Fifty years without my mother, and never quite without her

A warm Sunday afternoon in 1972. Mom and I were taking a siesta by the porch. She took my hand and put it on the lump in her left breast. I felt the soft mass. I had no inkling it was cancer. Cancer did not happen to us. It was something you heard about from other families.

She was sick for the next three years.

She died on July 25, 1976. She was 45. I was 19 years old and in third year college at UP Diliman.

It has been fifty years without my mother.

We were not close. I say that plainly because I do not want this to read like one of those tributes where the daughter and the mother turn out to have understood each other all along. We didn’t. I am not going to put the details here. What matters for this post is that it left a distance between us I never crossed while she was alive.

I loved her anyway. She was my mom. Both things were true at the same time.

The picture I keep is not of the sickness. It is of a woman always put together. Fashionable, even on ordinary days, never without her pink lipstick. She dressed like she was going somewhere, even when she wasn’t.

I loved her beauty, just not her bad temper.

The forgiveness came much later, and not because I worked on it.

I was 39 when the doctors found something in my breast and told me it had to come out. Nobody could tell me yet what it was, and I had to live with that until the surgery.

I told myself I could not die now. Not with my kids so young. They were 10, 9, and 3.

No, I cannot die yet.

I took the day off before the surgery and brought them to the play center at the mall. We did a photo shoot. I was thinking I might die on the operating table.

They will look back to these memories and remember that their mom loved them so much.

That night I cried in bed, and my thoughts went to my mother. I imagined her exactly where I was. Livid with fear of leaving her children and her husband. Nobody had ever put me in that room with her before.

She must have been this scared.

That was all. No revelation, no light. I had spent years holding her responsible for things she did while she was frightened, and that night I finally knew what frightened felt like. I prayed and asked forgiveness for not understanding what she went through. I forgave her before morning.

I taped my children’s photos around my hospital room. Just before they wheeled me out, I looked at them one more time.

I can’t leave you yet. God, don’t let me die.

It was benign.

Just recently I had myself tested for BRCA1. Negative.

After she died, I talked to her every day. Not in a spiritual way I could have explained to anyone. I just talked. I believed she was watching me, and believing it got me through years when nothing else did.

Then I learned something that made me sit down.

There is a phenomenon called microchimerism. During pregnancy, cells cross the placenta in both directions. Some of the mother’s cells enter the baby. A few survive, settle into tissue, and stay. Researchers have found maternal cells in adults decades later, in blood, in bone marrow, in organs.

Which means my mother’s cells are in my body right now. Fifty years after we buried her.

I want to be careful here, because this is where the internet runs ahead of the science. The numbers are small. A handful of cells per million. Nothing you could see or feel.

Those cells are not looking after me. They are not hurting me either. Researchers have found them near healing tissue. They have also found them in autoimmune disease. Nobody can tell you yet what that means. Anyone who promises you more than that is selling comfort, not evidence.
So I will not claim more than what is there.

For fifty years I had her memory. Now I know I have something more than that. Something of her is alive in me, and it is physical.

For fifty years I talked to my mother the way you talk to someone who has gone somewhere else. Now I know a small part of her never went anywhere. She was in the room the whole time, in the ordinary literal sense, in me. In the hospital. At the play center with my children. In the dark the night I forgave her.

The woman I could not reach when she was alive has been in my tissue since before I was born.
I still talk to her. Same as always. I just know now that some of her is close enough to hear.