Trigger warning: This post mentions violence, substance abuse, accidents, and suicide.

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I have a picture of my mom sitting at my desk. Both sides are slightly crooked where the photo was cut to crop her face from a sea of people in stadium seating. The blonde hair is a clue that it was taken in her twenties, and she looks so happy.

When I went through the Rubbermaid tubs full of photos after she died, it was this picture that stood out to me the most.

Mom’s life was marked heavily with pain and difficulty. Her childhood held the violence of alcoholism and domestic abuse, bullying that left her feeling isolated because of others not understanding the braces that wrapped around her small legs, and several other situations no child should ever have to face.

In her late teens, she got caught in her own dance with drugs and alcohol. She also met and fell in love with my dad. He was a “bad boy” five years older than her who had decided to try and find a “good girl” and had plenty of his own demons to tango with. Apparently, she was the only person he couldn’t scare.

Growing up, I heard some wild stories about a life he lived before fatherhood where he may or may not have had some low-level involvement in some pretty serious illegal operations. Mom always told me she specifically asked to be given as little detail as possible. But a front-page news headline and almost being mysteriously offed in a terrible “accident” are kind of hard to keep ones’ head in the sand over.

While they were together, she had a tubal pregnancy and was informed that if she tried to have the baby, there was a very high risk that both she and the baby would die. Family members urged her to have an abortion; she begrudgingly listened to their wishes. There were several complications after which she was told she’d never be able to get pregnant again. For years she felt like she was being punished.

So, when she did become pregnant again, she was terrified and ecstatic! She gave Dad an ultimatum: leave that life or be left behind. 

In the return to the normal world, he suffered an injury at work. He opted for surgery, but the surgeon butchered him, leaving him disabled, struggling with his mental health, and addicted to pills. Mom worked multiple jobs, took care of me, and handled all of the logistical soul-crushing legal work to fight for his disability. They won the suit eight years after he was injured. 

They were finally able to buy their own house. A few years later when he decided to quit the pain pills and methadone cold-turkey because of the toll his addiction took on his family, he had a heart attack and died. 

After she had squeezed every ounce of her soul and energy into fighting for him and their marriage and a better life for us, she was undone when she lost him. It was too much. The first few years after his death were utter hell while she did all she could to survive, much of her coping being drowning it all with a bottle. And she barely did survive.

During that time, she was buried under an avalanche of grief and loss. Every year that followed his death seemed to bring a new tragedy: she lost her younger sister to a tragic ATV accident on Christmas Eve, her great-aunt (more like a mother to her than an aunt) died after a stroke and other health complications, her father-in-law committed suicide, her dog became ill and died, and she almost lost me to the brainwashing and grooming of a mentor who desperately tried to have me cut off all contact with her in an attempt to isolate me.

She got to a healthier place, stopped the numbing and the binges, and then found herself in a lackluster marriage forged out of mutual necessity. It was full of many familiar unhealthy patterns. Her husband passed from prostate cancer and left her widowed a second time.

 After being diagnosed with photosensitive epilepsy as a teenager, osteo-everything and ankylosing spondylitis in her early thirties, and working herself to a ragged pulp, she had reached the point where she was too crippled to work. She couldn’t work on a computer because of her epilepsy and was unable to go back to school due to everything being digitalized. 

The second widowing left her with no life insurance, no savings, tons of debt, no income, and only her house to her name (which she also came close to losing).

She finally applied for disability herself and took a much smaller settlement thinking that if she had tried to fight for the larger one, she would not have been granted anything. The fear and exhaustion of her past made her feel like something was better than nothing. Settling left her with barely enough to live on, even after being declared completely unable to work in any capacity. She regretted it, but there was nothing she could do to go back and change it.

And shortly after she was granted disability, she unexpectedly passed away.

She talked for the last several years about dying. I don’t know if she was sick and didn’t disclose it, or if she was just trying to prepare me because we had lost so many people together. Either way, I’m sure she was trying to prepare me.

I think about her life every day. Her fierce grit and strength. Her weaknesses. The utter wisdom she gained from everything she suffered through and everything she found joy in even though there was so much pain in her life.

She was so intelligent and had so much deep insight into life and people. Her intuition about others wasn’t foolproof, because her past experiences and fears were the lens through which she lived so much of the time, but they were most often pretty accurate. 

I look at her life and know how much capacity she held within herself, and I always wonder what she could have done with her life had she not had so many setbacks, such poor luck, and harsh consequences for some of the choices she made.

And I know she wondered that, too.

Thinking about these things has been one of the most profound insights she left behind for me. I have pondered and pondered and looked deep inside myself to consider my own life. This grief has handed me intense weeks of fleeting certainty and months of timid hope that clashes against the witness of dreams that have been long lost.

It has been nearly a year and a half that I’ve carried all of this around with me. It’s still terrifying to try to imagine what I want the rest of my life to look like, understanding in a very real way that tomorrow isn’t promised to any of us. But for all my uncertainty, what I know without any doubt is that I’m working to create a life I won’t regret on my deathbed, even if the details aren’t all clear.

After all of that, she had written this to me:

 “I want to say that I have had a wonderful life… Always be yourself…keep being kind, pretty, loving, smart, caring, dramatic, young at heart, wise in your soul, sarcastic, angry when needed, mean to some, forgiving to a point, but most of all always be thankful no matter what.”

Life is rarely only black and white. It is rarely this or that and more often both/and.