Whenever I miss my mom, I reach for my favorite photo of me and her. We’re sitting on the steps in front of my childhood home in Massachusetts, cuddled up next to each other. I’m three years old and proudly wearing blue clip-on earrings to match my white puff-sleeve dress. My mother is flashing a smile that takes up so much space, it’s sometimes all I can see.
Happy photos like this one, which is protected in a heart-shaped frame, decorate the shelves in my home office. The sadder ones — taken after my mother was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer — hide inside my desk drawers.
They’re out of sight, but the truth is, they’re always on display in my mind. They sit alongside the many journals in which my mother kept track of my childhood accomplishments and made predictions about my future. “Mallary’s going to go places with her writing,” she wrote in one of them, believing I would one day become an author. “I’m so proud of her.”
My mom passed away from cancer when I was 11, before she could see me graduate middle school, let alone go off to college, pursue a writing career, get married, and have kids.
She was just 40 years old when she died — the same age I am now. As I begin to outlive my mother, I’ve been pondering questions that lack easy answers: How do I venture into this next phase of life that she never got to experience? What are the lessons she taught me (and didn’t get to teach) that I want to pass on to my own children? And how can I continue to keep my mom’s memory alive?
On my 40th birthday, I told my 7-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter why this particular birthday was so significant. They’ve heard me share stories about my mother for years, but this was the first time they learned how old she’d been when she passed away.
“Just because your mom died when you were 40 doesn’t mean you’re going to, right, Mommy?” my daughter asked, making my heart sink.
“Oh no honey, I’m not going to die at 40,” I reassured her. “My mother was sick, but I’m not. I hope to be around for a loooong time.” My words were tightly woven together by years of convincing myself that I won’t die young. And yet I know the unpredictability of life could unravel these words at any point, rendering them a lie in my children’s minds.
I hope my words remain true, but the reality of mortality seems to loom larger now that I’m 40. In some ways it’s a relief to have outlived my mother, because it feels like a sign that my fate will not follow hers. But I also find myself wondering: How much longer do I really have?
Grief expert Hope Edelman once told me that when you begin to outlive your deceased parent, you are “crossing the silent threshold.” When experiencing this rite of passage, she said, it’s normal to grow fearful about dying and/or to experience mourning anew. Edelman recommends honoring the silent threshold by naming it and recognizing what surfaces.
If growing up meant living without my mother, then I wanted to stay in the past forever.
I’ve been recognizing it by going through the photos in my desk drawers and exposing the hard truths behind them. There’s one in particular that I keep returning to — a picture of me looking happy as can be just five days after my mother’s death. I was at my first-ever middle school dance, smiling and looking perfectly poised, like a ballerina about to do a pirouette. I thought I was supposed to be “strong” and “resilient,” so I tried pretending to be okay. But behind that happy facade was a little girl who felt like her whole world had fallen apart.
If growing up meant living without my mother, then I wanted to stay in the past forever. I remember doing the math as I got ready for the dance, counting out exactly how many hours and minutes had passed since my mother died; they say time heals, but I learned at a young age that time also hurts. Every birthday, holiday, and missed milestone became a painful reminder of the permanence of my mother’s absence.
When you lose a parent at a young age, you’re always playing a game of catch-up that reminds you of not just who you’ve lost but what you’ve lost — all those life lessons that you hope your mom would have shared to help you navigate the world.
Having lost my mother just before my teenage years, I found it especially difficult to navigate puberty without her. I wanted her to teach me everything I thought a teenage girl was supposed to learn: how to use an eyelash curler, shop for bras, insert a tampon, and shave my legs.
I feel a pang whenever I look at one close-up photo of me as a 14-year-old, with eyelashes that were clumped together by far too much Maybelline mascara. I had taught myself how to apply it, hoping that it would help me look more like my mom, who had always worn it until she got too sick and weak to put it on.
But it wasn’t until age 38 that I learned how to properly use an eyelash curler. I had always applied my mascara and then curled my lashes, until one day a friend told me I was supposed to do it the other way around. How did I not know that? I thought to myself, feeling the load of loss grow heavier.
Soon enough, when my lip-gloss-loving daughter expresses interest in makeup, I will show her how the curler works. Until then, I’m trying to teach my kids the bigger life lessons that my mom shared with me when I was young: how to persevere in the face of uncertainty, work hard for what you want, and show familial love.
Lately I’ve felt a greater sense of urgency around sharing these lessons, especially when I think about what else is hiding in my desk drawers: genetic test results showing that, as my mother’s daughter, I’m at a higher risk of developing breast cancer compared to other women my age.
As I enter midlife, it saddens me to know that my mom never got to witness all the places I’ve gone with my writing — and that she won’t get to celebrate alongside me when my debut memoir is published this summer. But I find comfort in knowing that she was there from the very start, believing in me and giving me reason to feel hopeful about the future.
Mallary Tenore Tarpley is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the memoir SLIP.
