The Story That Never Ends
All my life, I knew that Mom loved me in the same way I knew taking a deep breath would give me oxygen. But there's a plot twist.
A few years back, trying to capture more joy in a world that was sliding off its axis, I started returning to the joys of my childhood: soccer, piano lessons, writing classes. The season before COVID shut everything down, I joined a civic chorus. On the night of our first performance, as I got dressed in my all-black ensemble, I got a bit weepy, thinking it was just one more stage of my life that Mom was missing.
So, inspired by the medium Laura Lynn Jackson, I said Mom, if you will be there tonight, please show me purple in an unexpected place. (Purple was her color.)
And then, because Laura insisted our loved ones appreciate a good challenge, I said, so I’m sure it’s you, please do it TWICE.
Mom only had about an hour before showtime, so she had to act fast, but she was always up for some fun. On our way to the concert venue, at the one traffic light, two people walked in front of our car, with their dog.
The dog was dyed a bright purple, tip to tail, sashaying right in front of me.
Okay, I said, laughing. That’s one.
Inside the church, there were purple banners everywhere, and lots of audience members dressed in purple, but this was hardly unexpected. It was December! Purple is the liturgical color of advent! According to my own rules, nothing I saw could count, and the show was about to start.
I thought, well, twice was a lot to ask. That dog was pretty good. Mom is probably here.
Then the soloist walked out. She was a professional singer, and we had never seen her before. She had never been to rehearsals.
She was dressed, head to toe, in a brilliant purple gown. The only color on the stage. The only color in the show.
That’s two.
Love…
This is something I did not know until Mom died, something I say to people I care about, when they lose a loved one:
They are gone, and your heart will break, and that is true. But something else is true. Your relationship with them will go on, in ways that you can’t even imagine.
There is so much purple in the world these days, showing up in unexpected places when I need it, when I ask, and it always makes me smile. Mom was always so wonderful about showering me with love when she was alive. I’m not surprised, really, that the two of us found a way for that part of the story to continue.
But that’s not the relationship I am talking about. The story that’s changed is the other one. The harder one. The one we could never talk about, when she was alive.
…and Fear…
I’m not interested in writing about the fights Mom and I had, when she was alive. All you need to know is that no matter how minor they were, and they were always minor, often about my wardrobe, the fights always ended with one of us (usually Mom) shrieking Our relationship is ruined forever, and slamming down the phone, then within a few hours, one of us (usually me) calling to ask what movie do you want to see on Friday night?
Sometimes I wanted to talk about why we fought so dramatically, why the stakes were always so intense. But Mom would never permit that conversation. Mom would never talk about her traumas, even when they were written on her rib cage. Even when they went to the very core of her being.
The first time I tried to write about my complicated relationship with Mom, I wrote All my life I knew that Mom loved me the same way I knew a deep breath would give me oxygen…
…and when I read it later, I shuddered. You see, Mom never knew that a deep breath would give her oxygen, because for the entirety of her childhood, a deep breath never would.
…and breath
Mom grew up with severe asthma in the era before inhalers, when the only treatment for a strangling child was try really hard to breathe. When my grandmother or my aunts spoke about Mom’s childhood, they would always lead with how sick she was; as if Mom were a child not necessarily expected to survive. Granny would twist her hands, remembering the days Mom spent in bed, but Mom hated these conversations, shut them down with ferocity.
“They’re exaggerating,” she would say dismissively. “They don’t remember anything. That never happened.”
Mom could try to dismiss the past, but the truth is that Mom spent so many hours, days, weeks gasping for breath that she literally changed her anatomy. As an adult, her rib cage bowed outward, so that you could see its point like an arrow underneath a thin T-shirt, so she could never wear an underwire bra.
I knew Mom loved me the way I knew a deep breath would give me oxygen, but those two blessings, love and oxygen, were blessings that Mom never knew. Not the breath, and honestly, as a child to teenaged parents during World War II, parents with addictions and trauma of their own, not the love.
Mom lived with fear, in a way that I can never even imagine. She lived in a world where nothing was reliable, not even your next breath.
I wonder how much this gasping shaped her, altered the landscape of her brain the same way it altered the landscape of her body.
Imagine what happened, to grow from a lonely child who cannot breathe into an adult who is not allowed to be afraid.
