feel my tears so on the brink, the strain hurts my jaw. No time to be a baby when your mom survived cancer.
A series of personal and financial events involves my transferring colleges twice and ending up finishing my degree in Louisville, Kentucky where she’s moved post-divorce. It makes sense for me to live with her and my brothers in their rented house for a while. Life without my dad should be more relaxed but he still pulls strings remotely, and continuously makes our lives, particularly my mom’s, a living psychological and financial hell.
But since it’s also hell to live with turmoil while trying to study for my college classes, I take out a student loan to use toward an apartment rental. When I move three miles away, she is distraught, and clings to my packed car when I reverse it out of her driveway. I have to stop driving to prevent potentially backing a tire over her foot.
I think she knows I will never move back. But I’m three miles away. I still come home weekly to do laundry. If it wasn’t laundry I’d come home for something else.
After college graduation I follow my long-term long-distance boyfriend to Minnesota. On a visit back Mom and I argue—probably about the fact that I moved to Minnesota, it was always about that, her always asking me to move back to Louisville—and that sends me stomping off down her sidewalk carrying my rolling suitcase, determined to walk the mile to the airport by myself.
At some point I turn around in a huff and get her to drive me. I’m not sure she noticed yet that I was gone.
The same boyfriend and I become engaged. Mom, aware that this is probably coming and having already argued with me about why the wedding should be in Louisville and not Minneapolis, says to my brother, when I call to relay the news, “Tell her congratulations.”
Ultimately, due more to finances or daughter guilt I’ve never been certain, we have the wedding in Louisville, and it’s beautiful. It is beautiful due in great part to her previous catering manager experience. To her, hosting this wedding is both a love letter to me and a career achievement. And it is the happiest day of my life. She helps with the cost (only because it’s in Louisville, that’s the offer) and makes our money stretch farther than it would have in Minneapolis.
When we head home to Minnesota, after the wedding and honeymoon, I cry most of the drive back.
Five years later I’m pregnant and we have moved from Minneapolis to a Chicago suburb. I’m on my way driving back to Louisville for my baby shower. She calls my cell phone repeatedly, asking, “How long do you think until you get here?” I roll my eyes.
When I give birth, and I tell Mom we just want a week alone with the new baby before we have any visitors, she shows up at the hospital anyway to say hi, and then drives back home the same day—ten hours of driving to meet her granddaughter. And before she comes back to stay with us (when we’re ready), we have a huge argument because she’s not sure whether to bring my Nana, her mother, or not. The two are arguing. I tell her we don’t need the drama, so please come alone. She does but feels guilty having left her mother and not taken her along for the trip. She’s been caught in the middle but chooses me.
It’s Thanksgiving and she takes turns holding our colicky two-week-old daughter while we all rotate cooking shifts to make some comfort food. Something to eat like the old, pre-parenthood normal.
When we decide to have our daughter baptized, at nine months, Mom plans on coming and then backs out at the last minute with no great excuse. I vow never to talk to her again. But I do.
While she occasionally flakes out on other visits over the years, she shows up for the birth of our son and again for his baptism. She says she won’t miss this one. She’s a big help and a welcome guest for both.
Every summer I drive the kids down to visit her for a week. Every trip she calls my cell repeatedly. “Are you close yet? What time do you think you’ll be here?” Every time I roll my eyes.
My kids hug her tight when we arrive and run to her attic looking through my old toys.
On every trip, she makes my kids chocolate chip pancakes. We watch TV and movies together, get takeout and ice cream. She never misses an opportunity to brag about Louisville and try to convince me to move back. She insists my husband can find a job anywhere, though she doesn’t understand the details of his career.
My younger brother dies of suicide, completely unexpectedly. I drive home to Kentucky. I split the stay between her house and a hotel, knowing I need space from her grief and anger, and she from mine. She doesn’t understand and is a bit hurt.
After one of my brother’s memorials, sitting near my mom and eating, I suddenly break down. I’m bent over crying. She doesn’t respond. She sees me but is talking with other people.
