Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)

Isserles, Robin G.

 journal of the motherhood initiative            101 
In this short essay, I draw on two extraordinary, virtually simultaneous personal 
experiences—the death of my mother only a few short months after the birth of my 
daughter. I discuss both the contradictory emotional weight of both experiences, and 
how my new motherhood was affected by becoming motherless. I also share how 
the birth of my daughter both intensified my grief, and at the same time, brought 
enormous comfort, alleviating some of the pain of losing my mother. This is just one 
story about reconciling love and loss, joy and pain, birth and death. 
When I was young and angry at my mom, she would take me to the “Mommy 
Store” located in the alcove at the top of the stairway which led to the basement 
of our house. It was there that I was supposed to pick out a new mommy, one 
of course, that I had to imagine was hanging on the yellow tiled wall that sur-
rounded me. It worked wonders for re-directing my momentary frustrations, 
as well as teaching me a few lessons in appreciating what I have. 
My mother brought a great deal of creativity to her motherhood. She was 
a first grade teacher for one year before I was born. And though she never 
returned to the classroom, she weaved her elementary education training into 
her mothering. The first poem1 she ever taught me was one she learned in 
one of her college classes, and like the mommy store, taught me to value the 
present, given the uncertainty of the future. 
I have little doubt that her orientation to life was a result of the experience 
of losing both her parents by the time she was 18 years old. With very little 
preparation or warning, her life was completely turned over and inside out, 
first, at nine when her father died of cancer, and nine years later, when she lost 
her mother after a routine operation went wrong. Parentless on the cusp of 
robin g. isserles
Love and Loss, Joy and Pain,      
Birth and Death
robin g. isserles
102           volume 1,  number 2
her adulthood, appreciating and valuing what was known necessarily defined 
her approach to life. 
How prophetic her own life lessons were, as it turned out, for I was 21 and my 
mom 43 when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer. Hers was a fourteen-
year battle, beginning with the lumpectomy, then radiation and chemotherapy, 
followed by ten years of the relative, albeit anxious calm of periodic testing 
and waiting. The last four years were quick and intense, as the original cancer 
that had been dormant and undetected spread to her clavicle and her brain. 
I was pregnant when she opted to undergo a stem cell transplant that would 
replace the malignant cells with her own virgin cells. I remember helping her 
to walk again, after the intensive surgery weakened her body even more, taking 
baby steps with her as her body strengthened. She was undoubtedly motivated 
by the life growing inside me—her first grandchild. In hindsight, she pushed 
herself gloriously as her one last desire was to become a grandmother. And 
she made it, healthy enough to come to the baby shower, to dance with me 
during my early labor contractions. A few short months later, however, the 
cancer metastasized to her liver, and her death was quickly approaching. Ten 
days after her 57th birthday, my newborn daughter and I waited for the hospice 
bed to be delivered, as my father and brother drove to the hospital to bring her 
home to die. On their way, I received a phone call from the hospital and was 
told that my mother awoke from her morphine haze, whispered quietly, “I’m 
tired” to the loving nurse at her side, and closed her eyes forever. 
My mother died the day my daughter turned seven months old. It was a 
peculiar experience—becoming a mother while losing a mother. The depen-
dencies of new life and dying and the caregiving they require, combined with 
the emotional weight that each produces was palpable. Clenching my mother’s 
hand through her severe abdominal pain and holding my inconsolable daughter 
as she cut her first tooth—experiences so similar and yet so profoundly differ-
ent—marked the beginnings of my motherhood. I was pulled between being 
needed, being the source of survival of these two live bodies, each at different 
ends of the life-death continuum. In the months following my mom’s death, 
as I would look at my daughter while I rocked her to sleep, I would see my 
mom at her weakest moments, lying in the hospital bed the day before she 
died, her pale face, hairless head—child-like. 
Life and death are opposing forces and while philosophically we can claim 
the connection between the two and the inevitability of both, as well as the 
emotional work that each requires, there is something so contradictory to be 
going through both at the same time. The ways in which we construct, treat, 
