I've been thinking a lot about mortality these days.

It comes, I suppose, from the number of friends I have that are currently caring for ailing parents or have recently lost one. It is strange, but this has been happening quite frequently in the past few weeks. It is difficult to know what to say to someone who is going through that. You want to help, want to find just the right words to say to alleviate their worries, to diminish their burden, but anything you say feels flat when it comes out. Even if you have been through it before, a lived-through past doesn't feel adequate to the job of emphasizing with the immediate reality.

So I offer what support I can, but do not push. There is nothing to do really.

Nothing to do but think about mortality and remember.

My mother was not a saint, she had a number of flaws. For many years, I did not care for her. She was not an agreeable sort of person to me. She wasn't a raging bitch or anything, she was just very distant, so I never really developed any great attachment to her.

People have a hard time understanding that. They think that motherhood magically endows the woman with everything that motherhood should represent. Read the newspapers about the woman who kill their children or abandon them in dumpsters and you will realize how untrue that is.

My mother did not seek the job. My father wanted children and looked forward to the job. From all accounts, he was very qualified to be a good dad (even my mother agreed, but felt she should have checked his references for the job of husband...) and the great tragedy for them both was that he was killed and she was left with the job.

She tried. That's about the best thing I can say on her behalf. She did not mistreat us, did not abuse us, but she just didn't really enjoy being a Mom and you could tell. She would help every stray animal that came across her way, any helpless person would be the recepient of her considerable compassion, but her children were a burden.

Because it isn't so easy to step away.

Her whole life never went in anything even close to the direction she wanted it to go, and then suddenly she was irrevocibly responsible for several lives with no backup. I resent the women who feel that fathers aren't necessary to this day. Foolish bitches.

I did not grow up mean because my mother didn't love me enough, though. The only byproduct of her lack of affection that I've noticed is a tendency for me to overcompensate in helping friends, but being uncomfortable with physical expressions of affection to my friends. I hug awkwardly and slightly flinch if I am touched and people pick up on that. To make up for it, I will usually bend over backwards to help friends, but there is always an odd distance about me, as if I were not quite there, but a reflection you see in a window at night.

I also didn't hate my mother because of her lack of affection. I certainly could have used it when I was a kid, but after a while you adjust to it and it feels normal to have things that way, so you don't really think about it too much. No, I did not like my mother for the simple fact that she was always so helpless. It wasn't until years later that I realized why she was that way.

When I say that nothing in her life panned out the way she'd hoped, I mean absolutely nothing. After my father died, she fell into a deep depression. She might have come out of it eventually when she found someone new, but my brother and I didn't take to him too well and he eventually decided it wasn't worth the effort. (Note to guys dating women with children: This guy tried to hard to be a "father figure". Don't do that. Just because you are sticking your dick in their mother does not make you the children's father. Think about the way you would rather be treated and let the kid come to respect you, then you are the father in all the ways that count.)

My mother spent a number of years wallowing in immense sorrow. It clung to the air around her almost tangibly. Her sadness was so great that I always felt that she could enter a room and make it feel emptier. I always hated that. I hated her resentment of me.

But I especially hated her helplessness.

Running to the bottle all the time, waking up to it, drinking every night until she would stumble off to bed to pass out and grudgingly face another day. Relying on her daughter and her daughter's husband to fill the lapses in responsiblities that she couldn't bear. Leaving me a legacy of failure and weakness and helplessness to look on as my birthright. She disgusted me in a fundamental way.

She tried to quit drinking for all the wrong reasons and failed miserably. I don't agree with the entire doctrine of AA, but one thing they have dead-on is that you can't quit unless YOU WANT to quit. You can't do it to appease anybody.

And when she finally quit, it wasn't to appease anybody. It was to appease herself. She saw herself as I saw her. She looked into the mirror in her room and screamed. She lay on her bed shaking. She saw things that weren't there.......

...she knew she was dying...

...and didn't want to die like that.

She quit. No program. No meetings. She just stopped drinking. She began to rediscover her artistic side. She didn't want to do paintings anymore, but she discovered beadwork. She began with simple patterns, then more intricate ones. She started with earings and ended with elaborate plans for a large mural. She would go to the bead shop and talk for hours and everyone would look at her work in honest amazement. Her best friend proudly wore the earings she made for her and received a number of compliments. My mother was very talented that way. They simply didn't look homemade.

For six years it remained like this, but then she got sick again. Not alcohol. She was diagnosed with emphysema (I don't like to tell people this because I'm usually seen with a cigarette dangling out of my mouth).

Without the drinking, I found I could talk to the woman occasionally. Without the drinking, I found that she could be very cool to talk to. She never really became a warm person, but she could hold a conversation, crack a raunchy joke, relax a little and show a hint of the woman she had been thirty years before.

Money was tight so I moved back to her house to help with the payments. My sister and her husband contribued an enormous amount of time, money and effort as well. Mom continued to deteriorate.

She was in and out of the hospitals. I was working 12 hour days and trying to funnel as much money to my sister as possible to lighten the load I knew she and her husband were carrying. I didn't go out much, just worked and worked and worked. I visited Mom as frequently as I could allow. How DARE she get so sick just when I was beginning to like the woman!!!

One of my last visits with my mother before she passed away was perhaps the most significant. I was heading to work and stopped in to check on her for a bit on my way. She had been going through chemotherapy and was losing her hair, had that face paint they put on you (she and I jokingly called it her warpaint and she kept bugging the nurses to get her a feather for what remained of her hair), and she just looked so tired........

This time her sadness didn't take anything from the room. This time her sadness permeated it. Before I even made it through the door I could feel it.

I sat on the edge of her bed, still at a distance from her, though. We were never a very close family, remember.

This was before she was in the wheelchair and before she had to be bathed, fed and wiped all the while retaining her full mind so she could suffer every human indignity of it.

For the first time in a long time my mother spoke to me in a very personal way. She told me how scared she was, how sad she was, how much sorrow she had for her life and that she had so much regret for the things she had done and so much regret for the things she failed to do. She told me how much it hurt that she knew she was close to the end and that there was no way she could ever go back and change those things, how inconsequental so many things seemed in retrospect.

And then she said with a bluntness that was almost scary: "I've never wanted a drink more in my life, but never needed one less. That much I'm glad for, because I never really got to know you before."

I hadn't kissed my mother since I was a very young child, but I leaned forward and kissed the top of her head. That one phrase alone made almost everything that happened before worthwhile. This was the woman that should have been my mother. I barely knew her, but was grateful for the brief acquaintance.

It was my last real conversation with her before they began to give her so much pain medication taht she couldn't think clearly nor be aware of her pain.

I didn't cry at her funeral. I couldn't share my tears with anyone there. I felt like I'd finally met my real mother and that nobody else would know who I truly had grief for.

No, I can never think of what to say to someone who is going through what I went through. There are no words I can offer that could adequately explain that I could not cry for her loss, but could only celebrate that she had lived and that at the end she had been able to touch my life and make me feel that perhaps there was some strength, courage, and blunt honesty to be had as a family legacy.

Rest well Mom.