Grief Also Means Losing Something or Someone You Never Had (but always wanted)

A Eulogy (of sorts)

What if the window of normalcy that trauma survivors are expected to re-enter isn’t normalcy at all? What if it’s just an anthropocentric model that gates out the wily and often ecstatic experience of being ecologically alive and aware? I am tired of the word survivor and the personal responsibility of coming back into cultural legibility. I want a better word and a better story. What if those who survived trauma and early abuse could call themselves doorways? Too big and too wide for binaries of good and bad. What if we could honor that our nervous systems and our bodies are openings to stories that are vital right now as we confront cultural chaos, mass extinction, and climate collapse?

~Sophie Strand

My mother, Julienne Andrea Durning, died two days ago. She lived 78 years, two months and two days on this plane of existence. For the past two years I heard her repeat the words, “I just want to go home” more times than I can count. In the past two weeks, watching her suffering through sepsis and pneumonia at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, she often repeated, “get me out of here”. Can’t help but to think of The Wizard of Oz, there’s no place like home. My mom was never at peace with where she was and I think I’ve finally figured out why. I believe home for her was her country house near Kennett Square in Pennsylvania. She roamed the fields and woods there as a child, tending to her horse, likely communing with the faeries she would draw when I was a young child. She was deeply connected to nature and the spirit world, evident in her artwork and her extensive library of books. I believe she longed for that idyllic time in her life before her beloved brother Biff died and the family reeled from the loss.

I apologize in advance for this clumsy attempt at a eulogy. I think it turned out to be more of a eulogy for the mother/son relationship I never had and so desperately wanted. It’s about the grief of losing something that was never possible. It’s about another fucking growth opportunity (AFGO). It’s about finding serenity in what has felt, at times, like an endless cycle of pain, abuse and violence. It’s about going home to ourselves. It’s about clicking our heels together three times and realizing that maybe, just maybe we were home the whole time. Or maybe it’s about forgiveness. I really don’t know right now. All I know is that I’m resisting the urge to beat myself up with condemnation. And I’m in mourning for the loss of a childhood that instead of being nurturing, supportive and empowering turned out to be an endless tyranny of AFGO experiences. I’m simply tired of it. It’s been a heavy heavy load ever since I can remember. I’m not even sure what serenity looks like. I know I don’t know what a romantic relationship looks like…heavy sigh. Anyway, I apologize too for the clunky timeline. I tend to jump around in a more or less stream of consciousness way. Some of it will feel judgmental, even harsh, but I decided to leave most of the first pass alone as it came out of me in a raw state of grief. Okay, here goes…

I visited my mother on New Year’s Day, the year of our “lord”, 2023 AD. “Here’s the creep”, she said as I entered her room at the nursing home. That was her new nickname for me. Creep. She had recently left a voicemail message singing “Jeepers Creepers”. Some of you might find that silly or consider it a unique way of being affectionate with her oldest son. For me, it’s her way of making sure I know who’s boss. We’re talking about a person who has never apologized for anything, at least since I’ve been aware of things. I’ve never known her to admit she’s wrong. She’s used to taking care of herself, living alone, and at that point she was weak and ill, spending most of her days sleeping or lying in bed in a nursing home. And she was hanging on to her power center for dear life. It was almost unbearable for me to visit her and even now I feel really really conflicted about that. Because I wanted to be able to detach, to feel grounded in myself. Overall, I’d like to navigate the challenging parts of life without getting rattled. To hold my ground. I wanted to be able to see and hear her without losing a sense of myself. I can sometimes do that with others but when it came to my mother, I found it nigh impossible. “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family”, said one of my mother’s old acquaintances – Richard Alpert AKA Ram Dass.

The portion of my life journey I'd like to unfold here begins on October 16, 2021 when I left my body for a couple of hours after ingesting four grams of powerful magic mushrooms. Up until then, I was enduring (and sometimes reflecting on) the challenges of “the plague” as the poet and philosopher Stephen Jenkinson calls it. Navigating through a stressful job, working on HBO’s “The Staircase”, doing payroll. Spending a lot of time alone at our country house, enjoying a chopping wood, carrying water relationship with the place but also feeling quite lonely out there at times.

I’m still not exactly sure why I signed up for the mushroom ceremony. I had heard from a friend about this singing couple serving up medicine and became vaguely interested in joining the circle. My relationship with psychedelics had been waning since my several years foray into Ayahuasca and San Pedro ceremonies with a group of folks who gathered mostly in Colorado and sometimes in Omaha, Nebraska. But by 2021 that fascination had almost run its course. I was feeling undone by persistent healing and seeking. In a way I was feeling more like I needed to heal from the healing “work” I had immersed myself in since 2013. I hadn’t ingested mushrooms in over twenty years but my experiences with the fungi had been good, including a heroic dose in the Cascades back in 1991. I figured it might bring some lightness to the stress I had been experiencing especially around the HBO job.

That’s not what happened.

