I'll Never Get Over the Death of My Mother

It is a Friday evening in 1994, and I am thirty years old. I’m coming home to Queens from a job in Manhattan that I can barely tolerate. My pantyhose are pinching my waist; the only thing on my mind is taking them off the moment I walk into the house, which I share with my parents.

My boots crunch the snow as I walk from the subway. It is dark and cold, and no one is out on these quiet residential streets but me and my noisy feet. And then a siren pierces the frigid air. An ambulance whizzes by me as I am about to cross a street, and I jump back onto the curb.

When I get to the end of my street, I spot a figure, someone standing and facing me. At first I think it is my mother, but as I get closer I realize it is a man. Even though I am a little afraid, I quicken my step, and without realizing it I begin to run toward him, so light on my feet. Now I can see that the man is in uniform and seems to be waving at me.

As I get closer, I notice the ambulance parked in the street. Oh god, I think, could it be my father? It has been over ten years since his last heart valve replacement. Could he have gotten home from work before me? Or maybe it is for the neighbor, I think, but I still am running. I am running so fast that I barely stop.

The man is a police officer, it turns out. He catches me and grips me by my shoulders at arm’s length. “Do you live here?” he asks, pointing his chin at my house. The first floor in the front is lit up like a beacon. I nod up and down, breathless. “Do you have a back door we can use?” I nod again but cannot move. “Show me,” he says.

The snow is higher and softer in the driveway as I lead him in almost complete darkness. We climb the five steps to the back door, which is locked. I stand with my hands to the glass and peer through into the kitchen, trying to understand. Maybe it is my mom’s friend; she always has a friend over.

“What’s happening?” I manage to say.

“They are working on your mother,” he says.

I bang on the door. Inside, Debi, my older sister, is crying, her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth agape and shiny, in the arms of a police officer who is holding her to his chest as if she might collapse. She does not see or hear me.

Finally she comes to the door and lets me in. She looks at me, tears streaming off of her, and shakes her head. “Oh, Les,” she says.

There are police officers in the kitchen, more than two. Suddenly my father is behind me, with another officer whom he’d probably shown the way. Snow melts off our shoes onto the tiled floor.

I begin to walk, followed by my father, to the front of the house, where all the lights are ablaze. Someone tries to stop us, but it is too late. My mother is on her back, there on the floor. The floral sectional couch is askew around her. Her brown leather skirt and her silk blouse have been cut off of her. Her body is bare. My father screams, “My wife,” and I make some sound that I don’t recognize.

I don’t know how this next thing happened, but my father and I have fallen, just feet from my mother. We are entangled, and officers come to help us stand and lead us away. They put us in the living room, which is dark and at the back of the house. We are seated on the wicker couch, stunned, as if we are not sure how we got here. Someone opens a window behind us. “Breathe,” they command. We do. We breathe in the cold air, and it slices through me, rendering me in two.

A week later, after the burial, after the shiva, after I don’t know what, I ask myself as I wait for the F train how can I go on in a world where my mother no longer exists. It is incomprehensible.

I work that day. At lunch I walk down Fifth Avenue to a crowded Barnes and Noble and run into a colleague. “I haven’t seen you in ages,” she says, beaming her smile at me. “What have you been up to?”

“My mother died,” I say, and I cry standing next to her, my mouth a square of grief, people milling around us, as she hesitates and then hugs me.

It is the first time I say it to someone, in such a casual way, on a regular day, at lunch hour, in a Barnes and Noble, and I am undone.

Thirty-two years have passed, and life goes on without her. And yet, I can’t help wishing her beside me as I pick out my wedding dress, her cooing over me as I hold my new baby, her comforting me after I sign my divorce papers, her raging with me when I get fired, praising me in three languages when my first essay is published, helping me sort my conflicted feelings over the state of the world — her words so wise, her presence a balm that I still need and no longer have.

Editor's Note

We publish this piece as an essential counterpart to the theoretical work that runs through this journal, a moment where personal testimony accomplishes something analysis alone cannot reach. The feminist and working-class traditions of left thought have long treated the personal is political as a method rather than a slogan. What looks private, merely personal, "just memory," in fact lays bare the structures that theory can only name from outside.

This essay is about the labor of grief. Grief functions here as labor: unwaged, unscheduled, entirely indifferent to the demands of the working day. It follows a woman who loses her mother on a Friday evening and returns to her Manhattan office on Monday, because bereavement leave, when it exists at all, was never built with mourning's actual duration in mind. Grief has no institutional time. It gets smuggled into lunch hours, into the five minutes before a colleague asks what have you been up to.

The scene in the Barnes & Noble is the essay's real center of gravity. The narrator says my mother died for the first time standing in a bookstore aisle during her lunch break, surrounded by strangers, by merchandise, by the ordinary churn of a workday that refuses to pause for her. This detail names, with more precision than any theoretical vocabulary could offer, the impossibility of grieving outside capitalist time. The structure of the working day makes no room for the fact of death. The body in mourning is still expected to commute, clock in, perform composure in public, and stay presentable for a market that has no use for its wound.

This is also, unmistakably, a text about class. A family sharing a house in Queens; a daughter still living with her parents at thirty; a father's decade of heart valve replacements; a job in Manhattan endured out of necessity rather than choice — these details form the material conditions under which this particular death, and this particular grief, take place. Mourning is always shaped by class position. Some bodies receive bereavement leave, grief counselors, the privilege of disappearing from public view for a while. Others receive a Monday shift and a bookstore aisle.

Placing a personal essay within a journal shaped by Foucault, Marx, and Barthes extends the question of authorship and collective labor that defines this journal's project into its most exposed nerve. If the subject is always already a node of social relations rather than a sovereign origin, the body that grieves in public, that cannot stop, that must perform normalcy on command, is where that theoretical claim becomes concrete rather than abstract. Vulnerability appears here without metaphor: a woman standing in a bookstore, her mouth, as she writes, "a square of grief," while the store keeps selling books around her.