I am forcing myself to write this. Don’t misunderstand. Writing is still the thing I’m most meant to do. I still get something from it. But every night, sometime after 6 pm, I hate everything and want to crawl into a cave and stare at the dank walls.
My mom, Margaret Huff, died on January 29, 2023, exactly one month after her 85th birthday. I spent the first half of February in Tennessee with my 86-year-old dad and my only remaining sibling, my 62-year-old sister.
I may, over time, try to write more about mom. She was a great person and a wonderful mother. She was warm, kind, and extremely smart in a subtle way. She had a sly sense of humor that could turn dark or silly in a moment. She was tall and willowy, her hair a natural white blonde at birth. It darkened to ash in adulthood, but she dyed it back blonde until the last time she entered the hospital.
Mom was never in good health. She smoked, which didn’t help, and she couldn’t quit until she was in her 70s. She suffered from severe anxiety, something I didn’t really understand about her until I was in my 30s, I guess. Mom and dad both came from a generation where you kept your internal problems quiet and medicated them with booze, cigarettes, or meds. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but even when I was a teenager, she always had valium on hand. It was great if I had a tension headache, and she halved one and gave it to me, but I didn’t grasp the significance of her having it for years. Because even the most conscientious kids will have their heads firmly lodged in their behinds until at least 20.
But mom’s poor health was, in part, just luck of the genetic draw. Ironically, perhaps, she married a man as robust as she was frail, so I guess the four of us kids—only two of us are left—were a mix. I have to admit, given that some of my earliest memories are of visiting her in the hospital due to one chronic ailment or another, it’s probably miraculous she did live to 85.
That doesn’t mean I was prepared for her leaving. I wasn’t. No one ever is when it comes to our parents.
I wasn’t sure what to do with this Substack when I created it, so I named it “Obsessions & Digressions.” At the time, I was thinking of some pretty specific obsessions. Additionally, my biggest challenge as a conversationalist and occasionally as a writer is my tendency to digress (thank you, ADHD). So the name made a lot of sense.
It still does, but I realized to keep the newsletter going, I will have to broaden my idea of what counts as an obsession—allow it to be more personal, not just reportorial. Right now, almost all I think about most days is my mom. It’s improving, of course; I don’t mean to sound too dramatic. But this kind of grief feels like a chronic illness. It goes into remission, but the relapse always comes.
As I said at the beginning, there are moments each day when the maelstrom of emotions that attend grief overwhelms me, and I want to retreat from everything. I wrote this tonight to express some things rather than do that. Also, to let subscribers know what is up.
I’ll be okay. I may seek some grief counseling. In the last 23 years, my older brother and oldest sister both died—my brother committed suicide in 2000, and my sister died after a short illness in 2016—and I never specifically looked for therapy to address the loss. I haven’t had particularly good therapists since moving to Massachusetts (I’ve had maybe three therapists ever, I’d say, who really helped me), so I’m wary of doing it again. Still, I need more than just Google or patient friends and loved ones to find ways to get through this.
Mom always worried about my mental health. I’ve struggled with depression since childhood, and my brother’s suicide only added to her worries about her remaining son. She’d want me to keep going. So I will.