matrilineage

If I could choose any place for my mother to die, it certainly wouldn’t be Waco, Texas. On the midnight drive back to Georgetown from the Waco hospital, my sister slept in the passenger seat. Our mom was days away from her final ones and we made the trek each day, an hour each direction, just to visit her bloated, jaundiced body.

I drove her barely running Honda Civic, the car I had learned to drive in, back and forth each day. The radio didn’t work, so I stuck the speaker side of my phone into the grimy cup holder, not listening to the shuffled playlist I had on. The Texas highway system felt like a video game that I just had to survive. Six lanes of pitch blacktop stretched into the miles of distance—I’d always thought California felt flat, but this was something else entirely. All I had to do, all it felt like I was ever doing in these purgatory weeks before Mom’s death, was get to our sister Amanda’s house in Georgetown. 

At eleven years old, I witnessed my parents in the thick of divorce proceedings. It was at this time I realized I hadn’t known my mom my whole life. She had stuck us under the care of a full-time nanny so that she could do what she did best: guzzle a couple bottles of wine a day while she pretended to make excellent money. I never saw the wine—not until the 2008 recession when the money ran out and so did my dad’s patience. He walked out in December of 2009, and I was the only one he told he was leaving. The actual divorce came what felt like eons later.

It wasn’t long before my mom was uncovered to me. In the teensy California apartment we moved into, cat piss and wine became familiar smells. If I got a peek into her closet, all I could see was a foot of clothes covered in broken glass, corks, and emptied boxes of chardonnay. The stench came at me like a wall of bile and ammonia.

My mom insisted one June weekend that we needed a vacation. She wanted to visit Palm Desert, just like we used to as a family. But now, it would only be me, my younger sister Ashley, my mom, and her mom. 

I don’t remember anything about that particular trip, except for the day we left for home. My mom and grandma—who we had to call Mama, because it made her feel less old—had been on a bender the whole trip. As I packed my clothes into my bag and tried to get Ashley organized, my mom retched into the sink. Mama screeched “Blaaaaaaaiiiiir!” every four seconds from across the room, imploring that checkout time had long passed. 

I don’t remember most of the drive out of the desert, either. All I remember is reaching a piano bar in Cathedral City, where my mom decided she was too exhausted (read: drunk) to drive anymore. It was still midday. Mom and Mama quipped to each other about how no one ever wanted to stop in Cathedral City. It was just someplace you wound up. 

The four of us sat in this piano bar trying to think up a plan. The women bickered and slurred at each other over glasses of white wine, the Texan accents they’d had in their younger days peeking through the veil. The pianist was tuning—the same note droned repetitively from the corner, shooting straight through my ears. We were surrounded by wood-planked walls and floors and tables and chairs. Nausea welled up in me. I didn’t question why we’d made the stop, because I knew I didn’t want things to be worse.

Somehow, they reached the agreement that we needed to stay in a motel for the night. We got a room with two full beds. They drew the curtains shut, blocking out the mid-afternoon heat and sun. Ashley laid with our mom, and I with Mama. Mom and Ashley were snoring within minutes.

I laid there next to Mama, who began to doze off. My lips were horribly chapped from the desert and I couldn’t stop licking them, feeling them grow more and more crimson as a line of flaking skin formed at my cupid’s bow. I begged Mama for chapstick.Visibly irritated, she dug through her enormous purse, handed me a mint green tube of balm coated in her red lipstick, and went to sleep on top of the duvet.

While my mom disintegrated of liver failure in the Waco hospital, my sisters and I fielded calls from Mama every day. I was 19 and hadn’t spoken to her since my mom and Ashley moved out of California the previous summer. As far as I was concerned, all she had done was make things worse. 

Every time she called, Amanda’s half-sister Cristen (who I call my own sister) took the lead. She was in her 30s and had known Mama since she was a child, and had endured her abuse long enough to know the right things to say and when not to say anything. Mama would holler into the receiver with her wobbly, piercing voice, drunk or on pills or both, threatening that she was going to hop into her Escalade and drive to Waco to see her dying daughter. Cristen told her that no, she wouldn’t. The car was impounded after her last DUI. At the court hearing, she had fainted in front of the judge from too much Xanax.

Mama wasn’t determined to see her daughter for any kind of loving purpose. As far as I could tell, she would constantly make it clear to my mom how much of a mistake she was—what a miserable child she’d been, how useless and cruel. Then, they would make plans to see each other, and end the call with I love yous. 

