"Kathy Kay" by Megan Saunders
Photo Credit: Debby Hudson, obtained and licensed through Unsplash.
Kathy Kay
Dear Mom,
The day before you died, I hugged you in the hallway of my childhood home. The framed photos to the right, just before rounding the corner into the kitchen, were hung too closely together, and yellowed from the sun shining through the front door. Your bones looked so thin under the soft cotton of your T-shirt. You smelled like you.
***
Things between my mom and me weren’t what one would call “fine,” but that was nothing new. I was seven months pregnant, and Annabelle, my 3-year-old, and I had visited for a couple of days to belatedly celebrate Christmas. My husband, Cory, refused to come, angry enough for the whole family that she had begun drinking again. I was angry, too, of course, but I couldn’t bear the thought of no one from my nuclear family showing up for our post-Christmas gathering. What if it tipped her over the edge? I cursed Cory on my three-and-a half-hour drive to my parents, stopping at a McDonalds in Abilene so Annabelle could get lunch and use the restroom. It was blistering cold, and the wet wind whipped my car door open. I pictured him playing video games in our living room by the fireplace.
That was two days ago. Today, it is sunny, and I’m hugging my mother goodbye for the last time. She held Annabelle, and I told her to be a good girl for Ammaw and Papa while they kept her for an extra night.
“She always is,” my mom said.
She wore the necklace we had given her for Christmas. Casually, I leaned forward and hugged her with one arm and Annabelle with the other. Did I sense it, in this moment? That my mother would be dead in 24 hours in the bedroom 10 feet from where we stood? No. But it’s so easy to imagine I did.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
***
Dear Mom,
You spent much of your life apologizing. Apologizing for the trauma you faced as a child and its effects into adulthood, apologizing to my father for your inability to control your addiction, apologizing to my brother and me for being drunk for most of our childhood. Did anyone ever turn to you and say—I mean really say—they were sorry to you? Sorry for refusing to acknowledge the terror and humiliation you faced repeatedly, or sorry for our lack of understanding of what you needed to fill that gaping wound? I don’t know if it would have made any difference.
I have some apologies of my own. I didn’t understand how—or didn’t have the courage—to voice them to you while you were still alive. That is my first apology.
I’m so terribly sorry that I often saw you as a one-dimensional addict. When you were drinking, it was so much easier to be angry with you for the physical act of drinking and what it did to our family on the surface. You drank, which usually involved lying or at least evasiveness, then you became some combination of belligerent, embarrassing, pathetic, and comatose. The fact that this behavior was a direct result of a liquid you purposely put in your body made it easy to lean on my anger. It was perhaps too painful to peel back that layer to see your pain, to better understand the perpetual nightmare of shame that existed within you. I didn’t understand that it was your own betrayal that led to the one you would enact on us.
***
I have some apologies of my own. I didn’t understand how—or didn’t have the courage—to voice them to you while you were still alive. That is my first apology.
The parting words my mom and I spoke aloud were full of love and familiarity, but our final digital communication was ridiculously mundane. I began my eastward return home, sans Annabelle, and decided I’d stop at a local children’s consignment shop in Great Bend. Three shopping bags later, I was back in the car, and I texted her.
“Stopped at that consignment place in Great Bend. Super cute stuff if you’re ever looking for stuff for the girls.”
“Yep. Been there.” Our last communication.
The consignment shop was called Forever Young.
***
Six days later, I was back in the car, this time with Cory in tow. Annabelle, too, of course, as my father had returned her home the same day my mother killed herself. We were returning for her funeral.
I purposely timed it so we would miss most of the visitation. Maybe I should feel shame for my selfishness — didn’t my dad need me, after all? — but I know my mom would have understood. She shared my dread regarding crowds of all sizes, well-meaning acquaintances encroaching on our space. The sorrowful eyes, the uncomfortable hugs, the “suicide is such a different type of grieving” sentiments. I just couldn’t. Being quite pregnant meant I wasn’t as nimble in my attempts to dodge them, either. More than this well-worn anxiety, though, I was terrified that I might catch a glimpse of my mother’s cropped blonde hair lying on a satin pillow in a casket down the aisle of the chapel attached to the funeral home. I simply could not bear it. We arrived at the tail end, plenty of time for sympathetic shoulder patting, but not enough time for my disobedient eyes to wander to the chapel.
***
Dear Mom,
I’m sorry I couldn’t bring myself to touch your hand one more time. I still remember how the veins patterned their backs, and how your nails could grow so much longer without breaking than mine ever could. I’d rather imagine them in the kitchen, though, wiping a finger across a metal mixer before popping it in your mouth to gauge seasoning for mashed potatoes. You made the creamiest mashed potatoes.