About twenty minutes after I drank the shroom and cacao elixir I was delivered a tidal wave of intoxication. There was a moment where I thought I might pass out, as I have done when the medicine hit in past experiences. But I didn’t this time, which I found oddly jarring in itself for a moment. And then I was presented with a choice, resist or surrender. Or was it really a choice? I don’t know. It was probably survival that had me on the surrender path and, in quick time, I was out of there, soul or self or maybe ego exiting stage left. It’s strange to describe it as “I left my body” because even the “I” was unclear at that point. And, in saying “I left”, where did “I” go exactly? But it’s the best I can come up with to describe an experience that resulted in some part of me entering an eternal realm of no affect inhabited by both the living and the dead, some familiar and some, well, I don’t know, maybe not. And yes, that’s right, there was no affect. I didn’t feel anything. No fear. No joy. No judgement. Nada. There was absolutely no sense of linear time either. It was similar to the near-death experience I had in 1990 where I can more assuredly say I left my body because I was observing my near dead, heart stopped, body on the gurney in the ER at Beekman Downtown Hospital. However, there were plenty of affect then. I was in pure bliss floating around above my body, possibly, in part, due to the narcotics injected into my bloodstream. Coming back into my body when the paddles jump started my heart and waking up to a circle of concerned faces of the medical staff was when shit got real and I got real scared, even pissing myself with fear. I yearned to be back in that blissful state but I suppose it was too early in my life to skip out to the eternal. I was only 23.

With mushrooms zooming through my bloodstream instead of narcotics, I wandered around this (perhaps) eternal realm (not sure how else to describe it) of no affect for a good while. I encountered beloved dead relatives and friends, my mom was there, my friend William Hurt was there, Aunt Beth, Bé, and so many others. It was like a dream I suppose. Maybe it was. So why no affect? Perhaps it was my safe space. I spent the better part of my early childhood in survival mode (not yet realizing myself as a doorway) so safety had been a necessity. When I was five I spent a substantial time in the chicken coop with my chicken friends. They didn’t judge me. They didn’t have much affect either. This arrangement worked well until they were all slaughtered by the neighbor’s German Shepherds, my first conscious sense of horror. Yet, during the mushroom experience, and in the aftermath, I could make no sense of this place the shrooms were showing me. Was it truly “the eternal realm”? Was it my safe place? Was it more about the people there? Or was it something else entirely and all of the above?  

When I arrived back in my body and opened my eyes, my face was soaking wet with tears, so much for no affect! I tried to get up to go to the bathroom and wobbled. Immediately, one of the helpers was at my side and escorted me across the room to the toilet. I sat there for a while, still very intoxicated and then made my way back to my spot in the circular room. I don’t remember much about the rest of the night except going outside to look at the moon and stars and at some point I was dancing to the live music and singing along. I didn’t particularly feel disorientated or ajar but later realized that clearly a door in me had been kicked wide open. In the days to come, I began to experience a sense of oncoming dread, fear and anxiety that I had never felt so strongly, perhaps since my early childhood.

At that time my mother was living in Shawnee on the Delaware near Delaware Water Gap in Pennsylvania right over the New Jersey border. I had taken one of my long mental health breaks from her but was feeling ready to reconvene our torturous 54 year journey. She had been diagnosed with MDS, a pre-leukemia anemia condition, and was getting regular blood transfusions. For years she was taking Tramadol, an opioid, and at some point graduated up to Oxycodone thanks to her pulmonologist who had the reputation of handing out the stuff like candy. He was very well liked as I discovered later. She suffered from chronic arthritic pain and lived by herself on the second floor of a run-down small apartment building. My brother Jake spent some time with her, taking her shopping, doing her laundry and we were both helping her out financially. My sister, Sessa, who decided several years earlier to take a permanent mental health break, also kicked in some dough. My mother lived on SSI and food stamps only so we augmented enough to make it possible to live within her means. She never had a “regular” job, always living hand to mouth as an artist. She never filed a tax return, a true anti-establishmentarian (although she more recently had a strange obsession with Nancy Pelosi). Even so, she had a pretty good stretch in the eighties when she thrived as a sign painter and muralist on South Street in Philadelphia. If you’re familiar with the place, her most visible murals were at the corner of 4^th and South – Lickety Split and Copabanana. Other than that, she struggled financially even though she wound up in a couple of magical places – Doolin, Ireland near the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare and Taos, New Mexico, in the land of enchantment.

In November of 2021 she was not doing well. Jake and I decided to take her out to eat for Thanksgiving but at that point she was sleeping a lot and it was difficult to make a solid plan. She rarely answered her phone. I booked a reservation at a local restaurant but we couldn’t get her on the phone to confirm the plan. We decided to drive out anyway and my car broke down on the way. I had to get it towed back to the city so Jake had Thanksgiving at my apartment in the city with my family. We kept calling. No answer. By the next day, we were concerned. I called a neighbor who knocked on the door. Nothing. The super didn’t have the key to her apartment. I called her best friend, Dale, who lived down the road so she went over and knocked. Dale heard my mother moaning but she didn’t answer the door. So on Friday afternoon at about 2pm, I drove out there by myself in my wife’s car.

I found my mother on the toilet in a catatonic state and called an ambulance. Dale and her husband Karl rushed over. Long story short, my mom had OD’d on Oxy and later was diagnosed with double pneumonia. Her O2 count was 80 and she was babbling and hallucinating, having a conversation with someone named Thomas, perhaps a man she once lived with in Philly who claimed to be The Messiah. They tried reviving her with Naloxone. Twice. Didn’t work so they carried her down the stairs and transported her to Lehigh Valley Hospital in East Stroudsburg, PA. I spent the weekend there until she was taken off the respirator and placed in a room to recover. I noticed she was also going through withdrawal from Oxy, not surprising for a long time addict. It took about two weeks until she was able to recognize me but she pulled through. Two or three weeks later the hospital released her to a nursing rehab center nearby where she contracted Covid so she was sent back to the hospital. She contracted pneumonia again. The next time the hospital released her she was sent to a nursing rehab center in the Bronx where she resided until a little more than two weeks ago. She got better for a time and then started declining. One memory from her time in the hospital is that she decided that she was going to produce the Broadway revival of South Pacific so I went along with it, telling her I'd help her do it. I suggested I'd need to interview her about the songs and for as long as she could sustain it, we'd explore each song from the soundtrack. Important to note, she only considered the Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza version valid. I have some video recordings of her listening to and singing along to the music and then talking about the songs in terms of what they meant to her.

