September 27, 2026
My mom died 20 years ago today. I was 24. I had left the cult that I had been in for five years a few months earlier. Finishing college gave me something concrete to focus on, but I was shaky and exhausted. I had just gotten back to my apartment after a class.
A family member in West Virginia, who has substance abuse and volatility issues, that I hadn’t talked to in over a year, called and I let it go to voicemail. When I listened to the message it said, “Your mom was in an accident and she’s probably dead. They’re doing CPR, but they found her and it’s been a while since it happened, so I think you and I both know she’s dead”.
The person calling was a nurse and I was finishing nursing school, which was apparently the reason for the “you and I both know.” But I remember being jarred both by the what I was being told and by the way I was being told. Why call me to say my mom “might” be dead? Why not wait a few minutes and call back when you knew, especially when I was in Boston and there was no way I was going to find out any of this on my own.
When I went to the police station/town hall in tiny West Virginia town, population 550, who responded to her in her even tinier town, population of about 50 people, they said when they got there she was cold and they never did CPR. I don’t believe there was any investigation into her death. Her store was closed down six years earlier because she was selling cigarettes and alcohol to underage kids, and since then she’d been running an illegal bar out of the apartment over the store when she wasn’t at the farm. The farm was a mile down the paved road, and a mile up a dirt road on top of a mountain, where she was usually alone. The kind of accident she had was something that people who knew her would have suspected would happen eventually. It wasn’t so much that people were thinking she better watch out or something bad is going to happen, it was more like it’s unbelievable that something really bad hasn’t already happened.
I was told she was drunk and flipped an ATV over on herself and broke her neck. When I spent time there she was kind of nervous on the ATV and I don’t think she would go for a ride drunk if she didn’t need to go somewhere, and there wasn’t anywhere you could go on the ATV except to other parts of the farm. The actual mechanics of the accident also never made sense to me. They said she backed it up onto an axle in the grass and it flipped over onto her. She had a friend coming to visit her an hour later and they found her and called the police. From far away the accident seems like something that would have happened to her, but nothing else about the details seemed right. They took the ATV somewhere for some kind of testing. I was told, maybe by the person who called me initially, that that always happens when someone dies on an ATV, but I don’t know if that’s true. Apparently, it’s then the family’s responsibility to retrieve the death machine from the testing facility. While that family member was towing the ATV back to the farm they were arrested for driving erratically while being high and drunk, with an open bottle of vodka next to them. Years later another neighbor who a different family member was getting into it with (as they do) threatened them and said if they didn’t back off the same thing would happen to them as what happened to my mom.
My mom had moments of being a great mom, like a really great mom, but those moments were so overwhelmed by most of the other moments, that the average experience of having her as my mom was a nightmare. Everything around her death felt really sad, and vaguely suspicious. I am aware that the suspicious parts of her death also might all be because when you learn someone has died it is literally shocking, and time slows down making small details seem more important than they were… and everyone in the story tended to be as drunk and high as they could afford to be without dying every day, and maybe that’s just what happened that day… it was just more of a miscalculation than anything else.
Growing up, I rarely felt safe with my mom and it was very stressful having that be the person I was expected to get the most help from in life. Still, I was heartbroken when my mom died. She was my mom and I loved her, and there were always small moments when she could be okay, though very few of those moments were ever strung together, adding up to more than a few hours of okay time with mom. Until that day, I always had some hope that she might somehow pull herself together and get better. Cumulatively, I only spent around six years of my life with her. Speckled throughout growing up and after her death there have been rare moments that I’ve missed her, but the reality of her always immediately comes rushing back in. Looking back, it feels like to whatever degree I had been able to maintain my mental health when I was young and then heal as an adult, it was because I learned early on that I needed to find ways to have boundaries around that relationship, even when I missed her.
I try to be the mom I wanted her to be. When I lived with my mom, I used to imagine a really nice foster mom that I wanted to live with. She was the person I longed for when my mom was being scary, after I had given up on my mom ever being that person. I think that most of the time I am like that imagined person with Abbey. Having my daughter allowed me to have more self-compassion than I was able to access before for how hard it was to have that particular mom be my parent, as well as recognize how little my other parent did to help me manage that experience or buffer me from harm.
A lot of people struggle trying to be as good as the mom they had. I struggle to remember that it’s okay to take a nap because I am nothing at all like my mom and my daughter is totally fine.