Fifteen Years Without my Mother

Reflecting on surviving parental suicide and a book that helped me make it through

May 12, 2025

This post, which has a CW for suicide and addiction, is from the archives (but revised). All paying subscribers have full access to over four years of archives. Please consider subscribing and diving in.

I wonder if every reader has a list of lifesaving books.

Do you? Which books have saved your life or helped you feel seen and affirmed as a person? Which essays and stories?

My list is long– from those books I read as a child whose stories sustained me and helped me escape reality to the memoirs and novels I read after my mother’s suicide in 2010, like Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. There’s one book that spans the time before and after my mom’s suicide and has remained a touchstone.

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön

It was April 2010 when I moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, and I was twenty-nine, reeling from the four excruciating months I had spent in Seattle trying to save my mother’s life.

The previous December, in 2008, my mom had called me, sobbing and drunk, claiming to have stage four colon cancer. I pictured her in her house; a shitty, falling apart rental overlooking Lake Washington; sitting alone on the large black leather sectional that had once belonged to her and my stepfather. A full glass of white wine sitting on the overpriced antique glass table, with its ugly brass feet resembling goat hooves.

I didn’t picture myself inheriting that table, or the couch, or her pain, which flowed from her spirit into mine when she pulled the trigger.

That phone call wasn’t the beginning. I’m leaving things out because the story’s too complicated. So complicated that not even I know the answers to some questions. Did everything unravel because I started therapy? Because, a year before, I’d stopped speaking to my mother in favor of piecing together a life I had blown apart too many times to count? Or because my mother had successfully scaled my admittedly weak boundaries with a barrage of triangulation, emails, and voicemails?

As my mother’s only child, I wasn’t allowed my own opinions, emotions, or needs. It took me twenty-eight years to understand how our enmeshment and trauma bond constantly triggered my worst coping mechanisms: Bulimia, binge-drinking, and promiscuity.

When my mom told me she had colon cancer, that she was dying, the first thing I thought was she’s lying. Shame and guilt drowned out my nagging intuition.

Because I was my mother’s only child, and because I loved her (and love her), I flew out for Christmas to assess the situation, but she wouldn’t discuss her cancer. My mother, historically obsessed with her appearance, was barely recognizable. Her skin was ruddy and unwashed; her bleached hair grown enough to expose gray. Her eyes blank, her drinking constant. I didn’t know it then, but over the course of the past three years my mother had spent her entire divorce settlement, which equaled half a million dollars. I still don’t know how that money disappeared so quickly.

“As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.” -Pema Chödrön

My mother, when she was eighteen, two years before she had me.

My mother’s life wasn’t easy. She and her three siblings grew up surrounded by abuse that was both inflicted on her and her siblings and self-inflicted by her mother, who was an alcoholic and opiate addict when my mom and her siblings were young. The way one of my uncles describes it, the siblings were islands, each pitted against one another and surviving as individuals, their bonds competitive rather than communal. My mom was sensitive; emotional. She longed for affirmation and love but could also be volatile and unpredictable.

She left home at sixteen for Ketchikan, Alaska. There, she worked as a dancer. She was sexually assaulted for the second or third time. Before she left her hometown of Kirkland, WA, her high-school boyfriend died by suicide. This experience stayed with her forever. These were the stories she told me as a young child.

Eventually, she made her way down to Los Angeles, where she met my father, seventeen years her senior. He was a Scientologist, so she decided to become a Scientologist. They had me in Los Angeles, then moved out to the desert to live and work at Sea Org.

When I look at my mother’s life, separate from my own, I see a succession of traumas. When I look at our lives collectively, can see clearly that my mother, who had no sense of self and lacked self-love, was incapable of loving me beyond my young childhood. My demands, which were consistent with basic childhood needs, overwhelmed her. I learned to survive, becoming a vessel into which she poured her rage and anger. I was loyal and tight-lipped. I saw all of her faces while the world saw one: Charming, gregarious, friendly, kind. Because of this, no one thought anything was wrong.

After those four months in Seattle, I flew to Fairbanks. I don’t know what I thought would happen. For those four months I worked as a night housekeeper at a gym and, most days, went to my mother’s house, where we watched movies and I watched her drink, always leaving before she blacked out. In retrospect, I am grateful for that time with her. She was mostly timid, except for a few terrible and wounding outbursts. I never pushed too hard. Never asked her outright if she had cancer, although by that point I was fairly sure she didn’t.

My mom didn’t want me to go to Fairbanks. She wanted me to move in with her, into the empty, dark downstairs unit she’d neglected to fill with a tenant. Before I left she told me I was abandoning her. But on the day I went to the airport, after selling my Jeep, we hugged. We were both crying. Our tears intermingled as our cheeks pressed together. It was the last time I’d see her alive.

In When Things Fall Apart Pema Chodron engages with instability. She encourages her reader to accept instability. To give up hope. To understand that we can truly know nothing, predict nothing, and understand nothing.

“We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.” -Pema Chodron

It was only a couple weeks after I arrived in Fairbanks that I did what I couldn’t do in Seattle. I called my mom and asked her. I’d bought a beater Ford Ranger and was sitting in the cab, parked in the Fred Meyer parking lot. Mom, I want you to know that it’s okay if you’re lying about the cancer. It’s okay. We’ll all still love you. Just please tell me. Be honest.

I said this, and my mother sucked in a sob. Composed herself. I’m sorry you feel that way.