Somehow, she’d found the number to call Mom’s hospital room. Whoever was there would pick it up and reluctantly hand the phone over. In these dying days, my mom’s brain wasn’t hers anymore. It belonged to alcohol now. It made her sweet as honey and confused. There were days I wasn’t sure she recognized me, and I’d have to leave the room for fear I was going to vomit. 

She recognized her mom’s voice every time, though. The conversation would seem to start normally, from what I could tell—pleasantries, how are you feelings, are they taking care of yous. Mom struggled to get more than four words out at a time from her pale lips. Somehow, the conversation always deteriorated, spiraling into the dirt as soon as it was clear that Mama had asked if she could come to Texas. Mom didn’t even know she was in Texas half the time, I’m sure. Screaming would ensue from the receiver, so threatening and vulgar that nurses glanced with furrowed brows. Silently, Mom would pull the phone away from her ear, her hands shaking slowly as she gave it back to whomever had answered it for her.

My mom always spoke of Waco like it was the most glorious place on Earth. For her, it had been. It was where she went to college and escaped the wrenching clutches of her mother, finally learning about the literature she’d always loved and writing essays late into the night. She spoke often of sharing a pitcher of beer and some cigarettes with her roommate Tracy over a pool table on Friday nights. She insisted it was the only time she smoked. They shared a one-bedroom apartment with their cat, Keeley, who they nicknamed the Furry Cuisinart for her ferocity. When one of them had a boyfriend over, the other would drag a mattress out to the living room and blast music as loud as they could. I like to imagine all the small joys of her time there: the sunburnt shoulders beneath spaghetti-strap tank tops, Bruce Springsteen shows in Austin at the peak of his career, the crawling heat and dusty cowboy boots marching through the Baylor campus. 

There’s a picture of my mom I look at frequently, where she stands beside Tracy, the fair blonde to Mom’s dark brunette. I can tell they’re at some kind of river in the summer, people probably floating on innertubes in the background. My mom grins and squints into the sunlight. Her skin is browned and freckled, her shoulders narrower than I’d ever seen them. She wears a pink and purple bikini top and a gold necklace. Characteristically, she holds a can of beer in a foam cuzzi. 

Before the age of ten, Mama was the grandma of my dreams. She took me out to shop for clothes at The Children’s Place and Limited Too, and there was never a budget. We went to make teddy bears at Build-a-Bear Workshop. She sat with me at whatever restaurant I asked for, though I rarely asked for anything—she would insist I rip the shyness out of myself and demand what I wanted. Occasionally, I’d request a Balboa ice cream bar.

One particular outing changed this. As we walked through South Coast Plaza, she started to wobble. Not knowing better, I presumed age was starting to get to her. She clutched my small arm as we made slow progress through the mall’s courtyards.

She grew irritable. No matter if I’d spoken or not, she would slur, “Now, hold on just a minute!” I don’t know who she was talking to. One of us suggested we go home, and she was determined she’d drop me off. 

I sat in the back of her enormous white Escalade. I watched the tags on the back of the headrests flutter—they still read “Genuine Italian Leather,” and Mama refused to remove them because it would ruin the newness. She drove impossibly slowly through the parking lot, until she gunned it. She blew through a stop sign and a car coming from the left—the side where I was seated—screeched to a halt just inches from the side of the car. I let out a yelp as the other driver’s horn blared.

“Michelle, shut up! You almost got us killed!” Mama wailed.

I sat tight-lipped the rest of the way, just as I had until that moment. My dad let into her when we got home. My mom probably screamed. I watched, peeking over the staircase railing, believing that if I hadn’t let out that momentary squeak, none of this would be happening.

As my mom’s days in the hospital were stacking up to a week, the insurance agents and administrative staff began not-so-subtly shoving us toward finding a permanent nursing facility for her. When a 15-year-old Ashley initially found her at home, delirious in her bed, pantsless with her own feces surrounding her, the doctors said she had a 50 percent chance of surviving the following 90 days. I wondered why we were pretending she had enough time for hospice.

We dutifully looked for nursing homes during the daytime while she napped. Amanda, Cristen, and I strolled through bleached hallways all over the towns between Georgetown and Austin. Tour guides told us about the lovely arts and crafts activities that Mom was far too sick to participate in. I stopped listening when I noticed that everyone I saw appeared to be about 400 years old. My mom was 56. 

