My Mom Died Last Year

and the timing wasn't great (how dare she)

Hi, it’s me. It’s Fall in my garden, and one of my favorite things to do is make little flower bouquets for friends when they come over. I hoard cute little salsa and pesto jars from Traders Joe’s all year long so I can fill them up with flowers and send them home with people. My kids are very concerned about my “jar problem,” but at this point I wouldn’t be able to stop saving them even if I wanted to. I’m the “jar lady” now.

Dahlias, zinnias, and calendula from my garden.

My mom died last year on May 10th 2021, after a long decline from dementia and stroke complications. We were close. I made her laugh. I was a hard kid growing up, but as an adult, we had a delightful relationship. Because of her nearly ten year decline, I missed her for a long time before she actually died.

Which is why I was surprised by how hard I took it when she actually did die. I sort of had in my head that I had done all my grieving and would be mostly about the logistics of it all. I was certain I had no more tears to shed. I even sent a note to my team at work saying I’d be out for a couple days but back on Wednesday. I know, right? I can feel your collective “Duh” as you read this, but in my mind I had a plan for dealing with her death, and that plan did not include being sad. That box was already checked, the task crossed off. I mean, what even is the point of a long, slow goodbye if not to get it all out of my system ahead of time on a schedule?!

I found out she died on a Monday morning when I woke up to a message from my sister. I was still processing the loss when there was a knock at our front door - our general contractor had arrived to begin tearing out our bathroom. This was not a fun bathroom renovation where I would get the tile and deep soaking tub I wanted. Nope. This was a leaky shower reveals mold everywhere we have to gut the whole thing right now renovation. And there was an urgency to the remodel because the final approval of our mortgage refinance depended on this problem being fixed.

Also, we only have one bathroom. The situation was not ideal.

Water damage from our bathroom extended into the hallway, so the floor had to come out. Beneath the insulation is dirt, like from the ground outside of our house. The outside of our house could be seen through our hallway floor.

I spent the first day making phone calls in the back yard because the bathroom demolition was too loud. That first evening, or maybe the next evening, I was at Home Depot picking out shower tile with Bryan and the kids, who are teenagers. I have no idea why they came with us  – they certainly didn’t have to. Sometimes during COVID we did weird things together just to get out of the house. Anyway, I hated all the shower tile at Home Depot and wanted something more fun, but we didn’t have the luxury of special ordering or the time to shop around at different design stores.

I literally sat down on the floor in the tile aisle of the Bitter Lake Home Depot and started crying because the Universe would not deliver my dream bathroom — a grief I could access with more clarity and anger than being left without a mom in this world. Ruthie scuttled away, embarrassed. Thomas picked me up and started suggesting tile options. Bryan was stressed and sweating at the forehead, coping in his own way with grief and surprise design decisions. The experience probably ruined Home Depot for my kids and their kids for generations to come. There will never be another Zug who steps foot in a Home Depot because that is where adults go to fall apart.

I fucking hate how life goes on when people die. 

I must have been a joy to parent.

When my step-dad, Gordy, died on January 3rd in 2005, it was also a regular Monday morning. I woke up, took a shower, and fed Ruthie breakfast (she was almost two). I called someone to fix our broken furnace. 

Around 11am the phone rang.

I had recently read Carole Radziwill’s memoir, What Remains, in which she describes what happens between the moment a death occurs and the moment you find out about it, how she was sipping a glass of wine and reading Pride and Prejudice as her friend’s airplane spiraled downward into the ocean. I think about that a lot, how we will all at some point experience a catastrophic loss without even realizing it. We’ll get a phone call or see something on the news, and the thing will have happened hours or maybe even days before. Inevitably, we’ll think back to what we were doing the moment it happened, or the last time we spoke. Could we have stopped it had we known? Would it change our last interaction with them had we known it was the last time we’d see them?

I was sleeping when my mom died, and also when Gordy died. In neither instance did I suddenly wake up at 2am feeling like my world had been rocked.

I slept soundly. I woke up and had a normal day. I was mad about the broken furnace because of course it broke on the coldest weekend of the winter. I was also seven months pregnant with our second kid, which is in the get-this-thing-out-of-me trimester. It was business as usual in the Zug house, having no idea what I’d already lost.

Gordy came into my life when I was eight years old, and we were close. He had cancer and we knew he was dying, but even so, you’re never prepared to receive that call. I answered the phone in the laundry room where I had been loading the washing machine. It was my mom and she was crying. I instantly knew he was gone. I started crying and we talked for a few minutes. 

And then the doorbell rang. I hung up the phone and opened the front door. It was the furnace repair guy. I greeted him, walked him downstairs to the furnace, and answered his questions. Then I thanked him and walked him to the door again. 

People die. Life goes on. 

Gordy, the Original Seattle Hipster

I still think about that morning and how absurd it was for me to flip that switch in my brain from grieving daughter to household manager. I couldn’t stop the earth from rotating or the tide from going out or a stranger from ringing my doorbell. The furnace didn’t care about my family’s loss.

From the perspective of 17 years later, I can see how that was the exact best thing that could have happened in the moment. I’m more of a do-er than a dwell-er. Talking shop with the furnace guy gave me something to do in that moment and in the next few moments. I had a task, an objective, something to focus on that didn’t require complicated reasoning skills. I could float through the rest of my day by fussing over my two-year-old and the furnace situation.

But now, all these years later in almost the exact situation of dealing with a home repair in the midst of my grief, I could not hold my shit together. I didn’t want to be in the tile aisle or have a stranger in my house, and I was 100 percent not being an adult about it. 

Finally, I gave up trying to power through. I took the week off, planted my garden, called old friends, and wrote an obituary. And I did it all without a shower or a toilet.

Thanks for reading. Until next time,

Jen

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Question of the Week

What was a low point for you over the last year? How did you handle it or move past it?