I first noticed clues of dementia in January of this year shortly after her Jeepers Creepers obsession. Sadly, it was around this time that we were pursuing a senior housing apartment for her so she could go back to living independently. We were able to get her on the waiting list for a rather nice situation in East Stroudsburg, PA near where she had been living for several years. Every couple of weeks we'd drive out there so she could do her shopping, go out to eat, go to the post office, things like that that made her feel connected to life outside the nursing home. When we visited the senior housing place, there was a group of women residents who seemed absolutely excited at the idea of her moving in. My mother was holding court, telling her stories about her life as a woman artist. Unfortunately, these trips were also often fraught with our age-old dynamic of relating. I could write pages and pages about this but in an attempt to sum it up, it was mostly about her expectations of me, of never receiving enough, pushing my boundaries and therefore triggering my ancient story of inadequacy. I would generally get to the point where I'd react negatively which would only make matters worse. Sometimes things would escalate. In short, this dynamic has been exhausting for me, my siblings (especially my sister) and most of the people who have hung around my mom long enough to experience it. To be fair, she did the best she could but it often felt impossible to deal with her narcissistic, righteous and stubborn way of moving through the world. Other times, this energy was also quite astonishing in terms of how, in never backing down, she overcame the obstacles of living in poverty, being homeless for a short time and always refusing to participate in the culture. 

I heard this new word recently, freedoming, defined as “the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free… doing whatever you have to do – as far as your situation will possibly allow – to live with independent dignity”. That is what I believe my mother was attempting in life, freedoming. It didn't always work out so well but she certainly embodied the idea of it, especially in more lucid times.

When my mother was offered an apartment in the senior housing facility in the spring, it was too late. She could barely walk and no longer had the capacity to use her cell phone. I so desperately wanted her to live in a decent place where she could experience a little more freedoming, maybe grow some herbs and flowers and enjoy a space of her own for however long as she was able. That's when she started falling on her way to the bathroom. The nurses would find her on the floor unable to get up. They moved her to a room closer to the nurses’ station and we declined the offer from senior housing. I felt this deeply and I guess by then I knew things were not going to get any better.

When I was a baby, life was hell. Allegedly, depending on who’s telling the story, my young parents had a violent relationship. My mom left my dad after a series of what sounds like awful clashes while he was in med school in Detroit. Back in Philadelphia, she attempted suicide, swallowing pills, with me there with her in the room bearing witness. Her father committed her to an institution. I spent a month with her parents until they decided to put me up for adoption. My father’s parents rescued me and I lived with them until I was two and a half. I was returned to my mother after she was released from the hospital. She soon met my stepfather and thus began their tempestuous gypsy-like existence. My brother Jake was born in Idaho when I was four and Jezabel (Sessa) was born in West Virginia when I was five. We moved around a lot with my mom and stepfather splitting up several times and then getting back together. This basically went on for fourteen years. By the time I was in high school, I had attended about a dozen different schools. I lived in Oregon, Arizona, Belize, various places in Pennsylvania and then south Philadelphia when I was twelve and downeast Maine when I was fourteen. My mother and stepfather split up for good when I was sixteen and she moved back to Philly by herself. The rest of us stayed in Maine. I left for college when I was seventeen.

My life was filled with adventure I suppose but there was zero stability or structure. I always felt like I was on my own. Thankfully, I maintained a good relationship with my father’s side of the family who were my support group, especially my beloved grandparents. The violence, insecurity and lack of stability and structure in my life always put me in survival mode. I never felt any real safety, love or acceptance from my mother. She was always fending for herself due to her own trauma and poverty. I learned how to take care of myself as best I could. I encountered other dangers along the way including sexual assault, street violence and extreme poverty. My anger and arrogance, along with my intelligence and street wisdom, fueled me. I’m not special as I’ve met so many who’ve been forced onto the same path. Luckily, I didn’t become an addict and I had enough awareness to find purpose. When I started having kids, I became a devoted father. I wish I had learned how to be a better husband but unfortunately that was something that eluded me early on in my marriage. My early childhood trauma was a severe handicap in relating in a loving, kind and gentle way due to obvious abandonment issues. I believe it also contributed to my recent prostate cancer diagnosis.