and think about birth and death, seems to require that we are supposed to 
experience each separately and certainly protect new life from its opposite, 
death. So, caring for my newborn daughter, watching as she grew and developed 
love and loss,  joy and pain, birth and death
 journal of the motherhood initiative            103 
at the same time that I was caring for my mother, watching as she became 
weaker and further deteriorated made both of these experiences seem so much 
more alien than perhaps they would have been had one occurred with some 
temporal distance from the other. 
For me, so much that new motherhood brought—joy, exhilaration, frustra-
tion, exhaustion—was experienced in the context of grief and loss. Certainly 
it was hard to be deprived of sharing the milestones—her first steps, her first 
tooth, writing her first letter, singing her first song—with my mother. All of 
these joyful transitions were tinged with the sadness and anger of my mom’s 
absence. Thus, when my daughter said the words, “momma” for the first time, 
as exciting as that moment was, I was reminded that I had ceased using that 
same word only a few months before. 
I expected some of these difficulties, though I wasn’t quite sure how it would 
feel to experience these milestones without her. What I did not, and perhaps 
could not, anticipate was the difficulty of coming to terms with the fact that 
I will not have a relationship with my mother as a mother. All of the missed 
opportunities for deepening our relationship—that she will not see me be a 
mom, nor hear my daughter call me “mommy.” Or that I will not be able to 
watch her take delight in being a grandmother, and that my daughter will not 
see me be a daughter to a mother. It is these identities that connect us—daugh-
ter/granddaughter-mother-grandmother—yet such connections between us 
can only be made through memories that have already been created before my 
mother died, before my daughter was born, before I became a mother. That I 
cannot talk about motherhood—the fears, the joys, the work—with my mother 
as a mother has perhaps been the most difficult part of losing her. And it goes 
much deeper than questions like, “was I like that when I was her age?” but the 
more profound experience of learning how she felt about being a mother with 
the sensibility I have gained through becoming a mother. 
At the same time, my connection to my mother is deepened by the fact that 
she too became a mother without her mother. So in a very strange way, death 
has made me feel even more strongly linked to her, knowing that we both 
became mothers without the light of our mother’s wisdom, knowledge, and 
mistakes. Retaining only memories of advice given when we weren’t ourselves 
yet mothers. 
By the time my daughter turned eleven months, she started to resemble my 
mother, quite remarkably, in fact. Naturally, I thought that I was seeing this 
change in her because I so very needed to, though others who knew my mom 
saw it too. It was such a comfort to look at my daughter and see my mother, 
and as she has grown, the resemblance has become even stronger—it is in her 
expressions, mannerisms, even the way she runs. I still find myself watching 
my daughter, looking for another “sign” of my mother. But, while I have found 
robin g. isserles
104           volume 1,  number 2
solace and even joy in this uncanny similarity it has been marked by such sor-
row that my mother is not here to see it for herself. 
Pulled emotionally in two opposing directions, love and loss, the joy of 
birth, the sorrow of death, my experience of motherhood is bound by these 
contradictions. And yet it is true that they are not so opposed. I have felt joy 
in places that are also filled with sadness and loss. As such, it has been both 
harder and easier to grieve the loss of my mother, as I myself have become a 
mother. Harder, because of the absence of her guidance at a time when my 
needs for her have intensified. At the same time, I was able to lose myself in 
my daughter and new motherhood when the pain of loss was its most difficult 
to bear. Nursing my daughter was such a source of comfort to me—the quiet 
of lying with her gave me some needed time to grieve, to allow my mind to 
flood with memories of my relationship with my mother. My daughter kept 
me company through this, and nourishing her gave me an ability to mother 
while I mourned the loss of my own mother. This, for me, has been the visceral 
experience of birth and death and the grieving that has brought me even closer 
to my mom and my daughter in such unexpected ways. And perhaps it has 
been the valuable lessons of the mommy store and the purple cow, that I have 
been able to reconcile my mom’s death and appreciate all the tools and insights 
she gave me to mother my daughter, even in her absence. 
1I never saw a purple cow
I never hope to see one.
But I can tell you anyhow
I’d rather see than be one 
(Gelett Burgess 1895)


