Reflections on Loss and Grieving
By Alicia Lanier
Reflections on Loss and Grieving
By Alicia Lanier
February 12
For several weeks, my mother has been dying as my siblings and I keep watch along with other family members. Mom is right now sleeping deeply with the aid of oxygen and medication in the next room. This guest bedroom of my brother David's home is profuse with flowers and cards and candles and soft music and family photos that span several decades and a red quilt...all deceptively cheerful, making her appear only to be napping. Hospice nurses and other staff are now here around the clock, helping her to remain comfortable and us family members to begin our mourning.
It's been, in a word, agonizing. There have been two hospital stays in one month. Finally Mom went home, still ambulatory and still wanting to live alone but still requiring, as she has for two years, the oxygen machine discreetly stowed in her guest room. The oxygen virtually gives her life through what seems to be a miles-long plastic tube which stretches wherever she walks.
The day after the last hospital visit was when the end began. We should have known. Her voice had changed from a sweet-sounding drawl to a thin nasal slur. Then she became too weak to walk. It was then that my brother and his wife took her to their home and, realizing the end was near, made the decision to allow her to die in their home with loving support from family and friends.
She's been here now for over a week and has transitioned from drowsy consciousness ("I love you, mom"and she opens her eyes and murmurs "I love you, too, Alicia Kay")... through barely-eyes-open responsiveness ("I love you, mom"and her eyelids flicker)... to coma ("I love you, mom"and she continues to sleep as I stroke her cheek and smooth her white hair.)
This was not an easy decision. There are five of us siblings--each with our own immediate family--and some of us initially resisted our brother's firm stand. I was one. But no longer. Now I understand there's much comfort in being able to say goodbye to a kind-hearted mother we love and in supporting/being supported by others who are also saying their farewells. But it's not all hugs and hand-holding. In the past few days we've taken turns playing out old sibling rivalries and other emotions accumulated through years of living both together and apart. However, in the past few days we've mostly kissed and made up. And even laughed through our tears as we share memories.
Mom is a churchgoer, faithful for all her 78 years to the Church of Christ, and two nights ago as we ate dinner the doorbell rang and in filed 20 teenagers. It was the youth group at her church, come to sing to her and to pray for her. They filled the house with soft vocal harmonies and hymns, which she so loves that she has ordered us, her children, to include congrega-tional singing at her memorial service. We'll do that. Even if we can't sing ourselves.
As I sit by my mother's bed, stroking her hand, I ponder the difference in my grieving for her obviously imminent passage and my other major losses of kin. My father at age 49 had a single heart attack and died. Decades later, first my father-in-law and then my mother-in-law each died suddenly. For all three, grief was forced upon me virtually overnight.
On the other hand, as a relinquishing mother in the 1960s, I was unable for 25 years to openly and thus truly grieve the loss to adoption of my son and daughter. I shed private tears, but because there was no social recognition or support for the mourning such a loss, I was unable to share with anyone what I felt. In the enlightened 90s, this seems absurd. How can a mother carry an infant under her heart for nine months and not grieve? Birthmothers, of course, have always mourned, even if it does not appear until after years of denial and whether they tell family and friends or not.
Conversely, how can an infant be carried under a mother's heart for nine months and not grieve the separation? In fact, adoption professionals like Nancy Verrier (author of Primal Wound) do now say that, even though an adopted person has no conscious memory of biological connectedness, there is cellular memory and attendant mourning on some emotional level.
(In one of those synchronistic occurrences that seem to happen so frequently in adoption reunions...as I grieve in Texas the pending loss of my mother, my birthson, Matt, in Michigan mourns intensely the loss of his adored adoptive father who died just after New Year's.)
As we first began tending my mother, none of us had the luxury of putting our lives fully on hold while we com-forted her. Thus I have found myself balancing hours spent with my mother and family with hours for work plus hours for TxCARE and adoption reform. I was tempted to put the latter on hold, but realized people were counting on me - and, in truth, it has proved a welcome distraction from raw emotions. Thus I was home this week to receive a phone call from AAC Legislative Director Jane Nast: Tennessee has won its court case! (See page 9.) And I found myself shouting in jubilation, even among all the personal sadness and anger I had been struggling through.
These contradictory emotions set me wondering: Is it intense loss that fuels all of us adoption activists? Are those of us spending time and energy to give adoptees their rights the ones who have not resolved our adoption loss?
These are unanswerable questions, of course, but obviously I myself have transposed grief into action. Even as I endure another grief. And, staring me in the face during my mother's final days is a primary reason I believe we must correct the closed adoption laws: In the 1930s, when records were first closed here in Texas, there was no knowledge of genetic diseases and the possibility an adopted person might find such history important as an adult, either for him/herself or one's child. Today, in the 1990s we recognize this right to be a clear issue of life and death.
There's also the compelling question of kinship. Adoptees, quite simply have two families. Some may never wish to find the one that gave him/her life, but if any do, they deserve that opportunity. That's why the Tennessee decision is so affirming: It opens the way for other states to end the secrecy of closed adoption records and help adoptees who have been severed from their biological identity.
Kinship. That's what my mother, as she lingers in her final days, is once again giving to me, my siblings, our families.
February 17
My mother who was always both proud and bemused that her five children celebrated birthdays on holidays (and she herself on April Fool's Day) left this world behind on Valentine's Day. She was buried today on President's Day.
I miss her.
February 18
I logged on-line today for the first time in awhile - needing not only to distract myself from the intense griefwork of the past few days but also compelled to begin to re-establish my connection with my other family, the TxCARE adoption activists. Within seconds, I had read a post from Dallasite Bill Betzen that our proposed bill to give adult adoptees in Texas access to their original birth certificates has won a sponsor in the Texas Legislature. Once again, joy pierces through the emotional pain. Once again, I am startled that my heart can contain these conflicting emotions.
In recent years after silent decades mom and I discussed my adoption relinquishments candidly. Once, I asked: Why didn't you stop me? You knew what it felt like to be a mother. Her sad reply was: I did the best I could.
Last week, I said to her: Mom, I love you. You were a good mother. And she whispered: I did the best I could. I smiled and hugged her. She truly had.
~ Alicia Lanier
Last updated March 12, 1997