Julienne Andrea Durning was born in San Diego on September 19, 1945 to Rosemary and Clifton Durning. She grew up in an idyllic setting in horse country outside of Philadelphia. Her father Cliff was a country doctor and her mom was a classically trained pianist and an artist. My mom's nickname was Andy. She had two sisters and two brothers. Her brother Biff died of leukemia when my mom was very young, maybe around 10 or 12. This broke her father who began drinking heavily. Cliff became more and more distant and ultimately, by the time I was about 6, abandoned his family completely, remarried and adopted his new wife's children. In his obituary his first family wasn't even mentioned. My grandmother who I only knew as "Mother" when I was little, had an affair and got pregnant. She gave birth to one of my aunts. My mom worshipped her dad and I believe her last words were repeating "dada" over and over. Those were the last words I heard her say anyway. Later, when my mom got pregnant with me and told her dad she was marrying a communist, he basically tried to disown her. Later, after the marriage went south quickly, it was he who committed her to the University of Pennsylvania Hospital where my mom stayed for the bulk of my infancy in the mental ward. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia which was a catch all diagnosis in those days. She claims her father saved her life. Five years later he was gone completely from her life.

My mom attended Villa Maria Academy near the main line in Philly, a Catholic school. She used to talk about it a lot. I believe she prided herself in being a good and obedient student. I'm not sure when she decided to pursue art but I vaguely remember her talking about getting encouragement from one of the nuns. She went on to study for a year, maybe two, at PCA, Philadelphia College of Art. Recently she reunited through Facebook with a group of her fellow students. I drove her to a reunion luncheon in center city Philly prior to the overdose. It was a really supportive group and I was happy to see her feel so accepted and honored for her talent. That was a special trip. We sang songs from South Pacific together in the car on the way back to her apartment.

While at PCA, she met "Big Tim Liveright", my father. I'm not sure about any of the details but she also became good friends with my aunt Beth and her boyfriend at the time, Grant. Tim would drive her around on his motorcycle. She was 20 years old when she got pregnant. I was born in January of 1967 in Chester County Hospital in West Chester, PA. My father was finishing up at Penn and then heading to Wayne State University in Detroit for med school. My mother and I went with him and things didn't go well as I described earlier. 

When my mother got out of the hospital and I was returned to her, she had various boyfriends including George Alikakos who introduced her to Gary Salas. George was a follower of Harry Balmer who had written a zen poem, later turned into a short book called Thirty Minutes to Enlightenment. Harry and George, and zen became the center of my mom and Gary's life. The main things I remember about that time were, "there's no such thing as good, bad, right, wrong, ugly or beautiful", "a tree is a tree, not a good, bad, ugly or beautiful tree", "eat, sleep and shit" and "everything is perfect". There was a very small circle of friends who would meet and listen to Harry and George debate their different interpetations of zen. At that point we were living on Sansom Street in Philly. I remember there was a swing in the loft and my mother would sit on the bed and draw, smoking cigarettes. 

The next several years were a whirlwind. My mother was doing her artwork, trying to sell it. Gary learned how to weld and my mother would design iron sculptures. They bought a VW bus when I was about three and half and drove out west to Driggs, Idaho where Harry offered them a place to live. On the way, I remember singing Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head and Gary, Indiana when we passed through Gary, Indiana. Jake was born in February in Driggs. We lived in a house with two black bulls in the back yard that terrified me. Soon after Jake was born, my mother was ready to leave Idaho so Gary drove me, baby Jake and my mom to Salt Lake City where we flew to Knoxville, TN to stay with my grandparents, Herman and Betty Liveright who were working at the Highlander Institute for Civil Rights. Gary drove east and I believe the van broke down so he bought another car. We ended up back in Philly for a short time at George's restaurant at 10th and Spruce. We lived on the top floor of the building until Gary and my mom found a place in the countryside of PA. We moved from one place in Jennersville to another in Oley. Then we moved to a small town in West Virginia called Stony Bottom. My sister Jezabel was born on the kitchen table in August when I was five. This is where the chicken massacre took place. Another memory is that I got kicked in the stomach by a neighbor's horse which sent me flying and knocked the wind out of me. I ran to my mom crying but she told me that my story was impossible, that I'd be dead if a horse had actually kicked me. 

Mom didn't last long there probably because the house we lived in had no electricity or running water. She also had a rough birth experience delivering Sessa. Overall though, my mother was simply restless and never satisfied being anywhere for any length of time so we ended up at her parents in Avondale, PA where I started first grade. Her parents were divorcing so she was asked by her mother to come help take care of her younger siblings. Next stop after that was South Street in Philadelphia where my mom took over her first gallery at 612 South 4th Street. 

Jesus, this is exhausting to write. I'm filled with so many feelings. My early life was so crazy! And it didn't stop there. Gary and Andy split up when I was seven and mom took the three of us to Belize. We stayed in Belize City for a short time until mom found a house on an island called Caye Caulker. Our stay there was abruptly cut short after my mother was raped by a local fisherman in the kitchen of our house. I hid under the table. I'm not sure where Jake and Sessa were. She went back to Philly and to Gary. Just as I started second grade, Gary and Andy bought an old International box truck, fixed it up as a camper, installed triple bunk beds and we hit the road west again. This time we did a bunch of sight seeing - Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, the Petrified Forest, etc. We spent a lot of time in that truck. I mostly laid on the top bunk and read books, one after another. By the time we got to California, Gary and Andy split up again. Gary somehow ended up in Palm Springs and found a job. Mom took us up to the coast of Oregon where I finished second grade. It was here that two things happened that changed my life. One, I got raped by a group of teenagers and two, my mother kicked me out of the house one rainy night. That was the first time of many where my mom kicked me out of her house, or kicked me out of her life. Soon after that we were on the road again.