English

Love and Loss, Joy and Pain, Birth and Death

Letherby, Gayle

Reflection on Loss as a M/Other and a Feminist Sociologist

Patterson, Serena

book reviews
290          volume 1, number 2
as the editors concede, a deeper examination of identity politics and how 
power and privilege influence mothers’ understanding of and reaction to “ex-
pert” advice would be valuable in a future anthology. 
Nonetheless, by the end of this anthology a reader feels empowered and 
compelled to critically question parenting “experts.” Mother Knows Best re-
futes the patriarchal notion that mothers need authority figures to tell them 
how to raise their children. It urges mothers to listen to their own authentic 
and authoritative voices, which may in fact be shouting that conventional 
advice is flat out wrong. 
Mothering Canada: Interdisciplinary Voices 
Shawna Geissler, Lynn Loutzenhiser, Jocelyn Praud, Leesa Streiler, eds. 
Bradford, on: Demeter Press, 2010.
Reviewed by Serena Patterson
Mothering Canada is promoted as a “multidisciplinary, bilingual anthology of 
mothering research in Canada that illustrates facets of Canadian mothering 
through different disciplinary lenses.… The anthology confirms that issues 
of mothering are prevalent in the Canadian psyche, and in much need of 
research, communication and change.”
 Especially moving are pieces on mothering in rural settings: Susan Picard’s 
wrenching poem, “Severed,” Patricia Miller-Schroeder’s “Mothering Under 
Duress: Tuberculosis and Stigma in 1950s Rural Saskatchewan,” Aboriginal 
Donna Lester-Smith’s raw grief in “A Poem to my Mother,” Elder Betty 
McKenna and her granddaughters’ “Voices from the Moon Lodge.” No less 
powerful are the difficult pieces by Pamela Downe, “Mothering in the Con-
text of hiv/aids,” and Jane Arsenault “Sick Mother, No Mother.”
Several visual pieces are especially evocative: the touching image of Susan 
Shantz and her daughter at the beginning of Bare Life (“technologies of ten-
derness”), Margaret Bessai’s hilarious Self Portrait of the Artist in Her Studio, 
Jewell Goodwin’s haunting Heimlich, and Michelle Glennie’s Madonna and 
Child, Melanie and Zack. Elizabeth MacKinzie is as adept with words as she 
is with images, and this allows her Representing Maternal Ambivalence to be 
entered by the reader who is brought by the images to those places that can 
elude the wordsmith.
This book does not offer a complete or unified portrait of mothering in 
Canada. Instead, its pieces are like shards of light, illuminating aspects of the 
mothering experience. It is a book of treasures, filled with pieces to ponder 
and to share with other readers. 


Mothering Canada: Interdisciplinary Voices

Kasdorf, Julia Spicher

 journal of the motherhood initiative            157 
Protect your chest, protect your chest!  Beth screams,
 meaning hold your fists above your breasts.  Weave
  or I’ll hit your head.  We duck and sway
  as she swings where our faces had been. 
 This isn’t Jane Fonda.  This isn’t the ’80s.
No dancing in here, she commands in the ymca
my dad painted in 1956—boards strung
 between scaffolding under 30-foot ceilings,
  saw dust added to stretch the boss’s paint.
  All summer he drove over the mountains
 to this foundry town with a big Catholic church
and taverns on the tiny-house side of the diamond.
Two women stock the pain relief aisle at cvs:
 When my son got back, he went straight to Vegas;
  uniforms drink free, and no one carded him.
  Look, when my boy came home, I gave him a beer.
 He said, Mom, you know you’re breaking the law?
Hey, you’re old enough to die like a dog over there,
you’re old enough to drink on my front porch.
 Our boys in Fallujah, our boys back for another tour
  or is it a third?  Our pizza shop sells cold beer to go;
  by the register a jar for loose change is taped
 with two photos:  prom shot and the boy
in a wheel chair.  When my farm boy father
got called for Korea, he told the draft board—
Cardio-kickboxing in a Town of 6,000
julia spicher kasdorf
brought to you by COREView metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
provided by Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and...
158           volume 1,  number 1
 with all due respect—he hoped he could do more
  good finishing college.  In the grave yard
  across from my porch, new flags pin the stones
 and Vets at attention bugle taps then shoot
a round on Memorial Day.  Flurry, flurry!  Harder!
That isn’t a flurry, that’s a hand job!  Beth screams,
 though she’s softened since the men with short hair
  quit coming to class.  When they deployed,
  kids in red, white, and blue waved flags and sang
 down Bishop Street on a school day, then speeches
at the park where the trains used to stop. 
The reserves left by bus. A contractor who lost
 his farm to divorce says It’s piss poor
  some of our high school kids can’t even pass
  the test to enlist, not that it’s such a great job. 
 He thaws pipes under my porch, no charge,
until he crawls into the insulation and spots a leak.
It takes all afternoon to replace the pipes, sixty bucks
 plus a six pack of Yeungling for the Steelers game.
  In Penn’s Valley, signs along Route 45 say
  The Purple Heart Highway, but no one here
 calls it that.  Do we need a wake up call?  Beth screams. 
We drop for squat thrusts:  1-2-3-1, 1-2-3-2. 
The retired game warden, back from heart attack,
 paces behind us, red-faced.  I strap on gloves,
  hot and wet with someone else’s sweat.  Jab cross,
  jab cross, jab cross hook into Beth’s mitt. 
 Harder, harder! she screams.  I know you can
hit harder than that!  She’s a third grade teacher
and mother of four.  Yes! That’s better, now
 give me your upper cut.  Swing from your legs!
  Harder!  Whatever you got, I can take.
julia spicher kasdorf


