I had no choice but to detach myself from the universe after watching my mom suffer for so many years. I actually smiled at her funeral, at twenty years old, when other adults couldn’t hold it together. I had already melted down to a level that wasn’t human right after she died, when everyone left me alone with her unbreathing body in the hospital room at Cedars-Sinai.
My dad had a DNR, which didn’t really seem like him. I told the doctors to ignore it one time after his new liver failed. I stood there watching the hospital staff try to resuscitate someone who allegedly asked not to be resuscitated. This was the same guy who once dyed his mustache so dark it no longer matched his salt-and-pepper hair. They brought him back for about five minutes.
I wasn’t with my grandmother, my mom’s mom, when she died, but I imagine she was wearing pink lipstick. I know she wasn’t mad at me for not being there because she was there when her daughter died six years earlier, and had to allow me to pick up the pieces. Life has so many pieces strewn about the floor that sometimes you just want to buy a new house.
When my stepmom died, it felt like a relief. My sister had been taking care of her since she was fifteen. I don’t think any of us thought she would live as long as she did. There were only a few of us at her funeral, our collective kids watching me give another eulogy, this one for the woman who called me “The Little Jew Boy” growing up.
Things have happened that undocked me from safety. I don’t know if I have been floating in a lake since 1991, but sometimes it feels like it. Sometimes it feels like other people don’t appreciate the tragic gut punch of great loss. If my parents weren’t such great people, I wouldn’t have been as destroyed. Maybe there is meaning in there somewhere. Maybe I didn’t detach.
I never thought I saw my mom or dad after they died. Not like in a vision, but just out in the world. I think this could happen to people who didn’t watch their parents die from their bedside. Losing someone is different than someone being lost. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have someone leave your life without knowing what happened to them. That would feel unmoored.
© Jonathan Greene, November 9, 2026
