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What Happened the Moment After My Mother Died

I felt something I’d never experienced before


spinner image two figures sit on the water's edge, looking at the sun
Laura Liedo

Welcome to Ethels Tell All, where the writers behind The Ethel newsletter share their personal stories related to the joys and challenges of aging. Come back each Wednesday for the latest piece, exclusively on AARP Members Edition.

In a dimly lit room, I held my mother’s hand, her body ransacked by cancer. From her iPad, I read prayers pertinent to her faith, as she’d requested many times before she’d fallen unconscious. Suddenly, a strange shift in the atmosphere made me snap my gaze up. My mother’s voice echoed in my head, and I dropped my eyes, completing the prayer on the page.

When I looked up again, I realized my mother was dead. I felt complete peace. At 36, the tranquility at that moment in Missouri was like nothing I’d ever experienced and far deeper than the calm I’d found months earlier meditating at an ashram along the Ganges River as the sun set. 

Mom was freed from her physical pain, and I felt relief.

Years later as my 40s faded, I dug into the need to make the unconscious conscious and embarked on a series of EMDR and somatic experience therapy sessions. In a tiny office in a town near my home with my new husband, I sat, without a specific agenda, across from a licensed professional counselor.

With a soft, soothing voice, she guided me into a deep relaxation as small devices delivered alternating taps on my hands, and a timeline of my life unfolded. There I was, almost three, my tiny hand reaching for a silver handle inside a van my Irish uncle drove, which held my mom, family and me on a trip to Dublin from St. Louis in 1978. For decades, my memory stopped there and jumped in time to a hospital. But with the therapist, I encountered more. The door opened. Air gushed around my body. I heard myself scream. The pitch out of the vehicle made me shake. I thudded to the ground. A strange man’s arms were around me, whipping me away from oncoming traffic. Oblivious to what was happening, the van with my family proceeded down the road.

When Mom arrived at the curb, she sobbed, loud and dramatic.

“I’m dirty,” I said.

Her hysterics took center stage. I grew quiet and still.

Mom’s feelings felt like they mattered more than mine. No matter what the cause or cost, my little mind settled on needing to please my mother and ease her pain. This was my new identity, sprung out of the depths of our agony, though neither of us knew it at the time.

For years, I adhered to my strict Irish-Catholic mother’s rules with a goal of making her jovial. I complied with her demands to be a good girl, which were to be seen and not heard. I feared misbehaving or misspeaking. Anxiety grew. I pushed myself to excel in my academics and practiced my Irish dancing (her choice for my hobby) until my heels bled and my calves ached. Distance swelled between me and my peers, and that little voice in my head, begging to be loud and lively, got suffocated. When I left my family and mother in Missouri, first for college in Chicago, then for law school in Manhattan, I told others, “I escaped.”

In New York, far from my mother, I broke her rules and those of her religious institution. I embraced my sexuality. I dated men whom she didn’t approve of. But the more I stepped out of her boundaries, my expectation that I’d be happier didn’t fully materialize. Then I fell into a profound grief when my closest friend died. My anxiety ballooned, as though I was always at risk of falling from a van and getting crushed. Success and failure were like life and death. Defeat was one slip away. Pressure stole joy from my life.

A few months after my mother's chemo failed, she was forever quiet and still. But grief didn’t weigh me down. Instead, repeating the prayers I’d said for her tethered me to the serenity I’d experienced as she departed. My relationship with my father deepened. I delved further into my spirituality and found meaning as a volunteer providing companionship to dying strangers. I even quit my long-term lawyer job in New York and followed my gut when the chance for real love appeared 1,200 miles from my Brooklyn apartment.

About The Ethel

The Ethel from AARP champions older women owning their age. The weekly newsletter honors AARP founder Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus, who believed in celebrating your best life at every age and stage. Subscribe at aarpethel.com to smash stereotypes, celebrate life and have honest conversations about getting older.

I no longer had a role to ensure Mom was happy and took care of my own happiness without burden — a load I didn’t fully understand until I lay there in the therapist’s room, holding tappers and a pillow comforting my belly. My body shook. My jaw trembled. My feelings unmoored.

“Good. Feel it. Don’t ignore it. Don’t push it away,” my therapist said.

Exhaustion enveloped me as my body calmed. But I felt lighter, larger, free. It was as if I’d returned to that moment when Mom took her last breath, and I became one with the stillness. Blinking my eyes open, I could see. Little me needed validation that her feelings mattered. Little me needed to be held and told she was OK. Little me needed a mother who comforted her, not the other way around.

Day by day, I integrate my inner work, feeling more and more aware and released from those minutes of my life in 1978 and all that transpired because of it, the complexities of life and my mother’s own unconscious struggles. Now, she’s long dead. How I perceived my reality is too. As I age, I’m grateful for the chance to start each day more peaceful than the last.

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.

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