Bereft

How often do you think about death? What is death to you? Is it the moment you stop breathing or the moment you stop living?

Do you wait for others to cease existing in order to regret your absence while they were alive, or do you try to be present, knowing we will not be here forever?

My obsession with death began around the age of thirteen, when I moved back to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, after living several years in New York City. My teenage mind, with its changes and inner crises, began to associate loving others with the definitive absence of a person. To know whether I loved someone, I imagined them dead. I closed my eyes for a moment and thought about our time together, the pain of losing them, and what life would be like without that person. If it did not make me sad, then it was not love. That was my thermometer, my measure of love.

My first victim was my mother. I was separated from her for the first time at eleven. It was a sudden separation from the only person I had known since birth and from whom I had never been apart. I did not have a good time during that first move to New York. Now I understand that the move was not only a change of country, but also my first death. I had to bury my former life and adapt, without any guidance, to everything that came my way. I did it without my mother holding my hand. During that journey alone, a sacred bond broke. I cut my roots with her, partly to protect her from knowing how I was feeling and how things were going for me. I disconnected in order to survive, and when my body returned to her, my mind was still a stranger to itself and a stranger to her, as if I were emerging from a long grief.

The change had been drastic. Neither my aunt nor I were prepared for each other. New York was not ready for me, and I was not ready for it. To avoid living with my mind still on the island, my brain put my mother away and stored memories, attachments, and connections. Now I know it did that so I could move forward.

When I returned to the Dominican Republic, I felt no connection to my mother. That period of readjustment was hard for me, but it was even harder for her. She had sent off a sweet, obedient, gentle, affectionate girl and received a teenager full of anger, confused, less innocent, distant, and without a bond with her. The only ties I kept were with my cousin and my aunt, because they were the ones who had accompanied me during my last year in the United States and returned with me.

I believed I felt nothing for my mother and that the only thing connecting us was responsibility and the basic bond between mother and daughter. I believed there was nothing left in me capable of offering her love. I ignored her, avoided her, talked back to her, and did everything possible to avoid spending time with her. Once, she became ill and went to the emergency room alone because I preferred to go have lunch with my friends. I did not ask for permission to go out. I simply announced I was leaving and asked for money. I felt I only needed her to meet my needs, and if she could not, I threw a tantrum —but that’s another story.

Everything changed the day I imagined her dead. I saw her lifeless, inside a coffin, under the ground, and saw myself without her. Not without her to take care of me, but without her to love me. That imagined encounter with her death, that feeling of her being gone forever, made me reflect deeply. Love, even when it cannot be felt, does not disappear. Sometimes the mind protects itself. I thought about how death brings clarity, sometimes early enough and sometimes too late. That moment showed me where the pain came from and what still tied us together. I understood that the anger I carried was born from everything I had lived through, from her absence during that time, and from the lack of communication, because I was the one who left emotionally first.

I cried a lot, without stopping. I cried out of shame for how I had treated her, and I cried out of pain because losing a mother feels unbearable. Even more when you have already lost her once. Life had separated us, and then, through my own immaturity, I separated us again.

Since that first encounter, I think about death constantly, about its ironies, its gentleness, and its damage.

And you? Do you think about it often?