What She Asked of Me

*Warning: this post includes references to the domestic violence suffered by my mother, her suicidal tendencies, and the emotional effects this can have on children. This content may be triggering.

My mother was a wild, gifted, artist in the 1970’s. She was thin, beautiful, stylish and wore thick green eyeshadow. She lived a large, loud, chaotic existence filled with men, women, booze, parties, and wild times that drifted from her memory the morning after.

She had experienced mental illness since childhood in the 1950’s when remedies were archaic, traumatic, and ineffective. A functioning alcoholic throughout my childhood, she lurched from one extreme to the next, sometimes slipping into psychosis when the madness took her flying, wheeling, higher and higher, like a kite ripped from your hand until she finally dropped into depression and attempted suicide. The familiar pattern repeated: police, hospital, straight jacket, thousand-yard stare.

Her entire life was shaped by violence, addiction, the uneducated judgement of others, and a health system that failed her, time and time again. She has consistently suffered more than anyone I’ve ever met, and that’s quite a statement. Now, in adulthood, I’m a trauma therapist (no surprise there, really).

I was her only child and I love my mother fiercely, with my whole heart. I loved her even when she was unpredictable. I loved her even when she disappeared. I loved her even when she tried to take her own life. I loved her even when, out of her mind on drugs, she threatened to kill me in my sleep (with a graphic description) when I was five or six years old.

I was a child of domestic violence. The child of a father who beat my mother to the ground in front of me when I was too young to speak. No wonder she was suicidal. I understand it now of course, but as a child, it shaped my development. You see, there’s a particular kind of scar that forms in the child of a suicidal parent. It’s not loud. It doesn’t bleed, not outwardly anyway. But it stays. Combined with the rhetoric society teaches you, it forms a hidden self-belief. Parents were supposed to love their kids more than anything and even be willing to give their life for their children, I thought. That’s what perfectly happy TV families taught you, you see. But in the threadbare reality in my housing commission house, my mother didn’t want to live another day. This early learning settled deep as a question: If my own mother would rather to die than be with me for one more day, what does that say about me?

Children do not think like adults. I was utterly terrified. Every minute of every day. My mother whom I loved more than life itself, who scared me and shocked me beyond belief, might vanish while I was still brushing my teeth, or packing my school bag, and I may never again hear her laugh in the next room.

I carried that hidden fear everywhere. It becomes a shape inside you — not just grief, but a lens through which you see the world. Your only worth is in the quality of care you give others. She was the victim, and I the protector. Like countless other children whose experience was similar, I learned to manage other people’s pain early. I learned not to need much. How to become useful, responsible, reliable. It’s a kind of self-preservation that looks, from the outside, a lot like strength. It looks like maturity beyond your years, because I did everything I could, every single day to care for her as it was the only bearable solution. I loved her and needed to protect her at all costs. It took many years for me to finally understand those costs, and they were terrifyingly high.

Now, years later, I am in my fifties, and she is in her seventies. I have children, and grandchildren of my own. I came back home to care for her — wheelchair bound, body failing, mind unravelling — and I seamlessly slipped into the role of the strong one. The one who will fight to protect her. The one who holds the storm.

But caring for a parent who couldn’t care for you triggers something that we may not expect. The past doesn’t stay in the past, you see. It leaks. Into the hospital. Into her bedside. Into the long nights where sleep won't come.

And then came her question. Soft. Clear. Terrible.

She asked me to help her die.

I’m a clinical psychologist. A trauma therapist. But nothing had prepared me for that. It’s not just the woman in front of me that I was tending to — it’s the child I once was, somewhere deep down still hoping, still somehow waiting for her to choose me.

Her arms bear dozens, maybe hundreds, of small white scars; the history of the cuts she made can still be traced on her old, translucent skin. The marks left by the razor blades she once used strike deep into my own heart. I hold her soft hands gently in my own. It was excruciating to see her suffering, so very much, still. She is old now, and frail, exhausted from the battle that her life has been. Please help me, she begged. If you love me, please help me die.

I said no. I can’t kill my own mother. Not even from love. Her eyes filled with tears of disappointment. Going to prison for the rest of my life (or carrying a criminal secret) is too much to ask of me, I thought, but I didn’t say that. I smiled, in a way that I hoped conveyed my compassion and hid the flood of guilt I felt for not being her solution.

I stayed. I listened. I bore witness to everything she felt, to who she is, and everything she had never been able to be. And in one lucid moment, she saw me — not as her carer, not as her emotional sponge, but as her daughter. Just her daughter. It happened. It was real, I caught it with my heart before it slipped away, back into the confusion of her failing mind.

That moment didn’t fix everything. But it really meant something.

It was all that can ever be. And that’s enough.