My landing pad

Last week I finally caught up and watched the TV series ‘Normal People’. I was devastated but more on this another time. What caught my attention, amongst many things, was the part when Marianne gets annoyed with people writing eulogies on a FB page of someone who died and how terribly superficial, insincere and almost self-aggrandising these comments are. Who are those people writing these comments for, surely not for the person who died?

So, when I struggle to see my own self-worth, perhaps I should think of my own dying. What am I going to leave behind? Such grandiose thing as ‘legacy’ don’t even cross my mind.

So, instead, how about we think about the feelings we leave behind?

And I immediately think of my mother. And the last time I saw her. It was just before she died. She wasn’t sick, unless you can call a decade of drinking a sickness. She was fine. Or so we thought.

The meeting was a form of reconciliation, a first delicate step to fixing our fragile relationship. It was a balmy December morning with the low winter sun just patching through. She sat in her favourite armchair. I think that’s where she spent the last couple of years. On that armchair. I remember her being puffy, swollen even. She said it was edema. She had problems with water retention. But her looks were not something that struck me. It was the feeling of how much I wanted to hug her. In fact, maybe because she was quite big at that time, all I could think of was her motherly bosom. How nice it would be to be held. To be loved, unconditionally.

To be honest, it’s been 25 years, and I can’t ever remember if I did give her a hug. My memory is like cheese. I wish I paid more attention. But at the time, I didn’t know it would be the last time I would be seeing her. That her time was up. That we used it mostly in quarrels.

I gave her a piece of my writing, a 20-something page copy. She was a fast reader. That’s one of these random things I remember about her. By the time I cycled back to Gdynia, walked through the door, she already was calling me on the old-fashion home line and said she loved it. It wasn’t good writing. It wasn’t anything special. But that’s not the point. For the first time in a long time, I felt I had someone in my corner. Unconditionally. And no matter what rubbish thing I produce, there is always someone to sit in their armchair and receive it. And tell me: keep going. You know, like a landing pad. We all need a safe landing pad. And her unconditional bosom was my landing pad.

A couple of days later I got a phone call from my father that informed me: your mother passed away.

She went to hospital for a random check-up, equally randomly they found out that her liver was dying. And just like, a couple of days later, still in the hospital, she passed away. No fireworks, no big announcements. Done.

The next thing I remember is the funeral. It was a bitterly cold day in January. I was walking behind the casket, like in a fog. Frozen from the bitter cold and robbed, numb from feelings. So so cold.

Then the anger came flooding. I was mad at her. I was mad at her for leaving me behind. I was mad that I didn’t have my landing pad. And that we wasted so much time. For the fact that I couldn’t / didn’t save her. That it was somehow all my fault but at the same time all her fault. Blame, so much blame. But mostly anger. As if this anger could keep my heart from falling apart. As if this anger could propel me into living. As if this anger could pretend that I could do it on my own. That this fire of my rage could keep the wheels rolling. That I don’t need a parachute or the landing pad of my mother’s bosom. Maybe because I died somehow too and you don’t need these if you are dead already.

Is it funny to think of my mother as a landing pad? Oh, how much I would give to give her a hug. To snuggle into her arms. To have her at the end of a telephone line. Unconditionally.

And as I write this, I have my new foster dog crashing on the side of my thigh. It’s almost a fight between his head and my laptop on my lap. For him I’m his landing pad. Unconditionally.

And it dawns on me that we all got it wrong somehow. It’s not the six-pack or the job title that people will remember us for. It’s how we made them feel.

Every time I question my self-worth because I haven’t achieved this or become that, I remind myself that perhaps that’s really trivial: should I not think of how I showed up in the world?

You see, my mother hasn’t achieved much. She hasn’t become anybody worth writing books about. She didn’t need to.  Because she was the best landing pad. She just was. She existed. Even if all I can remember is that one brightly lit December morning.

Gdańsk Zaspa, 1978