I have to imagine, because I will never know, because Mom would never talk about it. She only admitted to her fears one time in my whole life, and it was in the hospital, in the middle of the night, when she had already lost her mind.
The Story She Wouldn’t Tell
I don’t remember why she threw the water pitcher at me, but I remember that the water pitcher was hard plastic, designed for bad times, and it bounced off the wall, water spraying across the room.
I mopped up the water, and put the pitcher away. Caregiving did not come naturally to me. That cold fluorescent light at 3 am, in a hospital bathroom, looking at my reflection, I did not recognize anything about my life, or about my mom.
But when I went back to her bed, so tired, her voice sounded different. Soft, as if not to be overheard. High. Almost childlike.
“No one knows the truth,” she whispered.
“What truth?” I asked.
“People think I’m so brave,” she said “People think I’m so brave and no one knows the truth.
“No one knows that I am scared all the time. I am scared all. The. Time. And it’s so lonely.”
Dad always sighed that the two of them could never make it more than ten feet inside a party before Mom was gone for the duration, pulled into a deep, often all-night conversation with someone who came to the event tonight secretly hoping Betty would be there, to help tame their fears.
I tried to comfort her. I tried. “It’s okay, Mom. That’s normal. Everyone gets scared. It’s okay to be afraid.”
“Not for me,” she said. She looked haunted. “Not for me.”
The Story She Couldn’t Change
Weeks later, after we were out of the hospital, I was haunted by the phrase, It’s so lonely, by the haunted look in her eyes, and I tried to talk about it.
“You know Mom, you told me something one night. You told me you were scared all the time.”
Her face was blank. Maybe one brief stutter. “That doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “You know I was out of my mind.”
“It’s okay to get scared, Mom,” I said. “And you know, if you are, you can talk to me about it.”
“I know that,” she says. Her face softened. Sometimes, in these last six months of her life, Mom will come back. Every time it is like a blessing, like a cool drink of water, like a gift. I will endure months of torment for that moment when the signal comes in clear, when Mom returns.
“I know I can talk to you,” she says, putting her hand on mine. “But I’m really okay. I’m really not scared. I don’t know why I would ever say something like that.”
Brene Brown says “If you own the story, you can change the ending,” and I love this idea, but this is the thing: you have to own the story. The hard parts. The broken parts.
The parts you can’t even stand to look at, because you think they’ll swallow you whole. If you want to change a story, you have to tell it. An untold story, a buried story, will never change.
That’s something I’m learning. And here’s something else:
It’s never too late to change the story. Never.
It’s Never Too Late To Change the Story
I am Betty Castellani’s daughter. I carry her dark hair, her habit of closing her eyes when she laughed. I carry her nail biting and her flair for the dramatic.
I feasted and grew strong on her endless endless stories of love, but I also breathed in her stories of fear. They are literally in my bloodstream, etched into my DNA. The stories that tortured Mom, those are my stories too. And maybe they’re yours.
I have never had asthma, but I do know that tight chest feeling, that knot in the center of me where grief and panic and loss and fear live, in me, in Mom, probably in you too, the story that says, nothing can be trusted, nothing is truly safe, I don’t even know if I can take one more breath.
We all of us, even Mom, have that sense of being broken inside, being afraid. Stories of being too heavy, too scared, too lazy, too different, not different enough, of being dull, being sick, being old.
We all have stories that we are afraid to tell. We all fear that if we admit how broken we are, how scared we are, everything will fall apart.
We take our first breath when we are born, and we spend the rest of our lives afraid of that time when the breathing will one day stop, and then one day it does, but this is what I’ve learned.
The relationship with the people you love, it never ends, it goes on long after the last breath of life.
And as long as the relationship doesn’t end, the story won’t have to end either.
As long as you love someone, there is always the possibility that you will find a way to heal. Maybe that’s what this story is all about. Healing me, I hope. Healing you, I hope.
And healing Mom, too.
No one deserves it more.
This is one chapter in a year-long saga of love, grief, and the stories we tell to survive it all. To find out how it began, go here. Or subscribe for free to get a new chapter every week.
Oh that we would find ways to deeply listen to each other’s stories. Stories heal.
And , purple is and has always been my favorite
Do you think women feel the fear more than most men,or is it easier for us to fall prey to those feelings? I am amazed by the force of love you are able to feel each day from your Mom. I envy you for that,but know my father loved me with that same force and for that,I am grateful. Thank you once more.❤️