Cardio-kickboxing in a Town of 6,000

Kalfopoulou, Adrianne

16           volume 1,  number 1  journal of the motherhood initiative            17 
Want to leave the car right there
in the midst of traffic, blinkers flashing
like the emotional ambulance it’s become, 
leave the kids in the back seat 
arguing and my daughter yelling
that I ‘cannot’ ground her, that
she’s worked too ‘hard’ all week 
when I grab her arm, squeezing as she
screams ‘that hurts!’ Her lipstick
flies against the dashboard, the cap spins
off, hits the steering wheel, I jerk
to a stop for the damn photo shoot  
I agreed to drive her to with her friends.
She jumps out, slams the door
so the already loose window
sounds like it’s finally shattered,
her friends have hushed, piling out silently.
The woman doing the photo shoot
calls the five kids over to the metro entrance
to take their positions. ‘Look like 
you’re about to do a gig. Remember
you’re all supposed to be 
in a youth band.’ She’s clipped
and clueless, clapping her hands 
as if they’re elementary kids instead of
ninth graders on a Friday evening
itching to get the shoot over with, asking
more than once if she knows when
they will get their free books.
I thought the group of them pictured
in an English-as-a-foreign-language book
would be good to have, their ninth grade faces
frozen in time. The woman doing the shoot
Our Bodies/Ourselves
adrianne kalfopoulou
18           volume 1,  number 1
asks Jess to change her Bob Marley shirt
for something pink, wants my daughter to
take off the peace sign around her neck.  
I almost say Bob Marley and peace signs 
happen to be in, but this woman’s not even sure 
she’ll offer them free books though 
I insist the kids expect them
with their checks. It’s on the way home
my daughter loses it in the car
when I tell her to stop using so many
four letter words. She yells that 
I’m ‘a frigging hypocrite’ 
when Panos in the backseat
worried that she’ll finally be grounded 
pleads ‘stop yelling.’  ‘i’m not
yelling,’ she screams, coasting
down a slope of her own, invisible to me,
picking up speed until she swerves, missing
a clean drop, her snowboard spitting ice,
her skin stinging cold. ‘stop’ 
I’m shouting now, but she’s too fast,
too drugged with newfound power.
‘You can’t ground me’ she repeats,
‘I can live anywhere,’ the clear drop
no longer a threat, she’s going
faster than she’s ever gone, 
tensing her body, the snowboard all 
she clings to, taking her past trees, past
the cautious skiers, past all I can’t see
when I call her father on the cell 
to say she might turn up at his place.
‘It’s a crisis,’ I’m saying, my head
in as many pieces as the window 
inside its metal sleeve. He wants to know
is she or isn’t she going to come over.
‘It’s a crisis!’ I repeat the way she hurtled
the words like ammunition.
adrianne kalfopoulou


