By Jonathan Odell
I was surprised how my mother’s death affected me. I thought I knew what to expect from grief, having lost my father seven years prior.
I never counted on the delayed reaction. Two years after her funeral, in the middle of writing my next novel, a depression hit me seemingly out of nowhere. My writing stopped, I withdrew from my husband and friends. Any plans for the future seemed futile. COVID hit, George Floyd was murdered down the street, and I sank deeper into what felt like the waiting arms of death. All those years of therapy and SSRI’s and here I was again, entombed in the shadowy, unmapped warrens of my psyche. An old visitor, that feeling of self-hatred and worthlessness I had known as a child, had permanently taken up residence.
My mother lived to be eighty-five, and even as her seventy-year-old son, after a corporate career, owning and running my own businesses, publishing novels, becoming a husband, my first and most enduring job description is the one given to me as a child.
I don’t remember the first time my father drew me aside and told me to get close enough to my mother each day to smell her breath. To call him at work if I smelled anything funny. Anything funny meaning alcohol.
I knew the smell. It was the smell of my mother when she came to my room before I had gone to sleep to whisper into my ear, “Who do you love the best? Me or your daddy?”
I had to choose.
My mother’s jealousy with any favoritism shown to my father was fierce. Betraying her was out of the question. I chose my mother.
That’s why I believe the depression reared its weighty head. I was supposed to die with my mother. As a child, there was rarely talk about my growing up and getting married, having children like there was with my twin brothers. Mom referred to us as “Johnny and the boys”, as if I were somehow set aside for other purposes. And now there was no longer any point to my life.
Yes, I know that’s not true. I have more books that need to be written. I have someone who loves me. I have a family. It’s a deeper, older voice that whispers to me that all is meaningless now. That voice predates logic and reasoning and memory, even. It tells me that I am done. I should leave the stage. The show is over. The seats are empty.
I never tattled to my father, but I did keep a close eye on my mother and tried to control her drinking myself. After all, if she drank, it was my fault. I had not shown my love in the right way.
As long as I did my job to her liking, she reciprocated with her loving attention. She was the first to notice that I had a way with words. Anything I wrote for school, I couldn’t wait to show her. She insisted that I read my work to her aloud. She was my first adoring fan. My first book was based on her, and as I wrote it, I imagined her reading it. As I did with the second and the third.
My mother was my first audience. And when she died, a part of me still believes she had been the only one that mattered.
And so now I return to her in hopes that, perhaps, through writing about my mother, I can set us both free.