***
I’m sorry I couldn’t bring myself to touch your hand one more time. I still remember how the veins patterned their backs, and how your nails could grow so much longer without breaking than mine ever could.
Marc was brave enough to face my mother in her casket, though, and for that I’m glad. He and I operate as different sides of the same coin, perhaps more so than most siblings. In a way, his courage feels a little like my own. She looked like a reflection of herself, Marc said. Physically, she had the same attributes as in life, but the lack of a spark made her a stranger. I’m sure the mode of death didn’t help, either.
I white-knuckled my way through the visitation, knowing the worst was to come. Several months ago, my father had rented my mom an apartment in an attempt to save his own sanity and give her a place to go while she was drinking. My childhood home was most likely where she, too, considered to be her home, but the reality was that most of her possessions resided in this apartment. The memories in that house permeated the walls, and her footsteps were beat into the floors, but it was still a shared space. Within that apartment, though, every item had been chosen, organized, and arranged with my mother’s hands.
I prepared myself to enter that apartment, the one you left just a week before, fully expecting to return. You would not, but I would. It felt like an altar.
***
Dear Mom,
Did you like living alone? I know you were sad to not be back in the house with Dad, but I like to think you found some power in being away from his suspicious eye. He wasn’t fair to you. I wish I had told you that so long ago, but I spent my childhood and early adulthood being told that he was the hero of this story. I believed it. He was the one who carried the burden of the alcoholic wife, the embarrassment of your missteps, the raising of the children when you were incapacitated, and, most of all, making the money and keeping the family together.
“Your father is a saint. I couldn’t put up with everything he has.” I heard a variation of this sentiment a million times. And he did put up with a lot, you knew that, and you felt the guilt. But you also did the emotional labor that is rarely recognized in women, especially women who are constantly tripping over their own trauma. You were intoxicated most of the time, or at least planning the next time you could drink.
But even with all that chatter and distraction ping-ponging in your head, you still managed to wake children up in the morning, yell at them for eating five granola bars for breakfast, harp on them about making their beds, ensure they had clothes that fit, schedule haircuts and doctors’ appointments, enroll them in school and sports, attend their sporting events, buy groceries, make lunch daily for Dad and his hired hands, drive grain cart during harvest, run to the parts store for farm emergencies, buy birthday and Christmas presents, teach Sunday school, chaperone field trips, and substitute teach at my school (much to my chagrin).
You made plenty of mistakes, but we all know what the Bible said about casting the first stone. Dad cast a lot of those stones, and while I’ll never judge the anger and betrayal he felt toward a spouse who chose a liquid over everything he provided, I think you had some stones to cast, too.
***
The apartment was silent but for the air gusting in and out of my lungs. At the top of the stairs, just beyond the front door, my mom’s scarves hung neatly on hooks and her gloves rested in a basket below. My knees gave out and I tumbled back down the stairs, but only in my mind as I somehow kept moving forward. Cory followed behind, silently, letting me soak my grief in and out like a sponge. My dad said to take anything I wanted, as the apartment was going to be cleaned and back on the market by Monday.
How does one decide the items they’ll take from their dead mother’s apartment four days after she died? I grabbed two small suitcases and started filling them with a hunger that will never be satisfied. I started in the office, grabbing scraps of paper with her handwriting, books I knew she loved, then turned to the bedroom. Her curling iron sat on the bathroom counter, cord dragging on the ground, makeup scattered nearby. I didn’t take any of that. I’m not so sentimental that I wanted a half-used tube of deodorant. Instead, I took the framed picture of my mother as a child that sat next to her bed, and the simple flat stone she’d painted with Psalm 18:2, “The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer.” I took the shawl tossed on the bed, not necessarily because I wanted it, but because I liked imaging her placing it there, fully intending to return and hang it back up in the closet.
Sitting on the closet floor, my face wet, I held her sweaters up to my nose, memorizing the smell of the laundry soap. I heard the front door open, followed by my father’s voice, softly greeting Cory who waited on the couch.
A moment later, my dad popped his head in the closet. “Just wanted to say goodnight before we headed home,” Dad said as he glanced around the closet. “You should pick out some of her clothes to take with you. You two always had the same taste.”
Dad cast a lot of those stones, and while I’ll never judge the anger and betrayal he felt toward a spouse who chose a liquid over everything he provided, I think you had some stones to cast, too.
***
Dear Mom,
Do you know that Dad told me that I should take some of your clothes because we “had the same taste?” Hilarious, right? You and I both know that isn’t true. You were constantly pushing boots, dresses, and shirts onto me, and I would politely push them back. You were a size 4 on a bad day, and the thought of me shimmying into your dresses now would have made both you and me cringe a little, even if you would have been politely encouraging.
Still, I did as he suggested.