Our Bodies/Ourselves

Lang, Sharon

26           volume 1,  number 2
My heart lives at Hillside Memorial Park. This cemetery is serenity to me; my place 
of solace. When I feel lost in a tormented storm of confusion and conflict, I find truth 
there. I can cry if I want to without worry or care if anyone is looking. It is a rare 
freedom to unburden oneself, free from others’ reactions and perceptions. There are 
usually no other visitors around but even if there are, we are friends and all of one 
mind. Outside in this world under the clouds and sky my tears pour out and when 
they do it feels good not to be hidden in a room, or sitting in a coffee shop stifling my 
emotions, hoping no one will notice. In this sacred space, I talk to my beloved Micaela 
and I am honest. I reveal everything and nobody counters telling me to feel otherwise. 
In the air of the cemetery all feelings are simply heard and accepted.
I.
Sometimes after I drop Maya, my six-year old daughter, off at school I head 
over to the cemetery for a little while before getting started with the business 
that fills my day. This time-out in the morning is a buffer between me and 
the normal world; a space that allows me to transition from the person I am 
inside to the one I’ll show the world around me. I go to my baby’s grave to 
think and be at peace with myself. And when I feel lost in a tormented storm 
of confusion and conflict, as I so often do lately, I can find my truth there. For 
me, Hillside Memorial Park is a place of solace. 
 Usually there is no one else visiting when I arrive at the cemetery. I pull the 
car up to the curb about twenty feet from Micaela’s grave and scan the area for 
the thin birch tree that stands just east of her spot. As I turn the motor off, I 
survey the land to see who has left what this week. If it is just before or after 
sharon lang 
Life at the Cemetery
life at the cemetery
 journal of the motherhood initiative            27 
a holiday there will be plenty of balloons, flowers, and other seasonal trinkets. 
If it is any day during the week other than Wednesday, there will be a spat-
tering of bouquets and plastic pots of flowers. If the potted plants have blown 
over from the wind, I stop to stand them back up as I am passing by, because 
that just seems like the right thing to do. If it is Wednesday, the grass is bare 
because the grounds workers have cleared and thrown away all the flowers and 
grave decorations to mow the lawn early in the morning, as the sign posted at 
the cemetery entrance declares.
 During the first year after Mica died, Maya and I used to like to bring lots 
of little toys and mementos to leave at the graveside. Maya took great care to 
place sweet treats for her little sister on or near her marker. After the candies 
were all laid out, she would undoubtedly ask, “Mommy can I eat this one?” We 
arranged other small plastic toys, Winnie-the-Pooh, Tigger, Dora, and other 
Disney figures, angels, butterflies, all kinds of things we thought were pretty 
and that she would have liked. We’d leave two dolls, one that resembled each of 
the girls, lying together so Micaela wouldn’t be alone. When Maya and I had 
special days, we always tried to bring a piece of it back to share with Micaela, 
like the small shells Maya collected at Newport Beach. This I suppose was 
our way of continuing life all together. Others may view these rituals as acts 
of denial, but the bereaved are not so much in denial—I am all too aware of 
my child’s death. Rather our actions amount to a rejection of the unacceptable; 
a triumph of love over death, for death cannot sever the connection of love 
between a mother and her child. Despite death, the fact is that my daughter 
continues to be a part of my life everyday. I would write Mica letters when I sat 
at her grave and leave them in a small box that contained precious keepsakes 
like the candle from her first birthday cake.  
II
The first person I always see after I step out of the car is Carl Joe1 and as I 
walk past him I can’t help but smile. I imagine him to have been a fun-loving, 
simple kind of guy who enjoyed cold beers and hanging with his buddies. An 
engraved quote at the bottom of his marker quips, “Dying to see you again.” I 
wonder if his friends still go out and remember him and think about him often. 
Carl was only in his thirties when he passed away and I don’t know what caused 
his death. I have never seen anyone there to visit him who I could ask. I keep 
walking across the familiar grass and greet young Thomas. He was actually 
eighteen when he died and there is an etching of him as a young man in military 
gear. But the picture of him that stays with me is the coloured photograph 
from when he was about nine years old, which is set in a ceramic oval in the 
middle of his marker. Thomas was an adorable freckle-faced kid with a sweet 
sharon lang
28           volume 1,  number 2
smile and an all-American look—who had a brain tumor. His sister told me 
one day that he had had an operation when he was ten but the tumor grew 
back and he didn’t make it the second time they tried to operate. 
 I like to sit with Micaela or lie down on a blanket and read a book, if it is a 
warm day. I don’t pay much attention to the world around me or worry about 
what anyone may think. Sometimes a couple will come by to visit a parent, 
bring flowers, stay a few moments looking at the marker of their deceased 
and then leave. Sometimes people will come over and talk with me briefly. 
Solitude or simple, compassionate interactions, all of it is okay with me at the 
cemetery. One time a group of four high school boys were hovering over a small 
stone nearby. They were smoking and I asked them for a cigarette, just to be 
friendly. We talked for a while about the people beneath the double mother/son 
marker, which they stood staring down at. Sarah, Garrison’s mother, died of 
cancer a couple of years prior to her son’s death. Garrison’s father had been 
out of the picture since he was born and so he was left under the care of his 
older brother when Sarah died. One night after drinking and doing drugs, 
Garrison overdosed and died, less than two years after his mother had passed. 
I think Garrison’s friends had the feeling that it could have been any one of 
them. They postured in tough high school stances, but their reflective silence 
