I Regret Visiting My Mother's Grave
I think I’m finally ready to talk about this.
About a year ago, I got a generic email from a long term care facility, not far from my childhood town, letting me know that my mother had been admitted, and asking me to contact them. Apparently, my mother had developed dementia.
Now, my mother wasn’t a kind woman, especially not to me. I don’t feel comfortable speaking too much on it outside of therapy. Let’s just say I hadn’t spoken to her since she kicked me out at 18. As far as I could guess at the time, she had been living completely alone in our hometown after that, with me being the only living relative. It made sense that I had been contacted.
I did go and visit her. I was curious to see what had become of her. It helped that a place as well staffed as a care facility didn’t register as dangerous to my nervous system.
My mother barely registered my approach when I entered her room; I remember her weak, veiny hands dangling limply over the ends of the armrests, and she was looking down into her lap. I also remember exactly what she said when she eventually lifted her head to look at me: “You came back,” a smile, “you came back up.” She spoke with so much warmth and love that it made me feel sick.
She died that night. I found out because, apparently, I was still in her will. Maybe she just forgot to take me out, or maybe it was one final bit of torment.
There was only one other person at the reading. She was about the same age as my mother, perhaps a friend of some sort. I certainly never found out. She turned around in her chair when I entered, and her eyes went wide with an expression I can only describe as fearful. She spent the entire reading staring at me. I really tried to ignore it, recognizing I was already on edge just by being back in town. Yet, it was obvious that my presence was somehow distressing for her. I could feel her gaze on me as I kept my own eyes straight ahead, and I could hear her breaths coming faster, hitching and wheezing in a horrible way that only served to feed my own irritation.
After we were dismissed, I couldn’t take it anymore. I snapped at her, demanding to know why she was staring. She didn’t say anything, just freaked out, screamed in fact, and ran away.
I told myself it was a problem with her, not me.
Among the things my mother left me was a photobook, one that I did not open at the time.
I did not attend the funeral, but I did eventually decide to visit the cemetery. I was more than a bit drunk at the time, enough that going out in the late evening to spit on my mother’s grave sounded like a good idea.
When I reached the plot, I managed to trip over something in the low light. As I lay, cheek smudged against the wet dirt, I registered the expected sight: two old graves, those of my father and my stillborn sister (the lucky one), alongside the new grave of my mother. The dirt was still fresh on hers. However, as I lifted my head, I found that I was lying below a fourth, slightly weathered headstone:
Lillian [Middlename] [Lastname]
1991-2021
Beloved Daughter
It might not seem clear with the censorship, but that is my full name!
I don’t think I can fully articulate the kinds of feelings seeing your own grave fills you with. I think I ended up laying there for hours, shaking in the dirt and foliage, just filled with absolute dread. All the emotions I’d been dealing with the past week seemed to hit me all at once.
I went back to town when the cold became too much to bear. The only place that was open was a bar. I wasn’t looking to get more drunk; I just wanted to warm up.
I can understand, after the fact, why the bartender reacted the way he did. I must have terrified him, shambling into his establishment covered in grave dirt and dead leaves like I had. He chased me out, yelling, making sure to let me know that I was, in fact, supposed to be dead!
I had a lot of questions (I still do). My first guess was that this was the story my mother had come up with when I disappeared not long after turning 18, but to go as far as to stage a burial? It didn’t seem likely.
Eventually I did flip through that photo album. It mainly consisted of photos of me, each given a brief description in my mother’s handwriting. Things started out normal enough, with stuff like Lillian, Age 2, At her birthday party or Lillian, Age 13, Twirling in her new dress. It was odd to see this kind of affection when I’d received none of it in my daily life, but I suppose even the worst people are complex. Things stayed normal all the way up until Lillian, Age 17, Walking the stage at graduation, but the pages went on.
I’ll remind you, again, that my mother kicked me out at 18. The next entry showed my mother, arm and arm with me, both of us smiling brightly, possibly mid laugh: Lillian, Age 19, Out on a walk with me. And it just kept going like that. Image after image of someone who looked exactly like me, getting older alongside my mother. Whoever she was, she was indeed identical, right down to the little things like the two moles on my neck, or the small scar on my lip. I even compared the photos in the album with photos I had taken at various ages to confirm, and found that she had aged exactly as I had. The main difference, and the one that somehow disturbs me the most, is just how happy she is standing next to my mother. I’d never smile like that for her.
The last photo in the album was of an open casket. Whoever she was was lying in it, dressed in a blue sundress I’d left behind when I was forced out. It was also labeled: Lillian, Age 30, At her funeral.
I did a bit more research online, discovering that there had indeed been a funeral, and my “tragic death” had been reported in the local newspaper. I ended up booking a longer stay at my hotel in order to investigate. I think I freaked some people out when I insisted that I was Lillian; everyone who apparently knew “me” insisted that I had died, and that I was simply delusional, or playing a cruel joke by pretending to be “her”. Eventually it all got too hostile, and decided to go home.
There was a time I obsessed over this privately, but I have no explanation. I don’t know who is buried in that grave, and at this point I’m not sure if I want to know.