Mom drove the truck down the Pacific Coast Highway to meet Gary. We stopped in Berkeley where her childhood friend Kimmy lived. Kimmy's dog had puppies and I begged mom for one. She relented. On our way south, we were walking the puppy on the side of the road and it was hit by a car. Mom blamed me for the accident. I was still 7.

Once Gary joined us, we drove to Sedona, Arizona where we lived in the truck parked in an empty lot. Then Gary got a job driving a trash truck and we lived in a house next to the town dump. I started third grade. We got a dog, a black lab mix, and mom named him Moses (she was really into Old Testament names). I kind of liked riding around with Gary in the trash truck. Back in Philly when I was four, I remember riding around with him when he was distributing phone books. I'd sit in the back of the van with piles and piles of thick yellow phone books! For me, that was pretty exciting. In Sedona, mom wanted to buy a house for 50 bucks in an old ghost town called Jerome but I guess they decided they couldn't find the money to renovate the house which was a requirement of the sale. We all drove back east and settled in Fawn Grove, PA where we actually stayed for almost four years!

I loved it there. We had a nice house. We had nice holidays. I was a straight A student. I finished third grade there and made really good friends. I played little league. I had a girlfriend. Mom would host Easter egg hunts and haunted houses. She built a silk-screening press and printed cards and calendars she designed and then sold them. She and Gary would create sculptures and bring them to Philly to sell at places like Headhouse Square, a yearly arts and crafts fair. I had fun there and mom would buy me these amazing treats made out of a candy lemon straw and half a lemon. At the time, I thought those lemon treats were the most amazing things ever!

One of the things my mother hated the most is when I said I wanted to live with my dad. Visiting him was like a fantasy world for me. It wasn't reality but growing up in poverty, I wanted that fantasy world all the time. It drove my mother nuts when I talked about my dad so at the end of the summer after my fourth grade year, she sent me to live with him. It only took a short time to realize that it was not at all like I thought it would be. I was scared, anxious and because I was a straight A student and in the gifted and talented program, my dad had me skip fifth grade. I felt too young and out of my league with the academics. I was no longer a straight A student and after only three months with my dad, I wanted to go home mostly because I missed my school and all my friends.

It was a relief to be back and life continued to be good. My mother claimed later that it was her plan all along for me to see what it was really like living with my dad. Unfortunately, it didn't take long before Gary and Andy split up again and all of a sudden, halfway through seventh grade I was off to Philly again with my mom. Jake and Sessa stayed in Fawn Grove with Gary. My mom and I lived in the back of 612 South 4th which was still a gallery but owned by a friend of theirs. I started school at Middle Years Alternative where I met some lifelong friends. My resourceful and restless mother found another place to live on Bainbridge Street, just around the corner, where she planned to build out her second gallery. Gary and my siblings and Moses joined us there. 

The era of 317 Bainbridge was jam packed and relatively short, only two years, from 1979-1981. I finished middle school and started high school at Central. I became a Philly street kid and discovered that I had a knack for the hustle. Gary's welding business was taking off and mom's Apple Tree Gallery was doing pretty well. They managed to sock away a good amount of money. I was Gary's unpaid assistant, installing decorative iron gates and window guards. I started working at 12 and was asked to give half my paychecks to the household. I found life to be a mixture of extreme freedom and tension. Gary and Andy were always fighting and some of the house rules were hard to accept. Gary and Andy slept in a bedroom with AC during the hot summer nights while the three of us were sweating and taking cold showers every hour. We weren't allowed to talk on the phone for more than a few moments because it was deemed a business line. And yet, I could roam the streets on the weekends until midnight. I began stealing, vandalizing, fighting and acting out. 

After a few more events, getting molested by one of my employers, kidnapped by my Latin teacher and running away from home, my mother decided she wanted to move to Maine. In the summer of 1981 we moved to West Gouldsboro, a town of about 500. She claimed she was doing it for me but I had no interest in moving out of Philadelphia. My best friends were there, I had a girlfriend and a job I really liked working in the kitchen at Cafe Nola. At that point I thought I wanted to be a chef! Maine was a complete culture shock. Although my mom really tried to make a go of it at our new house, called Taft Point, a run-down inn, situated on a cliff overlooking Frenchman's Bay, things went south once again. Gary and Andy were fighting more than ever. My mom got very sick after being given Depo Provera shots for painful premenstrual cramps. And Gary's back went out. So for months they were both in bed not talking to each other. Even so, my mom managed to keep doing her art and she even taught art at the local grammar school. She built a pottery studio and kept a garden going. At one point she was so fed up with doing all the cooking and cleaning that she bought a freezer chest full of generic turkey pot pies and told us we were on our own!

She left Gary and returned to Philadelphia in 1983. That was the end of our family. The three of us stayed in Maine where I finished high school and college. My mom ended up at 529 Bainbridge where she thrived as a sign painter and muralist for a few years until she became restless once again and flew to the west coast of Ireland.

My mother settled in the town of Doolin in County Clare, almost directly across the spit from the Aran Islands.  Her stone cottage was at the end of a rough dirt road a kilometer or two from town on a plateau not far from the cliffs of Moher. Everything green and grey for miles, the sky constantly overcast and the grass perpetually damp. Sheep and cattle grazing nearby. When I first visited her there it had been over a year since she sold all her belongings in Philadelphia and taken off on another one of her crazy quests to find “home”.  She arrived in Ireland with seven suitcases and nowhere to go. Didn’t know a soul. Somehow, miraculously or otherwise, she landed in this magical little corner of the world, found a place to live, some work, and a circle of eccentric friends. 

