A Mourning Musing — Counterpoint

By Jacqueline Roderick ‘23

CW: death of a parent

Dedicated to my mother

On a Saturday morning, three weeks after my estranged mother’s sudden death, I found myself walking in solitude along the shoreline. I had slept in my dad’s old bedroom at my grandparents’ house the night before and woke to the late sunrise on the coast.

The Atlantic is a good ocean. It is good in that it is reliably fickle. Two days before my mom passed, the streets were knee-deep in foam and sea water. That morning, the tide was low, the waves were quiet, and the sun shone on the water. I walked on the seawall and on the sand, any trace of my pilgrimage to the local diner temporary at most.

I think I brought a backpack with me—this New York Times emblazoned knapsack given to me by a friend of my late maternal grandmother. In it would’ve been my staples: I always keep a Pilot G2 gel pen and a notebook on my person. I’d be interested to know what exactly I wrote that day, sitting in the diner—alone—and eating oatmeal of all things. Imagine! Your mother, who raised you, who you hadn’t seen in a year, suddenly dying, and you decide to have oatmeal for breakfast. No wonder I was as sad as I was—what a way to make myself feel better. I think I got breakfast tea, too. Or apple juice. Likely both.

My dad’s sister’s ex-husband’s brother’s ex-wife usually waited tables at the very same diner, and I sure didn’t need Christine to see me eating breakfast by myself like the sad little half orphan I was. My hometown is relatively large for the surrounding area, with a population of almost thirty-thousand people. In the wintertime, however, things are pretty dead without all the tourists and out-of-towners. It’s a small town by design, by its (dying) culture, and as the blessed kid of two townies, I’m usually recognizable as one (or both) of my parents’ daughter. They actually extended my mother’s wake an extra hour because there were so many people waiting outside, and my sister and I hardly got the chance to sit. I remember shifting in kitten heels and hugging people who hadn’t seen me since I was little––or so they claimed. When my dad, my sister, and I finally left the funeral home, we drove across the street to eat a quieter meal at a restaurant we’d never been to. Upon entering, I walked across the floor in those kitten heels and slipped on my ass in front of a bunch of soccer moms. Who, of course, I knew, along with my bosses at the bar who had just—you guessed it—hugged me at the funeral home. That was two and a half weeks prior to my beach-diner escapade, and after three years and some odd months, we haven’t been back to that restaurant.

Anyway, Christine wasn’t there that day. The weather wasn’t too bad that day either, despite it being January in Massachusetts. When I finished my bleak bowl of oatmeal and wrapped up whatever tragic hero-esque image you can picture of a grieving sixteen-year-old kid writing in some spiral-bound notebook at a lunch counter, I headed back out. Now, here’s the good part. If you’re to ever visit my town—which, you shouldn’t, and I wouldn’t want you to anyway—you could drive down a certain street where my first awful high school boyfriend used to live (he lives up the street now) and find a gray fence jutting out against the rows of houses. From there you’d get to a strip of pavement perpendicular to the shore and a gate you’ve only got to hop in the winter (as if it’s the locals they have to keep off the beach). There’s a set of stairs that, in the summertime, is extended down to the jetties below so that people can get to the beach. In the colder months, however, they remove the half of the stairs that reach the rocks and thus leave behind a staircase to the open ocean.

Throughout my time too long in my town, I frequented that staircase often. Took boyfriends (and eventually, girlfriends) there to have first kisses, spent time sitting on the edge of the last stair like a dock. That Saturday, I likely wrote there, with the picturesque green-blue water before me and sunshine supplanting a mother’s touch on my cheek. I must’ve done some crying, too, before making my way back to my grandparents’, where I could collapse onto a couch as if I’d just come back from a fifteen hour shift. I don’t remember much beyond that; most of the time surrounding her death exists in foggy afterthoughts. But something about that morning cemented itself in my mind.

In retrospect, my mom’s initial passing felt a lot like that day. A warmish January morning, because why not? Oatmeal for breakfast by myself just because. A staircase to nowhere seeing that my mother had died. Her death—one without closure and with infinite questions—marked the abrupt severing of a path that I thought would, at the very least, be found later on in life. At the very least, once I was ready, there would be someone to tell me how to wear those kitten heels again or how to order a proper Saturday breakfast. Someone to get an apology from, someone to heal with. What I was not ready for was her suddenly being gone.

Death is the existential question. It has no one answer, nor any real answer which anybody living can reach. But in that space between our beginning and our end, we figure out ways to make do.

Sometimes, that means going for a morning beach walk three weeks after your mom died to get some oatmeal.

Jacqueline Roderick ‘23 (jr2) would like to note that wiping out in kitten heels immediately after your mother’s wake does not make the grieving process easier. (From the February/March 2021 issue).