Four months later, Mom makes a trip to Chicago to visit us. Her health has declined. She’s on oxygen. She’s been hospitalized once since I saw her at the memorial, for breathing issues. An x-ray was taken and miraculously showed no cancer; she had not had a chest x-ray since that summer before my senior year. Denial works for her.
I did not visit her there because she insisted I should not, and I am a rules follower. Denial works for me, too.
While at our house, she’s stuck in melancholia. It’s Christmastime, and I’m trying hard not to be sad around the kids. I can see she is in awful shape and she’s hesitating to take the stairs up to our guest room. She sleeps on our couch. I sleep in and stall each morning before going downstairs, worried I’ll get sucked into sadness again. Unsure what to do with her, and with my own grief in this supposed stupid joyous season. She seems to want to hug a lot lately. But she’s so little, frail, it hurts to hug her, she’s all bones. It hurts to know she’s not well.
She drives home with her oxygen tank, on snowy roads. She has no cell phone, refuses to get one. I worry for several hours until she calls to tell me she’s home.
Less than a month later she’s been rushed to the hospital for a heart attack. Now an x-ray finds a tumor near her pulmonary artery. Inoperable. This did not show up when she reluctantly had the x-ray in October. It all goes fast: admittance, ICU, then hospice. She goes from telling me I don’t need to come down to Kentucky to making me feel guilty about not canceling a trip I have planned that weekend.
I cancel the trip. I drive down. There is no call in the car to ask when I think I’ll arrive. When was the last one I got? Did I have any idea it would be the last? The silence is cause for me to slow down and speed up, both.
In the hospital she tells me she’s embarrassed I’m staying at her house because “it’s so messy.” I find the cigarettes and ash tray in the basement and know what she means.
I tell her I’m cleaning her house while I’m there.
I clean all over the place and tell myself it’s just for her to come back. Even after she’s moved to hospice. It’s just to help her, give her a clean place to return to.
Eventually I’m cleaning out her house, the house she’s rented for over twenty years. The house my brothers grew up in after the divorce. The house that was home for me for a while, the house with the attic my kids loved to run to when we visited.
My husband and my kids come visit. They say bye to her, which is awful and surreal. I hope it won’t be the last bye. I know it is.
In hospice, in and out of morphine sleep, she tells me, “Dying isn’t so bad.”
One night I’m at hospice later than visiting hours. I don’t want to go but don’t necessarily want to stay all night. I want something in between. Options. Time. Just an extension.
She has a fan on her room, supposedly to help her breathe. I hear a woman whisper in the dark, barely audible above the fan, and I jump, completely spooked.
It’s a volunteer at the door, offering me cookies. No one needs a whispered cookie invitation past 9pm, so I figure that’s my sign to go. I tell Mom, somewhat laughing, “She was creepy, I’m sorry…I’ll see you tomorrow.” Kiss her forehead and leave.
She doesn’t make it through the night.
I should have stayed, I think.
At her funeral, I read that poem by Henry Scott Holland, “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was.” I read this to convince myself but my stomach cries bullshit. Gone is gone, done is done.
I have one of those vivid dreams, where I feel like I’m “really there.” Mom’s in the backless sleeveless white blouse, and she has the same energy she had on our wedding day, confident, happy. There is a crowd of people, it looks like a line to get in somewhere, and everyone is serious. But she’s smiling. She pulls a stranger close, and introduces me. “This is my daughter Emily. I’m so proud of her.”
Emily Schleiger is a screenwriter and writer in the Chicago area. Previously her nonfiction writing has appeared on The Manifest-Station, The Haven, and The Big Jewel. She earned her MFA at the low-residency program at University of California Riverside-Palm Desert, with a concentration in screenwriting. There she was the nonfiction editor of The Coachella Review for the December 2021 issue. Her satire and humor work has been published on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Reductress, The Second City Network, and more. She is a survivor of a short career in human resources and is a mom of two. Find her on IG @eschleiger or her website https://www.emilyschleiger.com/