I was nervous about our visit because she had shown signs, in recent letters, of going mad. Before she left Philly she lived with this guy who claimed he was the messiah, Thomas, who spent his time doing battle on the psychic plane. Thomas claimed “cyber nazis” were transmitting secret information through himself and others. He and my mother were perfect conductors of this psychic activity because they were artists.  On one visit, I heard screaming coming from their room, something like, “Go fuck yourselves cyber nazis!  Stay away from my family!”  My mother made the right decision to leave when she did but in Ireland she was still having visions, claimed that thousands of women visited her every night on the astral plane. Women who were abused or violated or victimized, women seeking solace. Up to that point my mother had a rough time in her life, two divorces, choosing to leave her three kids, the constant struggle as an woman artist, her family disowning her, getting raped, a car accident, spending a year in an institution after trying to kill herself and me.  The visions were a perfect outlet for her to work through the pain and justify her victimhood. She didn’t have to take responsibility for any of her actions.

There’s magic in Ireland.  I was open to it, maybe even seeking it out.  My second day there, at my mom’s urging, I hiked alone through this desolate area called the Burren, known for its wildflowers and Celtic ruins. On a hill overlooking Galway Bay I discovered a ring fort where the Irish once watched for invaders coming from Europe.  It was a warm day and I decided it would be good to get naked and lie in the middle of this ancient stone structure.  As I lay daydreaming away, I suddenly noticed the sound of tiny bells and hundreds of little footsteps.  I thought to myself, “no, this can’t be”.  I peeked through the cracked ruins and saw my faeries, a herd of goats with brass bells tied around their necks.  I danced around the circle, exchanging a wee bit of prose with the goats and then fell back onto the moist grass.  Staring up at the overcast sky smiling at my near mystical encounter, I felt oddly at peace, whole.  It’s these glimpses that make life just mysterious enough to keep you desiring more, and at the same time I could have died there and everything would have been just fine.

At night, my mother and I walked through wet fields of grass, crossing stone fences and making our way through brambles and cow pies to get to the pub, McGann’s.  Musicians from all over the world would sit in at McGann’s and a couple of times I witnessed jam sessions with close to twenty fiddlers, tin whistlers, accordion players, and drummers.  The clientele at the pub was a motley crew of opinionated locals and visitors from Europe and America who were there for a benign argument or two. My mother went there to meet her secret boyfriend.  A stone mason named John Griffin, about twenty years her senior, a devout Catholic, married and the father of seven children.  Mr. Griffin pulled me aside one night and confessed in a thick brogue, “I feckin love your mother Josh, I feckin love her!”

The last day in Ireland my mother and I made a spiritual exodus to the next town where she would visit a holy well from time to time to pay homage to St. Brigid.  The novelist and poet Robert Graves, in his manifesto on the history of poetic myth, “The White Goddess”, a book my mother gave me, describes St. Brigid as ‘the virgin as muse’. According to Mr. Graves she is associated with poetry and healing and throughout the British Isles her healing powers are exercised largely through poetic incantation at sacred wells. 

The well was sheltered inside a makeshift structure nestled in a small grove of hawthorn.  We entered through an old wooden door and walked down a cobbled path.  My mother suggested I take off my shoes, put my feet in the water and let the healing liquid work its magic. Then she told me to ask Brigid for something I truly wanted in life.  Here I asked for a moment to myself. When I was alone, I got down on my knees and prayed. But what did I know, I was so young.

These kinds of experiences, in magical places, were the best of what my mother had to offer.  Sadly though, Ireland circa 1990 was the last time my mother and I bonded in any substantial way. I will always hold those two weeks so dear.

I moved to New York City that fall and started my adult life as a theater artist. Mom couldn't make it work in Ireland, she ran out of work and therefore ran out of money. She basically showed up on my doorstep in 1993 when I was living in a shithole apartment with my friend Matt on the lower east side. She needed my help and I tried my best to give it to her although I was struggling to make ends meet myself. She wanted to make a go of it in New York City and I think she had the idea that I'd give her more attention than I was willing to do. It was then that I realized that I wanted to live my own life, not be obligated to saving hers. I was doing really well at that point having started a theater company producing plays and films, acting, having a lot of fun. Mom became a burden on me due to her financial hardship and her demanding nature. I was in my early twenties and trying to figure out who I was in the world. It created a lot of internal conflict in me that I hold to this day.

We clashed and by the end of her stay in New York City, I was at my wits end with her. I was subletting an apartment on the upper east side when she decided to drive to New Mexico with her alcoholic brother Matthew. That partnership didn't end well but once again, mom managed to find herself a gallery space in Taos and build a community of friends. I visited her there in 1996 and was really impressed with how she pulled it all together. Soon after my visit though, the money ran out, she lost her gallery and she was off to San Francisco to stay with Jake who was trying to find his way there. She ended up living with Jake and his friends for a time, even sleeping in the same bed with him, claiming "that's what families do all over the world". Jake is definitely more tolerant than me and he put up with this for likely longer than he would have liked. At that point I mostly tuned out of mom's life, taking perhaps the first of many mental health break. I believe she ended up going back to live near her family outside of Philadelphia. I think her youngest sister helped her out. I saw her a few times here and there but it was usually pretty tense between us from that point forward.