belied that they had been jolted into an all too harsh reality that they were 
not ready to handle. 
Just to the left of Garrison is Emily’s grave, which always has a pretty bou-
quet of purple flowers on it, no matter what day of the week it is. Her mom 
Jackie must get there before me on Wednesdays or maybe she leaves it on 
Tuesday night and somehow it doesn’t get cleared away. Jackie and I see each 
other occasionally at the cemetery. Her daughter is buried about ten plots 
away from my baby. I remember about two years ago when we first met. I was 
there crying and she came over to me. We hugged and talked about how bad 
it is and how we hate when people ask us, “How are you?” She told me about 
what happened to Emily. Two kids from the local high school, who had sup-
posedly been friends of her daughter, murdered her. Outrageously, one of them 
had actually come to and cried at the funeral before the police had unraveled 
the crime. As Jackie told me pieces of what had happened to her daughter, I 
realized I had heard the story before. I had seen the posters taped up in store 
windows all around Redlands shortly after my baby died. It displayed a picture 
of a beautiful, smiling dark-haired teenager who had gone missing. A couple 
of weeks later, the authorities found Emily’s body in a shallow grave in the 
canyon and the story unfolded in the Redlands Daily Facts. I remember trying 
to avoid reading about it; I did not want to hear of another mother who lost her 
daughter. I was struggling and could not handle an ounce more of heartbreak, 
not even that of a stranger. 
life at the cemetery
 journal of the motherhood initiative            29 
 But I felt close with Jackie from the moment we met. We shared the ultimate 
bond of sadness. I told her I never for a moment imagined that my baby would 
die. It truly never occurred to me that my daughter could just be gone and that 
I would never have her again. I remember driving with Micaela strapped into 
her car seat one day shortly before she died. I was upset over something that 
I cannot now recall but I remember telling myself, “Well don’t worry; at least 
you will always have Micaela.” Jackie was a single mother who had served in 
the military. She told me she prayed every night that nothing would happen 
to her daughter; she always lived with the horrific knowledge that one’s worst 
nightmares can and do come true. I wonder what had happened to her in her 
life before this tragedy that gave her that terrible awareness. No matter what 
it was, I think this was worse than what she had been through before. We 
comfort each other briefly and it does help to be in the presence of another 
person who knows your pain. Jackie kindly tells me that it must be harder for 
me, having had so little time together with Mica. At least, she says, she had 
eighteen years with her baby. Emily’s cremated remains lie in a small grave with 
a black granite marker that bears her name and dates as well as her mother’s, 
with the death date as yet unnoted. The pretty photograph of Emily is laser 
etched into the India black stone, the same picture that was on all the “missing” 
posters, along with a smaller one of her horseback riding. Emily’s big smile is 
one that stays in your mind. I left a little angel at Emily’s grave one day, and 
Jackie left a small stuffed kitten for Micaela. Jackie promised me that Emily 
would watch over my daughter and stay close to her and it’s odd that even 
though I’m skeptical of an afterlife, it does make me feel better. 
 Micaela has many protectors at Hillside. Dell lies just two rows east of her 
in a double plot that had only her final date filled in. Every day Lupe, a gentle 
and elderly man would drive up with his big old Chevrolet and visit his departed 
wife. Lupe’s accent and gruff voice made it a bit hard for me to understand 
him but nonetheless we connected with scarce words. Lupe always greeted 
Maya by name, and reminded me that it was his daughter’s name too. Then 
he would proceed through his routine, dragging a folding chair from the large 
trunk of his car. He came everyday and sat with Dell for about an hour. He 
tended to her gravesite with great care, fresh flowers in the ground, a tasteful 
assortment of garden decorations, a wrought iron stand that rose up about 
five feet and curved into a hook that held a birdfeeder with rose-colored sugar 
water, delicate wind chimes, and the always attached, plastic covered Xerox of 
his wife’s obituary, telling her story and showing her photograph. Lupe and I 
would exchange a few polite words and then retreat into our private worlds, 
respecting each other’s purpose for being there. The stone on Dell’s grave has a 
laser-etched photograph of the couple together when they were much younger. 
I think it was a picture from their wedding. Lupe went to the cemetery every 
sharon lang
30           volume 1,  number 2
day; he was still living with his wife, talking to her and spending his time with 
her. About two months ago when I went to see Mica there was fresh dirt on 
Dell’s grave and I knew Lupe had died. I tried not to feel sad because I knew 
he wished to leave this world and be with his wife. Although he bore his grief 
bravely, life held no joy for Lupe since his wife had departed. He did not have 
to say so with words, it was obvious that he would always remain thoroughly 
entwined with the woman whom he had shared his life. In life and death, 
Dell and Lupe would always be together. Almost a year later, their stone is 
now filled in with Lupe’s final date. I think about them when I go to visit my 
baby. Now the site is bare, no one decorates it anymore; it remains cleared and 
plain, like most of the others. 
III
I never liked cemeteries growing up. They used to scare me. The idea of lots of 
dead bodies lying beneath the earth was nothing I even wanted to think about. 
I could never understand my best friend Monica who after school would go 
to Lincoln Park cemetery with other friends just to hang out. To her it was 
fun, cool. To me, it was just creepy. Like so many other Americans, young 
and old, I avoided real death as best I could and only dealt with it when I had 
no other choice. As a girl, I would turn my head away in the back seat of the 
car if we were driving past a cemetery. These places frightened me so I’d look 
away and close my eyes. When my great aunt Etta was dying in the hospital, 