After one of the tours, we sat in Cristen’s SUV to regain our bearings. My sisters chattered about how it seemed okay, pretty nice. They didn’t like that one guy but otherwise it seemed fine. Their voices were small and solemn. I sat in the middle of the backseat, my face slowly twisting, my eyes losing focus. When Amanda looked back at me, I was already in a full-blown sob. 

I will never forget how fast Mandy launched herself directly over the center console, squeezing her wide hips through the front seats to reach me, a rescuer squeezing through a canyon toward a stuck hiker. She grabbed my head and pressed it into her chest, the wetness of my tears quickly collecting on her shirt. She hushed me, and said, “Oh, baby. Oh, little monkey.” She rocked us back and forth ferociously. Nothing had felt this good in so long. 

While I cried, I thought about how badly I wanted Mama gone. I wanted her dead. She’d been drinking and swallowing pills just as long, if not longer than my mom had, and here she was: still kicking, thrashing. Something in me believed that if it were her in the hospital, her liver eating itself alive, our mom wouldn’t be dying. She deserves it more. She deserves it more.

Once my mom was transferred to a nursing facility, I flew back to California and awaited the news I knew was fast approaching. I stayed with my best friend and her family in our hometown. We slept uneasily at night, tossing around in the same bed, not saying what we knew was slated to happen next.

One evening, Cristen texted me and told me that I should answer her incoming call. I did. My mom’s face lit up my phone screen, her eyes hooded in sleep or delirium. But when she spoke, she seemed as lucid as I’d seen her since before the hospital. 

“My beautiful girl,” she said, and I knew what was to come next. I couldn’t stop the tears. I felt everything, all at once, huge and boiling and petrifying. I tried to ask her how she felt. I tried to ask her how her day was. She smiled, closed-lipped.

“I’m ready, baby,” she told me, the Texan in her still alive, “I’m ready to let go.”

It’s a strange thing to witness someone be sure they are going to die. They are always more sure than you are. I thought she still had time left, so I booked a plane ticket for a couple of days later. I knew somewhere, in some deep chasm of knowledge I’d held shut for so long, that I was grasping for more time I wouldn’t get. This death, although sudden and brutal and ugly, had likely been over 30 years in the making. 

The next morning, at 7 a.m., Amanda called me without texting me first. In the way big sisters do, she tried to explain to me that Mom was gone, but she didn’t need to say anything at all. Something between us was aching to pretend that we’d seen this coming, but in the moment that we exchanged “okay”s, I felt the shock strike down and crack like lightning. It was over. I collapsed into my best friend’s arms and wailed in gentle earthquakes. Her mother hugged and held me, and her Iranian immigrant father stared me straight in the face, probably for the first time in the twelve years I’d known him, and told me I’d better not forget to tell him if I needed anything. I couldn’t put words to what I needed, so I flew back to Texas.

In Amanda’s living room, I sat among my sisters and we tried, once more, to find the words we had been so desperately in search of for the past month. Mostly, we walked the dogs. I slept in the guest room with Ashley, admiring her aggressive snoring for the first time in my life. We looked at pictures, drank coffee and ate eggs, sat around the fire pit when it wasn’t raining. We went to sleep before midnight on New Year’s Eve. Much of this time was wrapped in a cocoon of silence as we tried to figure out what came next.

Mama is still alive somewhere. She likely meandered to St. Louis, Missouri, back to where she was born and gave birth to my mom. Perhaps that’s where she belongs, because that’s where our bloodlines trace back to: back to the wet, hot dirt of the South, where the rent is cheap and she won’t get caught driving drunk without a license. I have refused her calls, but heard through my aunt that I was always her favorite granddaughter. 

My matrilineage is full of women who know about taking next steps. We know how to get up and go. My mom wouldn’t have lived as long as she did without ignoring what the alcohol was doing to her: disarming her, poisoning her and everyone around her, bone by bone. I cannot tell if this is strength or a blatant fuck you to nature, but it seems we know who she inherited it from, and to whom she passed it down. I don’t know whether to thank or curse her for this. All I know is that after she left, we all got up and went on ahead.

Michelle is a kinky, non-monogamous, bisexual literary PR assistant and copyeditor living in San Diego. She graduated from UCSB’s College of Creative Studies in 2021, her capstone project being a body of essays and poetry on trauma, sexuality, and healing. Apart from being a dungeon enthusiast, she takes pride in writing about those dungeons and all the weird queerness she's lucky to embrace in this short life. She tweets at @michellee_rae.