Two weeks later, I paced my yurt. It was Friday evening, and I was supposed to go out to a bar with my co-workers. I’d spoken to my mom earlier in the week; we were planning for me to visit in June. Now, I couldn’t reach her on the phone. This was unusual. Not just unusual, impossible. Despite my fraught relationship with my mother, we were on good terms. Even if we weren’t, she was always reliably there. I called and called, gripped by a dread I’d never felt before. I knew something terrible had happened. But I didn’t imagine the most terrible thing. Instead, I imagined a fall. Her laying on the stairs to the lower apartment, unable to get up. I filled her voicemail box. I called several of her friends. Finally, late in the evening, one of them promised to go to her house and check on her the following morning.

I spent the night pacing my yurt. Sobbing. Sitting on my wood plank bed. The sun didn’t set; a circle of light traced its way across the floor of the yurt, dimmer and dimmer. The birds chirped. Finally, I fell asleep for a couple hours.

The next morning my mom’s friend called. She was at my mother’s house. The door was locked. Her car was there. Should she go inside?

“Trying to run away is never the answer to being a fully human. Running away from the immediacy of our experience is like preferring death to life.” -Pema Chödrön

I will not tell you everything. You don’t need to feel that agony. You cannot. Or, maybe you have. I will tell you: no one told me how she died until I arrived at my mother’s house, on Mother’s Day 2010. On my flight from Fairbanks to Seattle I gazed out into the pink sky and pictured my mom’s spirit, thinking she had died from cancer.

I spent a week at my mother’s house. Two of her close friends helped me manage things. We had a makeshift memorial. Everything was rushed and haphazard. I had very little money. My mom had left me notes. Two thousand dollars in cash, which was all she had left. She left many notes, for many people. I am grateful the ones for me were kind. In one of them, she apologized. I’m sorry for lying about the cancer. I asked for an autopsy, and it was confirmed. No cancer.

The view from my mother’s house on the day of her memorial.

After that week, in which the weather in Seattle was unseasonable sunny and clear, I flew back to Alaska. Two days later, I was on a remote fire in the Alaskan Wilderness, surrounded by bears and men. I was learning how to work with helicopters.

I carried When Things Fall Apart with me everywhere in my line pack. Its pages were dog-eared and grimy, its sentences and passages underlined. I held onto it for dear life. What did it tell me? That there was nothing to hold onto. That nothing was safe or secure. That everything dies and goes away. That the best thing we as human can do is keep a soft and honest heart in the face of these constant deaths. That the best we can do is be kind to ourselves, and face ourselves with a brutal and compassionate honesty.

When my mom died, relatives suggested telling people she had died by cancer. I refused. This felt like carrying on the very thing that had killed her. These lies. These lies we tell ourselves. No one taught me more than my mother taught me about honesty.

“We can use our personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.” -Pema Chödrön

I broke down midsummer. We were in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, a region accessible only by plane. I started crying and couldn’t stop. Up until then I’d saved my crying for the evenings, when I was alone in my tent. I cried silently, holding my breath, squeezing my palms against my forehead as if keeping myself from dissolving. .

I couldn’t stop crying and I flew home for a week. I visited my stepfather in Olympia— he didn’t seem to understand that I was mourning. I took my mother’s ashes and haphazardly dumped them into the sea, but she stayed with me.

When I think about that first year after my mother’s death, I often wonder how I survived. I feel so much compassion for myself, and I wish I could go back, just for a moment, and visit my younger self. Hold myself and tell myself how good I am doing. But it’s not a stretch to say that I need that now, too. I can give myself the compassion I needed back then.

The most important thing I learned from When Things Fall Apart is a kind of steadfast presence. That no matter how much it hurts, presence is vital. As someone with CPTSD, I understand that dissociation is inevitable, but bringing myself back to presence is always possible.

I don’t think that I have a stable sense of self. I don’t see this as a bad thing. I am aware of my mutability because I have been obliterated. I was one self, and now I am another. There are personality traits I share with my past self, but my obliteration involved the dissolving of the self I needed to be in order to survive. My defended self. I am more vulnerable now. Things hurt more than they used to. I don’t lie to myself like I used to. I can’t.

When I look closely at my life, and my culture, and the world, I see nothing but constant transition, constant conflict and change and instability. This is comforting to me. There is no “there” to arrive at. In no future moment is my life going to be free from disturbance. And yet, within that constant movement I can always find peace and stillness. Within each moment. Being present in each moment, accepting myself as I am; my fragile, fucked-up self, always messing up and trying and failing to do good.

Can I fully accept that I don’t know anything? The more I can allow myself to do that, the more at peace I feel. I know nothing. Everything is mysterious. My life doesn’t make sense. It is not about what I deserve, or retribution. The wind blows, the leaves on the trees flutter, my body breathes, and I am here. Someday I will not be here. And then I will be somewhere else, or I will not be. I don’t know.

Recently, a friend asked me about my mother’s death. I told her that everyone I knew who was close to my mother in some way had come to a conclusion about her death. A reason why she did it. A reason why it happened.

I haven’t. Because settling on any explanation of her death is a lie. I’ll never know why she did what she did. I’ll never know what her life could have been. I’ll never know who I would be were she still alive.

I’ll never lie about what happened. I’ll never be ashamed of it.

And, I forgive her. I forgave her long ago. Because she did nothing to me. It wasn’t about me at all. The more I can absorb that, the more I can let what happened be what it is, instead of having to make it different in order to accept myself.

This is what Pema taught me. To be so compassionate, ferociously compassionate. To love myself so much that I will not lie to myself, even if lying to myself would make my life easier. Because one lie is never one lie. Once we lie once, we must lie again, and again, until we have surrounded ourselves with a structure that requires monumental upkeep. And what happens under the weight of that structure? What do we have to do in order to defend it, and keep it upright? Who do we have to silence?

If you would like to read more about me, my life as a firefighter, and my mother, please consider pre-ordering my forthcoming memoir, Hotshot: A Life on Fire.

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Share your thoughts with me by leaving a comment. Tell me about the books that saved you!