My Mother, March Madness, and Zucchini Bread

I was woken up by Emily tapping on my shoulder. She said something like 'The nurse said it's almost time. She hasn't got much time left.' 

I was on a sofa, college basketball was on TV. It wasn't a sofa or TV that I knew. I came to in the next couple of seconds. It was late at night on the 20th of March 2010. I was at the Gilchrist Hospice facility, in Towson. My mother had been here for slightly over a day. 

I would watch her take her last breath in the next few hours, during the early hours of the 21st.

The days that followed are a blur. There was letting people know my mother had died, there was organising a funeral, there was deciding where to bury her. There were phone calls, and emails, and visits, and more phone calls. Then there was the funeral.

The weeks that followed were odd. There was the film I was an extra in, there was a sense of not knowing what to do with myself in Towson for the next few months, there was the offer to teach a statistics course, there was the declining of the offer. Then there was the chicken pox.

The months that followed were depressing. There was the trip to Ghana for the Ghanian funeral, there was the move to Edinburgh, there was the difficulty in finding a job, there was the Thanksgiving where I wanted to be alone, there was a snowstorm that shut down the city. Then there was a new year.

The years that followed have felt unstable. There was the moving from job to job, not feeling like any of them were 'right', there was literal lack of stability with the fall my father took in Sierra Leone, there was the seemingly never-ending adoption process. Now, we're in the seemingly never-ending citizenship process. To be honest, I'm thankful my mother isn't around for a lot of this stuff - it would have driven her crazy.

It took about 3 years to come to terms with my mother's death. 

In the hours after my dad fell, 2 years after her death, I kept saying to myself 'You better not die on me. Not here. Not now. Not in this way'. I was thinking a lot about my mother during those hours. My mother's death was still haunting me.

Three years after her death, I went to Ghana, and saw how everyone had moved on and I very much enjoyed my time there, seeing people for the first time since her funeral. That trip brought a sense of closure that I needed.

Still though, I feel like I'm missing an anchor, and my ship just doesn't feel as steady as it did while she was alive. I've come to terms that this will probably never go away and now try to put my energy into being an anchor for the next generation.

So I'm here now, 5 years after Emily woke me up. 5 years after my mother died. To honour my mother tomorrow, I'm going to make zucchini bread. 

During her funeral, I talked about how she taught me to bake, and how one of the more meaningful things that happened between us was when she devoured a loaf of zucchini bread I made, a few months before her cancer diagnosis, which was the moment I felt that her teaching had finally paid off. 

To thank the people who helped us out after she died, I made each of them a loaf of zucchini bread. 

Zucchini bread, like March Madness, now always reminds me of my mom, so to thank the small family I have around me now, who's helped me not get too down this week by distracting me with requests that I laugh; requests to say 'oy vey' or 'dios mio' in crying/laughing/happy/sad voices; reading children's books in odd accents; and having tantrums, I'm going to make us zucchini bread. 

It's only fitting, since we can't all stay up late enough to watch college basketball.

I miss my mother

18 March 2010

This is from a journal entry I wrote during the Summer of 2010:

As I was waiting to get onto the bus, Lauren asked me what my mother's full name was; Lauren wanted to dedicate the Twi book she was working on to my mother. I teared up, as I had done a number of times in the previous few weeks, knowing that I would be going back to Towson on March 18; knowing that this would be the last time I was going home to see my mother.

I don't remember much about the bus ride to the airport, or boarding the plane, or what movies were playing on the flight, and what movies I may have watched. I do remember that the flight was delayed for an hour in Heathrow, because of some kind of technical problem.

Two things stick out for me on this flight. I developed a fear of flying at some point in my 20's, but had no fear as I sat on the plane. I remember thinking that no amount of turbulence on this flight would even begin to compare to what my mother had been going through over the last few months. I remember thinking that I was so much luckier than so many people who, like my mother, were suffering in that moment as I buckled in to fly across the Atlantic.

The other thing I remember is the guy from Kenya I was seated next to. He had no bags with him, which worried me a little - who doesn't carry anything on a transatlantic flight. After we were in the air, he borrowed a pen from me, and we started talking. He showed me an old picture of him with dreadlocks, which he no longer had; he told me about his turbulent flight from Nairobi to London, and how he had lived in Baltimore for a few years, but wanted to move back to Kenya.

He seemed like a nice guy, and when he asked if he could get a ride into the city after we landed, I didn't think much of it, and said I would ask my sister, after we landed. He used my phone once we were on the ground, and then we both went through customs. After we met up again, we both complained about the treatment we got from the customs officers at BWI - they took a bunch of spices he had hoped to bring from Kenya; I was asked "How did that happen?" to my being born in Nigeria - I considered going through an explanation of how it happens that children are born to the officer, but I was nervous about seeing my mother, knowing she was in bad shape.

I talked to my dad soon after landing. He seemed to want to talk about everything but my mother - the flight, the customs people, the delay we had in Heathrow. To this day, I don't know if he was doing this because he didn't feel comfortable talking about it, or if he was trying to shield me, for one last time, from the shape my mother was in. Part of me would have liked it if he would have been a little bit more graphic about her condition; a bigger part of me is glad he never did. I can't imagine what the experience was like for my father to go through that with my mother, and in the months since I have grown to admire my father more than anyone I know. We've always kind of teased my dad about his geekiness/nerdiness but, because of what he went through, I have come to see my father as the toughest man I know.

Emily picked me and the Kenyan guy up, and we dropped him off at a parking garage his cousin worked at. We then headed to Towson. Emily had not said anything about our mother until after we dropped him off. She tried to prepare me for what I would see, and said she was worried about me, because I hadn't see the slow deterioration of our mother. She said she would rather be in her position than my own, because she had seen my mother on a daily basis, slowly get worse - I hadn't seen our mother in two months.

I now think of Emily much the same way I think of my dad. I wrote a blog once on how, even though she was the youngest of our clan, during the last months of my mother's life, you would've guessed she was older than her brother and sister, who are 5 and 16 years older than her, respectively. I remember thinking on that drive back how much I admired my little sister, and how much braver and tougher she was than me. I don't think I could've handled taking care of my mother the way Emily did and for that, the rest of my family will be eternally grateful.

I got home, but I didn't want to go upstairs. I was scared to see my mother in the condition she was in. I talked briefly to my dad, but then had to go up there, to see my mother. I went upstairs, not sure what what to expect. She was in bad shape; lying on the bed in an L shape on her side, mumbling incoherently, her eyes were somewhat glazed over, kind of staring into nowhere. She was tiny compared to the person she was last Summer, the last time I saw her completely healthy. She was lying in the bed, seemingly unable to move much.

Emily and my dad said "Jeff is here, Jeff is here." Her sister, Mary, who had arrived from New York that same day, said to her in Twi "Jeff is here, Jeff is here." My mother, in the midst of her mumbling, then said the last word I would ever hear her say in English - she said "Jeff".

Many people have said to me over the months since she died "remember the good times you had with her", and I do, and remembering those times bring some level of comfort. But every single day, I see what I saw that night, sitting on the edge of my parents' bed, my mother in very bad shape, saying my name. And every time I remember that, I am filled with unbelievable sadness.