By 1996 I was in a new relationship and living in Hells Kitchen. Mom didn't like Marcela for whatever reason, likely she felt competitive with her for my love, who knows. I tried to stay connected with her as much as I could, even inviting her to holidays. Mostly I was just trying to live my life and keep a sane sense of boundaries, something I don't think I ever successfully pulled off. Mom was really struggling financially and wasn't getting any work. I think once the age of the internet came around her brand of art started waning into oblivion. No one needed hand painted signs anymore and she was also getting older, her body failing. She didn't have the energy. I also think she was getting angrier and more bitter, blaming the world, and anyone and everyone, for her plight.

When my son Bodhi was born, I took him to meet his grandmother. She was living in a halfway house for women at that point. She was delighted to meet Bodhi but our connection was all but lost. She was resentful of me for abandoning her. I wonder what would have happened if I had chosen to save her, to make her central to my life as a young man. Would that have changed things? These are the guilty feelings that have consistently played out in my thoughts for most of my adult life. 

When Bodhi was one and half, she came up from Philly to see us in New York. She took Bodhi to the playground and when she got back somehow his hand got stuck when the elevator door closed. Mom blamed Bodhi and I saw everything flash before my eyes, my whole childhood. It was then that I decided I needed to protect my family from her patterns of trauma and abuse. The last time I invited her to my home was Christmas of 2004 right before my daughter Ananda was born. Jake and Sessa were there too. Marcela was very pregnant and mom was acting out at the dinner table. I was incredibly triggered and I decided enough is enough. I didn't speak to her for eight years. And as much as it pains me to write these words, I couldn't do it anymore.

I'm not sure what happened exactly during those eight years. I know she had breast cancer, was homeless, had a dental malpractice suit where she won a settlement of 50K and lived in several different places in and around Philadelphia. At one point she moved to her friend's golf condo in Shawnee on the Delaware, was kicked out of there, lived with a man for a bit until his daughter kicked her out (her story) and then found a small apartment closer to Delaware Water Gap. I think it was around 2012 that I reconnected with her again. At that point I was going through a huge life crisis and to be completely candid, I needed my mom. At first, it was a tender connection but soon turned sour and ugly, same old pattern. She held so much resentment toward me that our conversations turned to condemnation and sometimes screaming matches. I even attempted to connect her with her grandchildren but that turned out to be too uncomfortable for her. She would spend the visits talking to them through me. I gave up again. Then she moved to the apartment where I found her on the toilet in 2021.

Her health was fading. She spent her days sitting in a chair rocking, doing very little artwork. Her friend Dale took her for her blood transfusions. She was hooked on opioids. But she was still doing a modicum of living, enjoying reading books about plants and fairies, knitting a bit. She was an incredible knitter and made these colorful and often kooky hats. She loved going to the library and out to eat. She often would spin tales about her life, mostly devolving into diatribes about her ex-husbands and how badly she was treated as a woman artist. But there was still a spark in her. She always wanted something better than what she had. Always. She wanted to live in a castle and have servants. She wanted a garden and an art studio. If I had the money, I would have surely set her up in a better situation. And yet, I could see the madness in that too. She was this tragic figure, so talented, so smart, so beautiful and sometimes really fun to be with. But she was stuck in a place where she never saw any room for personal growth. She had to have the final word on everything. She'd certainly take money but she would never take advice. She wanted things far out of her reach. She felt the universe owed it to her. Her sense of entitlement was off the charts.

Jake and I tried to make her life more comfortable but we couldn't provide a castle. We visited her but certainly not as much as she would have liked. So often I've felt chronic guilt around not doing enough for her. People tell me I'm being too hard on myself. And now she's dead. My mom. And I miss her so much, so fucking much. But what I miss is what I never had. She was so talented, so beautiful, so otherworldly and also so complicated, challenging, cruel, narcissistic and traumatized. I had to adapt as a child. No one will ever fully understand what it was like being her son. I learned her patterns of abuse, of violence. I've unconsciously behaved the same way with those closest to me. One thing I can say for certain is I'm committed to breaking these patterns. It's not easy but I'm going to do my very best. However, I'm a deeply wounded person and although I have so much to be grateful for, I also have so much more healing to do. I know my mom did her best and I'm also doing my best. Do I wish things had been different for both of us? Absolutely. But now she's gone and all I can do is try to notice what it feels like to no longer have to deal with her in the flesh. I now have an opportunity to establish a brand-new relationship with my incredibly complex first connection, and womb home. 

Last night, Jake, Sessa and I raised a few pints to her at an Irish pub in the east village. We held each other and realized how strong our connection is. It was one of the most beautiful couple of hours I can remember. We decided that we'd like to take mom's ashes to Ireland and scatter them in Doolin, where she was perhaps the happiest. Who knows if she was ever truly happy but I believe she had a lot of happy moments there. 

Since January, mom's dementia came on like a freight train and her body began its steady decline. Eventually there were no more trips to East Stroudsburg. No more anger either. In recent months I'd visit her regularly and read to her, take her to the roof deck, sit with her watching clouds. She had this orange winter coat with a furry hood that she loved to wear no matter the temperature. That was her touchstone. She always knew who I was, even the last time I saw her. Her life in recent months consisted of sitting in a wheelchair either staring out or nodding off. She became animated occasionally especially during a visit I made to her on October 17. She was making silly faces, sticking her tongue out. She even told me she was making "Tim faces". I sent him a photo and he seemed touched. That was probably the last time she had fun with me. And it's important to say that even through all the painful times, we did manage to have fun together and laugh. It's those moments I cherish the most.

