My mother and I weren’t close at the time of her death. I don’t know if we ever were. She crossed every boundary I set to protect myself from her. I swore I was different from her while knowing the whole time we were the same. In the few years before her death, she’d call my daughter to chat, and I’d run scared from the room so I didn’t have to say anything. I couldn’t trust her with anything about my personal life. She gossiped. She manipulated and made me feel guilty. She messed with my emotions. For the sake of my mental health, I had to limit contact to minimize the damage she could do.

My husband and I cleaned her apartment with the help of a few of my mom’s friends.

“I knew you right away,” one of them said. “You are the spitting image of your mother.”

I smiled at the compliment even though it stung. I didn’t want to be like my mother even in appearance, but the mirror told the truth.

My mother’s whole life was in that apartment. There were boxes stacked high in the bedroom of framed pictures of our family, her as a baby, me as a baby and her grandchildren. It took hours climbing over the rest of the mess to get to them. It made me sad for her. She had boxes filled with images of the people she loved, but she couldn’t get to them in the hoard. It made her loneliness more palpable, easier to understand.

Looking through her papers for the ones we needed to settle her affairs, I found a letter recently dated from the building manager. He threatened to evict her if she didn’t clean up her apartment. I imagine her stress level at the thought of having to move. She’d lived there for almost fifteen years. There was no way she could have cleaned up that mess by herself even if she could bring herself to throw anything away. Could that be why she didn’t call for help with her injury? Was she afraid the landlord would look at her apartment and see she’d made no progress? Was the thought of it so overwhelming she chose death instead?

Her kitchen was unusable. Dishes and silverware overflowed the sink. There wasn’t an inch of empty counter space. I’m not sure how my mother made meals for herself. I wish I would have visited her more, maybe helped her clean so she could eat and use her bathroom and walk around in her own apartment. I felt guilty for the ignorance of not knowing or concerning myself whether my mother was okay. Worst of all, I never asked. She was well aware that my unresolved anger towards her slanted my focus, but she never complained to me about her life. Maybe she thought I wouldn’t care. I’d like to think I would have helped her, but I never gave her the chance.