***
“Yeah, okay. I will. Is there anything you want me to make sure I leave here?”
“No, take whatever you want,” he responded as he turned to walk out.
I stuffed cardigans and sweaters into suitcases—items with a better chance of fitting my very differently shaped body—and quickly zipped them shut. Wheeling them out toward Cory, a thought bulldozed me. I ducked back into my mom’s office, trying to channel her thoughts. Where would she have put it? Would it even be here? I poked around in the closet and there it was—the blanket my mother was knitting for the granddaughter she would never meet. Periwinkle blue, perfect in its slight imperfections and, best of all, nearly finished. I let out a low laugh. Even in death, she held our shit together.
***
Months later, I was back at the house—the apartment long gone—for the weekend, this time with the new baby in tow. While my dad was preoccupied, I resumed my new reluctant pastime: Searching for my mom’s shit while he wasn’t paying attention. After turning up little in the hall closets, I opened the coat closet off the front door and felt around the top shelf. Bingo, notebooks. She must have been doing a Bible study in the months before her death, as the writing seemed to have a focused quality, like she was answering questions. Beneath all the surface-level familiar highlighted Bible verses, a stunningly painful theme began to emerge: Heartbreak.
“I will forgive Kirk, I will forgive Kirk, I will forgive Kirk,” my mother wrote in one corner, line by line. “I will work on bettering myself so Kirk will want me back.”
***
Dear Mom,
I’m sorry I read your entries, but I think they gave me your final beautiful, terrible gift: Understanding. The divorce a year before had been sold to the family—myself included—as more of a legal formality. Dad was rightfully concerned that you would harm or kill someone on the road while you were drinking. If you two were still married, potential victims could come after the farm and the assets that he, his father, his grandfather, and now Marc had worked so hard to accumulate. If you were divorced, this historical livelihood would be a little more insulated.
Slowly, though, the severity of the break became much more apparent. I can’t imagine what that was like for you, watching your marriage dissolve in extreme slow motion, knowing your own actions were causing it, but not being able to stop that train. By the time you died, it had progressed from “on paper only” to “only at the house when necessary.”
It was clear how long you had been hurting, and how little of it had to do with your alcoholism. “I’m so frustrated that Kirk won’t recognize my value to not only the farm, but in raising our children,” you wrote. I know that’s true. Dad is a kind, hard-working man, but his focus is narrow, and his flexibility is that of a fresh carrot (you would like that joke). It’s not that he didn’t love or respect you, but I don’t think it is unfair to say he viewed you as inferior. I think you viewed yourself as inferior, too. He was the man, after all, so he made the money and gave his blood and sweat to keep you at home and comfortable. So what if you were home alone all day, in the middle of nowhere with two small children and near-crippling anxiety that made a social life next to impossible? You had a comfortable bed, plenty of food, and Bible class on Sundays. What more could you want?
I must admit that the overwhelming feeling I felt reading those notebooks was guilt. It was the kind of guilt I didn’t feel when Dad called me that terrible evening after Christmas to tell me you had killed yourself. “I should have done something more,” people say in those situations. But I knew there was nothing more I could have done to stop you from putting a gun in your mouth at 2 p.m. alone on a Sunday afternoon. You were drunk — the coroner could still smell the booze in the room — and so afraid and sad. At that point, I had no power to help you.
But reading those journals, I fear that I failed you. I know the psychology—I was the child, you the parent, albeit often an incapacitated one. It wasn’t my job to monitor your emotions. But my heart whispers a different story. I wasn’t just your daughter; I was one of your only true friends. One of the only other people in your world who understood the suffocation of anxiety and the constant threat of negative thoughts looping through your brain. Maybe most of all, I understood the complications of Kirk Molitor, how he could be so compassionate and understanding in one moment, then turn off emotion at the drop of a hat and become ice cold, repelling any source of warmth.
I may not have been able to change it, but I should have felt your hurt at losing your true love. Dad had rescued you from a mother who sat silently with the knowledge of your abuse, and now he was the next one to turn his back on you when you were struggling. Don’t get me wrong, Mom, I was angry with you, too. I sided with Dad and supported him—there’s no denying his pain. But toward the end, I know we had a tendency to treat you as an alcoholic, and not as Kathy Molitor. You became flat, a two-dimensional problem that was best dealt with using tough love. Often, though, it was more tough than love.
***
But toward the end, I know we had a tendency to treat you as an alcoholic, and not as Kathy Molitor. You became flat, a two-dimensional problem that was best dealt with using tough love. Often, though, it was more tough than love.