my mom took me to visit her at her bedside, and I remember being aghast at 
her sickly appearance. I begged my mother not to tell me when she died but 
I overheard her tell my father a few days later and I quickly covered my ears. 
At age nine, death was a huge fear for me that I could not handle, and I tried 
my best to shut it out. 
A couple of years later, my friend Susie called and told me rather casually 
that a boy named Mark in our sixth grade class had drowned. After hanging 
up the phone, I freaked out so badly that my parents did not know how to 
calm me down and I think I really unsettled my dad who just kept telling me 
to splash some cold water on my face. Mark had French kissed me the week 
before at a party when a group of kids were playing spin the bottle and this 
had made me, a painfully shy and innocent eleven year old, so uncomfortable 
I called my mom to pick me up but I would not tell her why. Mark asked me 
if I was leaving because of what he did and I lied and said “no.” When I heard 
he had drowned, I felt shaken to the core. I thought it happened because of 
something I had done wrong. He had asked me just a few days earlier at school 
if I would “go out” with him and when I again said “no,” he laughed and claimed 
he was glad because he was just joking. Mark and his uncle had jumped into 
life at the cemetery
 journal of the motherhood initiative            31 
a river to go swimming but the undercurrent was too strong. His uncle barely 
survived and was not able to rescue Mark. Beyond my vague sense of shame, 
I felt overwhelmed by the fragility of life; the instantaneous and omnipotent 
grasp death holds on all of us. I feared that I too might die at any moment, if I 
simply took a wrong step or made a faulty move. My mom tried to comfort me 
and tell me life was not so random. As always her strength moved to reestablish 
order and control, but I was not convinced. I cried all night long for Mark, his 
uncle, and his family. The next day at p.s. 95, Mrs. Larritza, our teacher, looked 
very sad and Christine, another girl in the class, remarked on how puffy my 
eyes were, but needless to say, I did not attend the wake.
Everything is as different now as my childhood world of the Bronx is far away. 
California cemeteries are friendly and familiar places to me. I teach courses on 
Death and Dying, take my students to visit gravesides, and actually relish the 
opportunity to talk about issues surrounding death. I feel comfortable with 
the people who lie beneath the ground at Hillside. In fact, they have become 
a kind of community to me, the friends that surround my daughter, stay with 
her body, and keep watch over her when I am gone. Robert John Morgan, 
Lieutenant Colonel in the u.s. Air Force, stands guard over Micaela and makes 
sure she is protected. Carl Joe, Thomas, Tina, Dell and Lupe, they are always 
there in the same old spots as if waiting for my arrival. I greet them silently in 
my head as I walk across the grass to visit my girl. Passing the familiar names 
and faces time after time, I feel that we are all friends of an odd sort and this 
interconnectedness feels comforting to me. 
The only thing I don’t like are the too frequent disturbances of the newly 
deceased being placed into the ground. The additions and transitions upset 
my peace of mind. I am bothered by the burial precursors: the rolled out metal 
canopy that announces an upcoming funeral, the dug out pits with inhabited 
coffins waiting on the side, the wreaths of flowers pinned onto standing frames. 
I also do not care for the post funeral signs, which include an array of wilting 
flowers that cover a newly filled grave, or worse a flat rectangle of fresh dirt 
that stands out in contrast to the grass around it and remains anonymous, un-
marked. Perhaps these ongoing indications of the end of life and the beginning 
of death resurrect in me buried emotions of grief-stricken loved ones in the 
throes of raw heartache. New death takes me back to the initial weeks after 
my baby died when shock and utter devastation engulfed me. 
 The area where Mica is buried is the section that is filling up fast now with 
new bodies interred every day. Recently when I went to visit, there was fresh 
dirt from a newly filled grave adjacent and just above or west of my daughter. 
I was indignant. I wondered who the deceased was, as the earth plot contained 
no clues to his or her identity in place yet, only a droopy single lily marked the 
site. It bothered me that I had no knowledge or control over who would lie so 
sharon lang
32           volume 1,  number 2
close to my baby. Is this a good person? Someone who I want to be so near to 
my daughter? I regretted not having thought to buy that space for myself. No 
one had asked me if it was okay to bury this person right over my baby. Futilely, 
I am still trying to be her mother, protect and watch over her, gain a measure 
of influence in her life, or rather in her life after death. In this instance, I am 
troubled less by the transitions and more by my lack of control over anything. 
Perhaps these are not such different things.
 Regardless, this cemetery is serenity to me. In this sacred space, I talk to 
Mica and I can be completely honest with her. I can reveal everything. I express 
what I am feeling quietly but out loud, and nobody counters and tells me that 
I should feel otherwise. I frequently tell my baby how much I miss her, how 
much it hurts that she is gone, and how sorry I am that I did not take better 
care of her. I do not have my mother there to shield me and not allow me 
to say or feel guilty in this way. For the truth is that I do, logical or not, it is 
my unfortunate reality. And in the air of the cemetery all feelings are simply 
heard and accepted. I can cry if I want to and not worry or care if anyone is 
looking. It is a rare freedom to unburden one’s self completely free from oth-
ers’ reactions and perceptions. There are usually no other visitors around at 
the cemetery but even if there are, it does not matter, we are friends and all of 
one mind. Outside in this world under the clouds and sky my tears may pour 
out and when they do it feels good not to be hidden in a room, or sitting in a 
coffee shop stifling my emotions and hoping no one will notice. 
1Some names throughout have been changed to protect people’s privacy.