The morning of Saturday, November 4 I got a call from the nursing home telling me that mom had a fever and they were likely going to have to send her to the hospital. Jake was planning to visit that day so he went up to check out the situation. It was pretty bad so while Jake was there an ambulance came to pick her up. I went to see her in the ER that night and it was really bad. She had double pneumonia again, and sepsis. They also suspected she had a bowel obstruction and twisted gut. I got a call from a surgeon who asked if we'd like them to remove part of her bowel even though the risk of death was 70%. Jake, Sessa and I decided no surgery. We began to think about palliative care and hospice. It wasn't looking good. The doctors and nurses thought palliative was the way to go. Mom was on antibiotics, getting blood transfusions every other day and was having difficulty breathing. She was in and out of consciousness but clearly she was suffering. Watching someone with dementia suffering is just...well I really can't describe it...you feel less than useless. I spent a lot of time standing over her bed praying. That's the best thing I could think of doing at the time. I also talked to her. A lot. I told her she was beautiful, talented and loved. I attempted to comfort her the best I could. For long stretches, she would stare into my eyes and I would just smile at her, attempting to transmit my wish for a comfortable passing. Mom always felt like she and I had a special connection, that we communicated on another plane. In these more recent moments, I wanted to believe she was receiving my transmissions.

We wanted her to be comfortable so palliative care seemed like the right decision. Making decisions for someone who is that sick is not easy. We realized that everything is moment to moment and things change. Just when we thought we were ready to let her go, the doctors told us she couldn't be moved to the palliative floor because she wasn't dying. That was actually a shock to me because that wasn't what I was seeing. I was seeing someone who was in a great deal of pain. After a couple of more days, it all changed again. Then we found out there was really nothing else for them to do. The antibiotics weren't working and her lungs were failing because of the infection. Palliative was back on the table. Finally, on Monday November 20 they discontinued antibiotics, blood transfusions and any intervention. That morning she was moved to the palliative floor. Sessa sat with her that day and the doctor told her that mom was stable, that she could live for weeks. That was also surprising to hear but they were wrong.

I received the call from the hospital at 1:42am on November 21, 2023. I didn't pick up in time but when I saw the number I knew. After a few moments of emotional paralysis, I called back and found out that my mom was dead. I left my body, just like that night with the shrooms, like I've done so many times in the past when things got really rough emotionally. The doctor who picked up told me a bunch of things and I asked some robotic questions and then all the information just flew away, vanished, so I asked her to repeat everything she had just said. I think she was used to doing this so she gently went through everything again. It was surreal. I didn't know what to do. I tried calling Jake and Sessa but neither picked up. I texted them to call me. Then I got up and went to get my laptop. I was going to write something, I guess. Then Marcela, who was sleeping in another room, asked me what was happening. I told her. She laid with me in bed for the rest of the night, holding me.

Three things happened. First, I fully experienced mom's pain before she died and it seemed so clear she was transmitting this to me. It was so bizarre and uncomfortable, like an intense Ayahuasca trip. Second, I felt an electrical charge where the umbilical cord once was, like it was being psychically cut, or maybe it was restored, who knows. Third, after drifting off, I entered a waking dream state where I was with my dead mom in the hospital. Suddenly she came to life and she was a vibrant, beautiful young woman, full of life but she couldn't talk, only smile and look at me. I asked the doctor what the hell was going on and he said that this was normal and it's my chance to see her for who she really is for a brief moment. I tried to get Jake and Sessa on Facetime so they could experience it too but only got them on audio where they heard mom die again, gasping for breath.

I didn't sleep that night. I didn't sleep for the next 24 hours. I realized that I'm grieving for something I never had and looking to create a new relationship with the essence of someone I've never known, the part of her I only caught glimpses of throughout my life. When the dementia set in, I felt great relief, almost euphoria...finally my mother was unable to take her anger and pain out on me anymore. In her dementia, she was childlike, likely more like the young girl who walked the idyllic fields and woods of her childhood home before her brother died so tragically, before her dad started drinking and took his pain out on his family, before the suffering took hold of her. That's the part of her I miss the most. And I never really got the chance to fully be with that mom. I'm hoping, in time, we will meet each other in that place, now that she's no longer here in the flesh. I truly hope so because it's what I've always wanted.

Today is Thanksgiving, her favorite holiday. Two years ago, Jake and I tried to treat her to a nice meal not realizing that she was sitting on a toilet in her ramshackle flat struggling to breathe.  This morning we did our annual circle at Shorakkopoch Rock in Inwood Hill Park. I read a poem of mine in her honor.

Deaths presence is like the night,

Swallowing all our pain.

Sometimes disaster strikes, it's true,

Yet we cannot help but feel delight

In the very rays of the sun.

Each day brings new fragrances of cherry blossoms.

Crops come and go with the seasons.

Constellations appear and reappear with each revolution.

Seeds replenish the earth.

Among the ruins, the devastation, something grows.

Something we can all see.

Something we can all feel.

And this something gives us reason to carry on.

To carry on.

Tomorrow we will open our eyes again.

Wider maybe.

We will cultivate love, kindness rules the day.

We will dance, sing and embrace,

Choose words wisely, show reverence,

Nurture with a quiet presence.

Tomorrow we will open our eyes again.

Maybe even wider.