The morning of the day my mom would die, my dad briefly left the house to check cattle, getting in a quick chore before bringing Annabelle back to our house. My mom planned to tag along, an opportunity to help me organize the nursery. Instead, when my dad returned home around 7 a.m., he found his wife passed out in bed, inebriated beyond belief in such a short period of time, Annabelle standing alone in the hallway looking afraid. We’d been thrilled to leave her there just one extra day, not only to give Cory and me a break, but to give her one-on-one time with Ammaw and Papa. Subconsciously, maybe it was a misguided motivation to help her stay sober.
“Are you coming with us to bring Annabelle back?” he asked the unmoving form in front of him.
“No,” she murmured, lips barely moving.
He left my mother in the same bed in which she’d later die. Several hours later, he would stand in my kitchen with me, explaining why she wasn’t there, not yet understanding she would never be there again. We both simmered in the familiar disappointment and anger.
“If she thinks she’s coming up when the baby is born, she is very wrong,” I said. “She made that decision for herself.” Dad just nodded somberly.
“If you want to see her from now on, you’ll have to visit her in her apartment,” he said. “She isn’t coming back to the house anymore.”
He got back in his truck for the return trip that marked the start of his nightmare. For the second time that day, he would find her still body in bed. Now, however, it would never move again. When my father called to inform me that normal life had ended, I blurted out, “I can’t imagine feeling that kind of hurt.”
Of course, I couldn’t, because I was immersed in my own hurt. But her hurt was real, too, and I can’t help but wonder if we’d spent more time surrounding her with love and support and less time trying to parent the alcoholism into submission, maybe that morning would have gone differently. Maybe she would have woken up to find Annabelle making a mess in the kitchen, then made her some peanut butter toast and started a show on the tablet for her to watch. Then, after going to church, the three of them would have driven Annabelle back up, and I would have hugged her at least one more time.
***
Dear Mom,
I’m not disillusioned—you still would have been an alcoholic, no matter what steps we took. Your trauma preceded us by decades. You probably still would have been the mom who got drunk on mouthwash while substitute teaching my high school class, or who had to be carried to the car after my wedding reception.
But you still would have been my mom.
Cory disagrees with me, and maybe it’s the irrational thought of a grieving mind, but I told him the other day that maybe we should have just let you drink. Would it have been so bad? Even intoxicated, you were never cruel or hateful. Really, any embarrassment or danger came from imposing such strict restrictions that caused you to resort to stupidity in order to rebel.
What if we would have just taken the keys and let you be?
While you were still alive, I often had a silly, wistful thought. While many of my friends were reaching the age where they spent time with their mothers at wineries, treating themselves to a fancy cocktail at dinner, or even engaging in a little good old fashioned drunken bickering over Christmas, I knew I would never have that milestone. I’d never share a glass of wine with you. It’s inconsequential, in the scheme of things, but I think it speaks to a bigger desire: To go back in time and save you from the trauma that would rob you of every shred of innocence and would someday rob us of you. I would save you from the people who pretended to care, the people who knew, and still turned away from the little girl in front of them who was loudly crying for help.
Each of these individuals robbed me of the mother-daughter relationship I craved. Crave.
We were never a family that said a lot of “I love you’s,” but that mistake ends here. I will tell my daughters I love them every day until they’re sick of hearing it, and then I’ll tell them some more. I’ll also tell them about their Ammaw, and how she loved them both so much that you could see it welling in her eyes when she’d talk about them—even Adeline, whom she never met. On that last Christmas, you hastily hung up an extra stocking and pinned a slip of paper with Adeline’s name, even though we weren’t sure yet of the spelling. I treasure the few times I heard her name come off your lips, and I grieve so hard that I couldn’t bottle up that sweet sound and play it for her.
Adeline’s middle name is Kay, after you, and I hope that isn’t all she gets from her grandma. I hope she has your fierce kindness and subtle sense of humor that was both eye-rollingly lame and refreshing. I hope she searches for similarities with others, not differences. I hope her silent presence is just as comforting, and that she isn’t afraid of her emotions. Your emotions were what made you so strong, stronger than Dad. Your weakness was that you didn’t believe it. I hope both of my girls love in the face of great impossibility and hardship, just as you did for all your life, and I hope that, like you, they never give up.
Because you didn’t give up, Mom. You fought like hell for decades to overcome sexual trauma and PTSD, depression, anxiety, bulimia, alcoholism, and a sense of both geographical and relational isolation. You survived; demons just seized your reason when you were most vulnerable.
“Let’s not end it like this,” you whispered to me at the breakfast table that last morning as I wrestled a screaming Annabelle into her booster seat. “Just let her be.”
I, too, must let you be.
Megan Saunders is a creative nonfiction writer who moonlights as a senior marketing writer for a sustainability consulting firm. She received her B.A. and M.A. from Kansas State University and currently lives in Wellsville, Kansas with her husband, two young daughters, and too many pets.