Life at the Cemetary

Wilkinson, Toni

Rediscovering Maternal Passion in the Photographic Portrait

Finch, Annie

212           volume 1,  number 1  journal of the motherhood initiative            213  j     i i i i              
Opening light calls the river back to see
where the old nightmare has risen from, when she
calls herself back in the rhythm that is she.
Nightmare, oh woman lost in the depths of me,
lost to the rage that has risen up with me,
lost till I ride you home—nightmare of me.
annie finch
Nightmare
brought to you by COREView metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
provided by Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and...


Nightmare

Herrick, Leigh

 journal of the motherhood initiative            51 
99.97% the same meaning eyes meaning ears meaning heart and hands and 
that one over there’s a dad and that one
 
a grandmother and she who died last night was just at home in her 99.97%-
the-same-as-yours body while the blue cloth’s innocuous folds flowed over 
the table at which
she sewed and stitched in such minimal difference that no one knew exactly 
where it lay where mapped inside her beyond the thimble-less finger stained
in the prick of blood that neither ran nor hid from the unknown difference 
as she lifted her head toward her laughing son just before the bomb reduced 
her to rubble
now strewn among stones with nothing in the difference able to be identified 
nothing able to be saved of her like who she was which was 99.97% the same 
as you which is
a being 99.97% the same in ability to become merely these remains in the 
place where a man’s hands now tremble the same as another man’s hands 
trembling
on the other side of the world where fathers uncles nephews dig and women 
wail in this kaddish their genomic poem
Genomic Kaddish
leigh herrick
brought to you by COREView metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
provided by Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and...


Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)

Not a member yet

Love and Loss, Joy and Pain, Birth and Death

Reflection on Loss as a M/Other and a Feminist Sociologist

Mothering Canada: Interdisciplinary Voices

Cardio-kickboxing in a Town of 6,000

Our Bodies/Ourselves

Life at the Cemetary

Rediscovering Maternal Passion in the Photographic Portrait

Nightmare

Genomic Kaddish

Stigma, Belonging and Mothering: An Outsider's Understanding of Disability

1,574

1,824